A better name for that menu option would have been: Install and Update Software.
Yet another example of "usability means we must use the wrong terminology." A package manager is NOT the same thing as a software installer and updater. "Package manager" is the correct term, is the common term in all Unix and Unix like systems, and should thus remain the term to use. We should not dumb (ei. stupidify) the UI down to the level of how moronic you believe people to be. Yes, this might confuse some newbies freshly come over from Microsoft, but as the saying goes, your first day on the job only lasts one day.
I'll bet two RIAA settlements and half a donut, that this is merely ZDNet's inability to differentiate between journalism and editorializing. Of course, they are hardly alone in this deficient behavior, and are in the company of many prestigious (and formerly prestigious) media outlets.
Note the story's reference to a federal magistrate. It's obvious to all but the tinhat crowd (and ZDNet) that the police did the raid.
Or are you going to quit running away from the real issues?
The real issue is *journalism*, if you ever bothered to look at the Slashdot article title. Journalism. As in the top anchor (Rather) of the top network (CBS) being caught presenting obviously false documents as genuine. The real issue is that amateur bloggers are scooping the professional media. The real issue is that journalism as we know it will never again be the same.
The real issue is Dan Rather, *formerly* known as "The Most Trusted Man in America". He fucked up. He fucked up on national television. He fucked up so bad that mainstream journalism may never recover from its lost reputation. Even ABC's exploding pickup trucks couldn't do that.
Trying to blame this on Karl Rove is so pathetic it causes cognitive dissonance. I've met ufologists with a greater grasp on reality.
...my solution to a deep and complicated problem is going to be basic compared to a guy who spent years of his life learning algorithms.
I'm a literature major as well, whose ended up a software engineer. I did minor in computer science, and have had those algorithms classes. Thus, having seen both sides of the issues, I can assure you that nine times out of ten the simple basic straight forward solutions are superior to the fancy algorithms. For the rest of the problems you can just grab the algorithm off the net.
You should know SOMETHING about algorithms though. You wouldn't want to use a bubblesort for example. Or spend your time rediscovering all the gotchas of binary trees.
I once wrote a function called "stoopid_backdoor". I was told during my code review that I had to rename it. So I renamed it to "bypass_security". That was acceptable.
That was two years ago. Apparently I didn't open that door wide enough and I now have a must fix urgent priority bug. It seems that the time it takes for all of our support people to type in passwords for all of our systems out there comes to three *million* dollars a year. So tomorrow I'm removing the requirement for passwords to log in as root.
I'm going to rename the function back the way it was...
Who can understand the leftist mind? I sure can't Months after these documents were exposed as transparent fakes, people are still accusing people of being "Busheviks" for not having the knee-jerk reaction that they must be real. It's bizarre. Truly bizarre. I'm called a Bushevik because I *doubted* some evidence. This is entering the realm of religious conviction! No, it goes beyond that into the realm of cults, because all mainstream religious allow for healthy skepticism.
As for the information flying around too quickly, so what? Would you prefer that information not flow at all? Would you prefer that the truth be kept hidden?
In this particular case, the *real* issue is who faked the memos.
I don't think it was Karl Rove, but if it ever turns out that he did it, I want to shake his hand and buy him a beer. The cartoonish entertainment value of this is priceless. Rove is the Bugs Bunny to your bumbling Elmer Fudd. "Sure dear old grandmotherly figure, I'll run an expose on these documents! Say... you aren't that wascally wabbit trying to trick me are you?"
Hah! Less than twenty four hours after the story broke the evidence was in tatters. All it took was some guy to say "hey, that doesn't look like a typewritten memo" and it was quickly dissected.
p.s. Yes, proportional typewriters existed back then. For a good "geek" example of one, look at the opening title sequence to the Gerry Anderson's U.F.O. series. But also look at how that example still looks like it was made by a typewriter, and not by MS Word using the default settings.
I mean how much is actually missed by the policemen?
Screw that! I'm worried about all the vandals pretending to be policemen!
The problem is that bias is an emergent behavior of random people trying to eliminate bias in a common document. You can see this most in certain political articles, where references to controversies and scandals overwhelm the actual content. You can also see the opposite where some controversies are are downplayed simply because they are controversies. Vandals "in the know" can use these behaviors to their own ends.
I agree with you to a point. Unfortunately we can't get rid of conventions. It's why we wear clothes, for Pete's sake! The fact that these conventions are also useful (being able to mount/usr/local as a common NFS point for all workstations) is strike two.
But that said, there still shouldn't be problems with install kits working across Unix platforms. If you find a problem, the problem is likely to reside with the application. A good example are configuration files. Usually they are under/etc, but they might be under/usr/X11R6/etc,/usr/local/etc, or even [gasp] in the user's home directory! A well behaved program is going to look for its configuration within its own hierarchy, or provide a means at build time to specify somewhere else. For example, if the program is installed in/usr/local/bin, then it should look for its configuration in/usr/local/etc first, before looking in/etc, and then in the user's home directory.
This is of course much more work for an application that wants one single installer for all platforms. But to balance things out, it's much less work if it relies on the distros to package things up. If your customers use vendor packages or mechanisms like apt-get/ports/portage, then you're not going to have to spend nearly as much time figuring out how to install the application, because someone else already has. Which is one reason I greatly prefer packages to installers.
Most of the angst over Linux standardization comes from commercial proprietary vendors who feel they need to remain in full and complete control over the installation process. A Linux program should expect a certain minimum version of glibc, for instance, but it should care less about being installed in/opt instead of/usr. Ship along a modifiable startup script to set environment variables if necessary, but for the love of mom don't lobby for the elimination of time honored convention!
Correction, BSD puts ports under/usr. It may install said ports under/usr/local (because it's stuff that doesn't come with the system), but the ports themselves reside under/usr.
The purpose of/usr/local isn't for you to write case studies of FHS failures, but simply to partition the filesystem space between the system's software and the user installed software. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better then the alternatives I've seen.
I currently live and work in ultra-expensive-housing Silicon Valley. I would gladly work for half my salary at the same job if I were allowed to telecommute from Idaho.
I will point to the Declaration of Independence which refers to our rights as unalienable, meaning that no one can take them away.
I am a firm believer in unalienable rights. But the only way to legally remove my rights is still through government power. Private citizens can do it, but only by committing a crime.
Let's take freedom of speech as an example. The only way to suppress this right is through threat or application of physical harm (imprisonment or death). For a government with police and laws, the applications and threats are legal. But for private citizens, such applications and threats are crimes. If you strike me for speaking that is assault. If you tie me up so I can't get to the rally to speak, that is imprisonment.
An employer firing an employee is none of the above. It is not an application or threat of physical harm. It is merely the termination of a relationship.
What you said is true for the 1st Amendment, but completely ignores its application to states
Every state constitution either incorporates the US Bill of Rights, or incorporates identical provisions. While it may be technically possible for a future state to do otherwise, it is doubtful in the extreme that one such would ever be admitted.
Otherwise goverments could privitize everything, ignore the bill of rights, and get away with murder (most likely literally, in some cases).
The Constitution and Bill of Rights still applies only to the government. Regardless of how big or small it is. It wouldn't matter how much they privatized their functions, because the more they do it the less the problem of government becomes. I mean truly privatize, and not merely contract out government services. A private prison is still under the jurisdiction of government. If it weren't, it would merely be a hotel with very bad amenities.
Like it or not, agree with it or not, the US Constitution is based on the principle of limited and restricted government. The founding fathers were in essence libertarians. They did not fear private business, but considered government to be very dangerous, however necessary it might be. I don't care how much you twist it, you won't be able to wring out any restrictions on private businesses from it.
Modern corporations are another matter, as they cannot exist without government grant. Corporations as we know them today did not exist in the eighteenth century. I would have no problems if you wished to extend the First Ammendment to public corporations, but please do so for reasons of their governmental privilege, and not because they are private commercial concerns.
The main issue here seems to be not about freedom of speech... but about your right to your job.
You're right. Employment is ultimately a voluntary affair. But that doesn't stop people from bitching about violations of their free speech. Just goes to show the shoddy state of civics education in the country.
Corporations are under no obligation to uphold the First Amendment.
Non sequitur.
No one but the *government* is under any obligation to uphold the first ammendment, because it is only the government that the first ammendment applies to. Let me quote: "Congress shall make no law..." The Bill Of Rights is not a universal document, rather it is a set of restrictions upon the government, and only the government.
And why are you picking on corporations? Your observation applies to all non-government groups, regardless of corporate status. Heck, it even applies to your *spouse*. Tell your wife she's a whore, and expect all your marital benefits to immediately cease.
Not just Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, but EVERY group acts this way. Don't make waves or you will be asked to leave, even in the most enlightened of organizations.
An unincorporated (as in not a corporation) mom-n-pop shop will fire you if you right an editorial about mom being a whore. A government bureaucrat will fire you if publicly dispute the policies he is implementing. Even a tenured professor can get ousted for embarassing the university.
Tell the world that Linus can't code his way out of a paper bag, and expect your linux patches to be summarily rejected. Why would you expect otherwise?
Only people born and raised on Microsoft's brain dead office suite would ever consider styles to be useless. For the rest of the world, we have the opposite opinion, because MSOffice can't do styles right.
I'm not sure what you mean by "innovation". I don't want an innovative word processor or spreadsheet, I want them to behave just like they have always done. WYSIWYG and style-centricity were the big innovations, but they're over fifteen years old.
If you're only talking about minor features, here's some OOo has (or had first): XML file formats; collaborating on a vendor-neutral standards; export directly to PDF without having to install third party module; dumping the MDI; styles that work (at least to Word users it seems innovative); lack of macro viruses; real fields instead of bookmarks doing double-duty; etc, etc, etc.
Having never used MSWord at all until the past year, I have the opposite opinion. Whenever I have to use Word I end up fighting it trying to do what I want it to do, instead of what Microsoft wants me to do. It's a slow learning process of discovering Word's brain dead limitations so I can avoid them.
Slashdot Mirror
A better name for that menu option would have been: Install and Update Software.
Yet another example of "usability means we must use the wrong terminology." A package manager is NOT the same thing as a software installer and updater. "Package manager" is the correct term, is the common term in all Unix and Unix like systems, and should thus remain the term to use. We should not dumb (ei. stupidify) the UI down to the level of how moronic you believe people to be. Yes, this might confuse some newbies freshly come over from Microsoft, but as the saying goes, your first day on the job only lasts one day.
I've already paid up to everyone who accepted the bet. Where were you?
Aaargh! I'm wrong! In Australia a corporation really can conduct raids. Well roll me in grits and call me cornpone!
I'll bet two RIAA settlements and half a donut, that this is merely ZDNet's inability to differentiate between journalism and editorializing. Of course, they are hardly alone in this deficient behavior, and are in the company of many prestigious (and formerly prestigious) media outlets.
Note the story's reference to a federal magistrate. It's obvious to all but the tinhat crowd (and ZDNet) that the police did the raid.
Or are you going to quit running away from the real issues?
The real issue is *journalism*, if you ever bothered to look at the Slashdot article title. Journalism. As in the top anchor (Rather) of the top network (CBS) being caught presenting obviously false documents as genuine. The real issue is that amateur bloggers are scooping the professional media. The real issue is that journalism as we know it will never again be the same.
The real issue is Dan Rather, *formerly* known as "The Most Trusted Man in America". He fucked up. He fucked up on national television. He fucked up so bad that mainstream journalism may never recover from its lost reputation. Even ABC's exploding pickup trucks couldn't do that.
Trying to blame this on Karl Rove is so pathetic it causes cognitive dissonance. I've met ufologists with a greater grasp on reality.
...my solution to a deep and complicated problem is going to be basic compared to a guy who spent years of his life learning algorithms.
I'm a literature major as well, whose ended up a software engineer. I did minor in computer science, and have had those algorithms classes. Thus, having seen both sides of the issues, I can assure you that nine times out of ten the simple basic straight forward solutions are superior to the fancy algorithms. For the rest of the problems you can just grab the algorithm off the net.
You should know SOMETHING about algorithms though. You wouldn't want to use a bubblesort for example. Or spend your time rediscovering all the gotchas of binary trees.
I once wrote a function called "stoopid_backdoor". I was told during my code review that I had to rename it. So I renamed it to "bypass_security". That was acceptable.
That was two years ago. Apparently I didn't open that door wide enough and I now have a must fix urgent priority bug. It seems that the time it takes for all of our support people to type in passwords for all of our systems out there comes to three *million* dollars a year. So tomorrow I'm removing the requirement for passwords to log in as root.
I'm going to rename the function back the way it was...
I disagree when writing Java and C#.
Hah. Hah. Hah hah hah. Hah. Hah. Hah hah hah. Hah. Hah. Hah hah hah. Hah. Hah. Hah hah hah. Hah. Hah. Hah hah hah
Giggle snort chuckle
[laughing coca cola out the nose]
Hee hee hee.
Who can understand the leftist mind? I sure can't Months after these documents were exposed as transparent fakes, people are still accusing people of being "Busheviks" for not having the knee-jerk reaction that they must be real. It's bizarre. Truly bizarre. I'm called a Bushevik because I *doubted* some evidence. This is entering the realm of religious conviction! No, it goes beyond that into the realm of cults, because all mainstream religious allow for healthy skepticism.
As for the information flying around too quickly, so what? Would you prefer that information not flow at all? Would you prefer that the truth be kept hidden?
In this particular case, the *real* issue is who faked the memos.
I don't think it was Karl Rove, but if it ever turns out that he did it, I want to shake his hand and buy him a beer. The cartoonish entertainment value of this is priceless. Rove is the Bugs Bunny to your bumbling Elmer Fudd. "Sure dear old grandmotherly figure, I'll run an expose on these documents! Say... you aren't that wascally wabbit trying to trick me are you?"
...but you have to admit it was well done.
Hah! Less than twenty four hours after the story broke the evidence was in tatters. All it took was some guy to say "hey, that doesn't look like a typewritten memo" and it was quickly dissected.
p.s. Yes, proportional typewriters existed back then. For a good "geek" example of one, look at the opening title sequence to the Gerry Anderson's U.F.O. series. But also look at how that example still looks like it was made by a typewriter, and not by MS Word using the default settings.
I mean how much is actually missed by the policemen?
Screw that! I'm worried about all the vandals pretending to be policemen!
The problem is that bias is an emergent behavior of random people trying to eliminate bias in a common document. You can see this most in certain political articles, where references to controversies and scandals overwhelm the actual content. You can also see the opposite where some controversies are are downplayed simply because they are controversies. Vandals "in the know" can use these behaviors to their own ends.
I agree with you to a point. Unfortunately we can't get rid of conventions. It's why we wear clothes, for Pete's sake! The fact that these conventions are also useful (being able to mount /usr/local as a common NFS point for all workstations) is strike two.
/etc, but they might be under /usr/X11R6/etc, /usr/local/etc, or even [gasp] in the user's home directory! A well behaved program is going to look for its configuration within its own hierarchy, or provide a means at build time to specify somewhere else. For example, if the program is installed in /usr/local/bin, then it should look for its configuration in /usr/local/etc first, before looking in /etc, and then in the user's home directory.
/opt instead of /usr. Ship along a modifiable startup script to set environment variables if necessary, but for the love of mom don't lobby for the elimination of time honored convention!
But that said, there still shouldn't be problems with install kits working across Unix platforms. If you find a problem, the problem is likely to reside with the application. A good example are configuration files. Usually they are under
This is of course much more work for an application that wants one single installer for all platforms. But to balance things out, it's much less work if it relies on the distros to package things up. If your customers use vendor packages or mechanisms like apt-get/ports/portage, then you're not going to have to spend nearly as much time figuring out how to install the application, because someone else already has. Which is one reason I greatly prefer packages to installers.
Most of the angst over Linux standardization comes from commercial proprietary vendors who feel they need to remain in full and complete control over the installation process. A Linux program should expect a certain minimum version of glibc, for instance, but it should care less about being installed in
Correction, BSD puts ports under /usr. It may install said ports under /usr/local (because it's stuff that doesn't come with the system), but the ports themselves reside under /usr.
/usr/local isn't for you to write case studies of FHS failures, but simply to partition the filesystem space between the system's software and the user installed software. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better then the alternatives I've seen.
The purpose of
I currently live and work in ultra-expensive-housing Silicon Valley. I would gladly work for half my salary at the same job if I were allowed to telecommute from Idaho.
I will point to the Declaration of Independence which refers to our rights as unalienable, meaning that no one can take them away.
I am a firm believer in unalienable rights. But the only way to legally remove my rights is still through government power. Private citizens can do it, but only by committing a crime.
Let's take freedom of speech as an example. The only way to suppress this right is through threat or application of physical harm (imprisonment or death). For a government with police and laws, the applications and threats are legal. But for private citizens, such applications and threats are crimes. If you strike me for speaking that is assault. If you tie me up so I can't get to the rally to speak, that is imprisonment.
An employer firing an employee is none of the above. It is not an application or threat of physical harm. It is merely the termination of a relationship.
Ah, I see. I thought you wanted two separate documents side by side.
What you said is true for the 1st Amendment, but completely ignores its application to states
Every state constitution either incorporates the US Bill of Rights, or incorporates identical provisions. While it may be technically possible for a future state to do otherwise, it is doubtful in the extreme that one such would ever be admitted.
Otherwise goverments could privitize everything, ignore the bill of rights, and get away with murder (most likely literally, in some cases).
The Constitution and Bill of Rights still applies only to the government. Regardless of how big or small it is. It wouldn't matter how much they privatized their functions, because the more they do it the less the problem of government becomes. I mean truly privatize, and not merely contract out government services. A private prison is still under the jurisdiction of government. If it weren't, it would merely be a hotel with very bad amenities.
Like it or not, agree with it or not, the US Constitution is based on the principle of limited and restricted government. The founding fathers were in essence libertarians. They did not fear private business, but considered government to be very dangerous, however necessary it might be. I don't care how much you twist it, you won't be able to wring out any restrictions on private businesses from it.
Modern corporations are another matter, as they cannot exist without government grant. Corporations as we know them today did not exist in the eighteenth century. I would have no problems if you wished to extend the First Ammendment to public corporations, but please do so for reasons of their governmental privilege, and not because they are private commercial concerns.
The main issue here seems to be not about freedom of speech... but about your right to your job.
You're right. Employment is ultimately a voluntary affair. But that doesn't stop people from bitching about violations of their free speech. Just goes to show the shoddy state of civics education in the country.
Corporations are under no obligation to uphold the First Amendment.
Non sequitur.
No one but the *government* is under any obligation to uphold the first ammendment, because it is only the government that the first ammendment applies to. Let me quote: "Congress shall make no law..." The Bill Of Rights is not a universal document, rather it is a set of restrictions upon the government, and only the government.
And why are you picking on corporations? Your observation applies to all non-government groups, regardless of corporate status. Heck, it even applies to your *spouse*. Tell your wife she's a whore, and expect all your marital benefits to immediately cease.
Not just Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, but EVERY group acts this way. Don't make waves or you will be asked to leave, even in the most enlightened of organizations.
An unincorporated (as in not a corporation) mom-n-pop shop will fire you if you right an editorial about mom being a whore. A government bureaucrat will fire you if publicly dispute the policies he is implementing. Even a tenured professor can get ousted for embarassing the university.
Tell the world that Linus can't code his way out of a paper bag, and expect your linux patches to be summarily rejected. Why would you expect otherwise?
Only people born and raised on Microsoft's brain dead office suite would ever consider styles to be useless. For the rest of the world, we have the opposite opinion, because MSOffice can't do styles right.
So what bloopers are they? It would be much more useful to have a review with content than to merely whine about disappointment like some slashclone.
Firefox adapts to the host system? Then why the hell did it require GTK+ when I installed it only KDE-centric system?
I'm not sure what you mean by "innovation". I don't want an innovative word processor or spreadsheet, I want them to behave just like they have always done. WYSIWYG and style-centricity were the big innovations, but they're over fifteen years old.
If you're only talking about minor features, here's some OOo has (or had first): XML file formats; collaborating on a vendor-neutral standards; export directly to PDF without having to install third party module; dumping the MDI; styles that work (at least to Word users it seems innovative); lack of macro viruses; real fields instead of bookmarks doing double-duty; etc, etc, etc.
Answer: no it's not. OpenOffice is just as "bloated" under Windows as it is under X11.
Having never used MSWord at all until the past year, I have the opposite opinion. Whenever I have to use Word I end up fighting it trying to do what I want it to do, instead of what Microsoft wants me to do. It's a slow learning process of discovering Word's brain dead limitations so I can avoid them.