If Verhoeven saw fascism in the book, he's a bigger idiot than I thought. Regardless of what you thought of the book's politics, it was NOT fascism.
RAH was exploring the nature of the "franchise" (who gets to vote). Previous societies gave the franchise to the nobility, wealthy landholders, all males, dues paying party members, everyone over age 18, etc. RAH's premise was that only those who cared enough about society to volunteer for miltary service should be allowed to vote. It's a radical idea and interesting to ponder its implications, but it is NOT fascism. The society itself was quasi-libertarian.
Ditto! Without a free-beer bridge to other "phone" systems, this isn't practical for anything but walkie-talkie like service. It's like my friend who brags that he saves so much money with his internet phone, yet he still has to run to the corner pay phone to call us to brag.
Sometimes this social engineering can be much more clever than baffling them with tales of sludge in the engine. Think of the recent emails from "Microsoft" with an update.
The equivalent analogy to this with cars is finding a note saying that the local police station is providing free smog checks, with an address to place in a bad part of town. If you did not know that the police have nothing to do with smog checks, you might believe the note. And if you didn't know that the address was not correct, you might drive there just in time for a mugging.
I hate those Windows tricks. People think it's faster because they see the desktop, but it's really still in the middle of loading.
Ten seconds after boot you get the login prompt. But the system is waiting, not doing anything. Not even the network is fully up and running. Then you log in an five seconds later you see the desktop. But you cursor is an hourglass and you can't do anything with it for a while. Then it flickers to an arrow and back to an hourglass. If you try to start an application during this time, odds are it won't get started.
I did a test once on a dual boot W2K and FreeBSD machine. From poweron to the display of Slashdot in the browser on the desktop, W2K/IE took fifteen seconds longer than FreeBSD/KDE/Konqueror.
Ringworld was essentially the "Wizard of Oz" in disguise. In terms of climax, you have Dorothy (Louis) suddenly realizing at the end that she had the means to get home all along by clicking her heels (going through the mountain).
In the sequel, Teela gets a brain and ends up ruling the place. just like the Scarecrow in the Oz sequels.
I want my installation wizards for programs damnit:) As well as having an easy way to remove programs that I've installed.
You're not asking for something better, only something that resembles Windows. So just stick with Windows if that's what you want.
Package managers are a different concept than Windows' installers. They are apples and oranges. Where a Windows wizard installer will give you several pages you have to click through, most package managers will handle a one-click install quite nicely. Download a package, click on it, click OK, and you're done. A lot of them will also handle downloading the dependencies for you as well. As opposed to Windows installers that won't tell you you're missing a critical DLL. Uninstalling is just as easy, and will always be available. With Windows installers you just have to hope that the installer also installs the uninstaller.
One more thing though, an easier way to install drivers too.
For third party drivers (NVidia), the package manager handles this as well. The problem comes with drivers shipped with the kernel. The solution is to enable everything as a module. Most distros do this. I've got a Gentoo laptop where the first time I plugged in my USB camera it worked. But under Windows I still had to hunt down the CDROM and install the driver manually.
And have unknown devices show up as well if there is no driver part of the install yet.
Do you know what you are asking? But there may be devices I don't want drivers for loaded into memory. For example, I don't own any firewire devices, and consequently don't want any firewire drivers loaded.
Detecting NEW hardware is a different story. Perhaps this is what you are asking. Several distro already do this. Frankly I find it extremely annoying, but I can understand some people wanting it.
And distro specific packages like rpm don't cut it. I want a way that'll work with all distro's
I'll let you in on a little secret. Each Linux distro is a distinct and separate operating system. While they tend to be very compatible, they are still separate systems. They are designed by separate people, and the package dependencies trees are distinct. Mix and matching packages from different systems is going to give you problems. Unfortunately there's no way around it without a central package dictator. That's never going to happen, so stop holding your breath. In the meantime, stick with a single distro.
You've managed to get by without having OSX packages that would install on Windows, so I think you can manage without Debian packages that can install flawlessly on Fedora.
You can install the same program on windows 98/2000/xp.
Extremely few XP programs will install and work on 98 or 2K. And only about 95% of 98 and 2K programs will install and run on XP.
But they keep using #!/bin/sh shebangs! That's just Evil.
I stopped coding in bash when the embedded RTOS I was developing for switched from bash1 to bash2. I spent about two weeks doing nothing but rewriting all the scripts. We never knew that there was a problem, because the shebangs said sh, and everything parsed fine with "sh -n". Now I make sure I test every script with a real sh.
bash and ksh WILL deal with vanilla bourne scripts just fine. It's the extensions that kill you. If you don't need those extensions, don't use them. If you do, make sure you use the correct shebang. Because that/bin/sh might not be symlinked to bash. Just because you use Linux doesn't mean sh is always bash.
sh is horrible as a user shell, but it's more than adequate for scripting.
95% of what most people use their computers for don't need the new 3.4GHz HT Pentium IV they bought. It's like buying a Hummer to go grocery shopping with on Sundays. If we can waste Pentium IVs this way, then we can similarly waste the power of massively parallel computers:-)
Seriously though, there's a lot of things that can be done in parallel. We already have multiple processes and threads. Put each one on a separate processor. Sure most of them are going to sitting in a wait loop 95% of the time, but that's what our single CPU machines are doing right now.
Chips keep getting smaller, but the laws of physics remain the same. We're getting leakage and reducing the die size only makes it worse. Pretty soon we're going to have chips so small and so hot, that they'll be better at producing fusion than processing data.
We need a new direction. Moore's law is still in effect, but it doesn't dictate die sizes, only speed and cost. The most obvious alternate road is parallel processing. Multiple chips in other words. We're already doing this. Outside of the PC world this is old hat. We think we're all 1337 because we have a four-way Xeon server, but the non-PC world just yawns at this.
My prediction: PCs will have 64 processors, each of which will be cooler than today's 3GHz+ p4, but will provide a magnitude more processing power. Software (or compilers) will have to designed for this new architecture, but it's the only way we're going to see a PC capable of running Longhorn or Linux 2.8 that doesn't take 500 watts.
p.s In the meantime, software follows Moore's Anti-law, which states software will waste all additional resources provided by Moore's Law. If only software would keep up with hardware I would be ecstatic. When WP5.1 did 98% of what WordXP does today, but did it on a 640K 16-bit processor, it's hard to say software is improving in any area but the GUI.
Bob: "But I have to stay here until Joe gets back with the pipe wrench."
Boss: "I appreciate your work ethic, but the law says you have to take a break."
Bob: "Can't I just take my ten minute break ten minutes from now?"
Boss: "Sorry, but the law is very specific on that point."
Bob: "Okay then. But first move aside. Because when I remove my finger from this cracked pipe, raw sewage is going to be spewing right at the spot where you're standing..."
But that's too simple. What the poster is looking for is something in between. It shouldn't be the ChangeLog, but there should be something with a bit of detail to it. Will it finally support his Thingamabob(tm) USB device? Did that bug that caused his system to crash when his neighbor's garage door opener activated get fixed?
In most other projects, this is called the "release notes".
This kind of dictatorship works dandy at the core level of linux, and needs to be extended to include the GUI
Bzzzrt! Wrong! Here's your consolation prize, now get out of here!
We have multiple "core levels". Linux and GNU are only one. There's also FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. And Hurd. Or Debian's freakish genetic experiments in crossbreeding. You can argue that those are not really Linux, and you would be right. But that's as pointless as saying Gnome is not really KDE.
In Free Software you get your choice of operating system, operating environment and graphical environment. Mix and match to your heart's content.
I just don't have the patience and time to have to make things work that take a SINGLE CLICK and work OUT OF THE BOX in windows.
As a Unix developer who has also managed to do quite a number of Windows installs (from 3.1 to XP), please point out to me the areas in which you can make things work with a "SINGLE CLICK... OUT OF THE BOX". It isn't the installer, either the OS installer or any application's installer. And it isn't video card configuration. So what is it?
Granted, some things in Windows are much easier than Linux/BSD/Unix if you happen to have various manufacturer's CDROMs, but I've never seen anything under Windows work with a single click out of the box that didn't also work with a single click out of the box under Linux or FreeBSD (mouse, keyboard, etc).
Okay, if you're boss is walking by your cubicle you might not want him to instantly realize you aren't running Windows. But other than that, is there any sane reason to use this?
If Windows users are so completely hostile to changes in their working environment's look then WHY aren't they still using Win98 or Win2K? Windows XP brought a huge difference in look, feel and layout to Windows, but people don't seem to have a problem with that. In fact, now that I think about it, the ONLY people who say Linux needs to look like Windows are Linux people!
The reason people stick with Windows is not because it looks like Windows. The look and feel differences between 98 and XP should be ample evidence of that. The reason they're sticking is simply because it's Windows. They use it because it runs the software they need. Or they're more comfortable using what everyone else is using. Or because they've bought into the.NET propaganda. Or it supports their hardware. Or any of several other dozen reasons. But they ARE NOT using it solely to get a specific appearance.
Slashdot Mirror
If Verhoeven saw fascism in the book, he's a bigger idiot than I thought. Regardless of what you thought of the book's politics, it was NOT fascism.
RAH was exploring the nature of the "franchise" (who gets to vote). Previous societies gave the franchise to the nobility, wealthy landholders, all males, dues paying party members, everyone over age 18, etc. RAH's premise was that only those who cared enough about society to volunteer for miltary service should be allowed to vote. It's a radical idea and interesting to ponder its implications, but it is NOT fascism. The society itself was quasi-libertarian.
It was Al Gore! Just ask him...
Ditto! Without a free-beer bridge to other "phone" systems, this isn't practical for anything but walkie-talkie like service. It's like my friend who brags that he saves so much money with his internet phone, yet he still has to run to the corner pay phone to call us to brag.
Sometimes this social engineering can be much more clever than baffling them with tales of sludge in the engine. Think of the recent emails from "Microsoft" with an update.
The equivalent analogy to this with cars is finding a note saying that the local police station is providing free smog checks, with an address to place in a bad part of town. If you did not know that the police have nothing to do with smog checks, you might believe the note. And if you didn't know that the address was not correct, you might drive there just in time for a mugging.
If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit...
Me: "This is a partial specialization of a member template using RTTI to handle exceptions thrown by the descriptor class when it blocks on release."
Raj: "But I only know Java!"
There's no way I'm going to insert $50 to $200 worth of quarters into a vending machine. And that's just for the CHEAP software.
I hate those Windows tricks. People think it's faster because they see the desktop, but it's really still in the middle of loading.
Ten seconds after boot you get the login prompt. But the system is waiting, not doing anything. Not even the network is fully up and running. Then you log in an five seconds later you see the desktop. But you cursor is an hourglass and you can't do anything with it for a while. Then it flickers to an arrow and back to an hourglass. If you try to start an application during this time, odds are it won't get started.
I did a test once on a dual boot W2K and FreeBSD machine. From poweron to the display of Slashdot in the browser on the desktop, W2K/IE took fifteen seconds longer than FreeBSD/KDE/Konqueror.
I could handle the bald engineer women, but seeing Louis doing the rishathra with big hairy grass giant women would give me the heebie jeebies.
Ringworld was essentially the "Wizard of Oz" in disguise. In terms of climax, you have Dorothy (Louis) suddenly realizing at the end that she had the means to get home all along by clicking her heels (going through the mountain).
In the sequel, Teela gets a brain and ends up ruling the place. just like the Scarecrow in the Oz sequels.
I've got one too. No spit binding, but still kind of ratty. The direction of travel was only one of the mistakes in the book.
I want my installation wizards for programs damnit :) As well as having an easy way to remove programs that I've installed.
You're not asking for something better, only something that resembles Windows. So just stick with Windows if that's what you want.
Package managers are a different concept than Windows' installers. They are apples and oranges. Where a Windows wizard installer will give you several pages you have to click through, most package managers will handle a one-click install quite nicely. Download a package, click on it, click OK, and you're done. A lot of them will also handle downloading the dependencies for you as well. As opposed to Windows installers that won't tell you you're missing a critical DLL. Uninstalling is just as easy, and will always be available. With Windows installers you just have to hope that the installer also installs the uninstaller.
One more thing though, an easier way to install drivers too.
For third party drivers (NVidia), the package manager handles this as well. The problem comes with drivers shipped with the kernel. The solution is to enable everything as a module. Most distros do this. I've got a Gentoo laptop where the first time I plugged in my USB camera it worked. But under Windows I still had to hunt down the CDROM and install the driver manually.
And have unknown devices show up as well if there is no driver part of the install yet.
Do you know what you are asking? But there may be devices I don't want drivers for loaded into memory. For example, I don't own any firewire devices, and consequently don't want any firewire drivers loaded.
Detecting NEW hardware is a different story. Perhaps this is what you are asking. Several distro already do this. Frankly I find it extremely annoying, but I can understand some people wanting it.
And distro specific packages like rpm don't cut it. I want a way that'll work with all distro's
I'll let you in on a little secret. Each Linux distro is a distinct and separate operating system. While they tend to be very compatible, they are still separate systems. They are designed by separate people, and the package dependencies trees are distinct. Mix and matching packages from different systems is going to give you problems. Unfortunately there's no way around it without a central package dictator. That's never going to happen, so stop holding your breath. In the meantime, stick with a single distro.
You've managed to get by without having OSX packages that would install on Windows, so I think you can manage without Debian packages that can install flawlessly on Fedora.
You can install the same program on windows 98/2000/xp.
Extremely few XP programs will install and work on 98 or 2K. And only about 95% of 98 and 2K programs will install and run on XP.
No wonder you're not getting any. You're supposed to wine and dine her BEFORE the wood gets played with...
I find that Opera has only one package format for my FreeBSD operating system.
But they keep using #!/bin/sh shebangs! That's just Evil.
/bin/sh might not be symlinked to bash. Just because you use Linux doesn't mean sh is always bash.
I stopped coding in bash when the embedded RTOS I was developing for switched from bash1 to bash2. I spent about two weeks doing nothing but rewriting all the scripts. We never knew that there was a problem, because the shebangs said sh, and everything parsed fine with "sh -n". Now I make sure I test every script with a real sh.
bash and ksh WILL deal with vanilla bourne scripts just fine. It's the extensions that kill you. If you don't need those extensions, don't use them. If you do, make sure you use the correct shebang. Because that
sh is horrible as a user shell, but it's more than adequate for scripting.
95% of what most people use their computers for don't need the new 3.4GHz HT Pentium IV they bought. It's like buying a Hummer to go grocery shopping with on Sundays. If we can waste Pentium IVs this way, then we can similarly waste the power of massively parallel computers :-)
Seriously though, there's a lot of things that can be done in parallel. We already have multiple processes and threads. Put each one on a separate processor. Sure most of them are going to sitting in a wait loop 95% of the time, but that's what our single CPU machines are doing right now.
This is one reason why some CLI fans look down on those who don't speak bash
I don't speak bash. But I do speak sh. Does that count? I prefer to stick with the standards instead of the GNU embrace and extend additions.
Soldering iron? That's too difficult! Why can't they make electronic components that you just snap together like Lego?
Chips keep getting smaller, but the laws of physics remain the same. We're getting leakage and reducing the die size only makes it worse. Pretty soon we're going to have chips so small and so hot, that they'll be better at producing fusion than processing data.
We need a new direction. Moore's law is still in effect, but it doesn't dictate die sizes, only speed and cost. The most obvious alternate road is parallel processing. Multiple chips in other words. We're already doing this. Outside of the PC world this is old hat. We think we're all 1337 because we have a four-way Xeon server, but the non-PC world just yawns at this.
My prediction: PCs will have 64 processors, each of which will be cooler than today's 3GHz+ p4, but will provide a magnitude more processing power. Software (or compilers) will have to designed for this new architecture, but it's the only way we're going to see a PC capable of running Longhorn or Linux 2.8 that doesn't take 500 watts.
p.s In the meantime, software follows Moore's Anti-law, which states software will waste all additional resources provided by Moore's Law. If only software would keep up with hardware I would be ecstatic. When WP5.1 did 98% of what WordXP does today, but did it on a 640K 16-bit processor, it's hard to say software is improving in any area but the GUI.
With a SINGLE CLICK? I don't believe you.
Boss: "Take your ten minute break."
Bob: "But I have to stay here until Joe gets back with the pipe wrench."
Boss: "I appreciate your work ethic, but the law says you have to take a break."
Bob: "Can't I just take my ten minute break ten minutes from now?"
Boss: "Sorry, but the law is very specific on that point."
Bob: "Okay then. But first move aside. Because when I remove my finger from this cracked pipe, raw sewage is going to be spewing right at the spot where you're standing..."
But that's too simple. What the poster is looking for is something in between. It shouldn't be the ChangeLog, but there should be something with a bit of detail to it. Will it finally support his Thingamabob(tm) USB device? Did that bug that caused his system to crash when his neighbor's garage door opener activated get fixed?
In most other projects, this is called the "release notes".
"Here, try this Godiva chocolate. It tastes just like the Ex-Lax you're used to."
This kind of dictatorship works dandy at the core level of linux, and needs to be extended to include the GUI
Bzzzrt! Wrong! Here's your consolation prize, now get out of here!
We have multiple "core levels". Linux and GNU are only one. There's also FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. And Hurd. Or Debian's freakish genetic experiments in crossbreeding. You can argue that those are not really Linux, and you would be right. But that's as pointless as saying Gnome is not really KDE.
In Free Software you get your choice of operating system, operating environment and graphical environment. Mix and match to your heart's content.
I just don't have the patience and time to have to make things work that take a SINGLE CLICK and work OUT OF THE BOX in windows.
... OUT OF THE BOX". It isn't the installer, either the OS installer or any application's installer. And it isn't video card configuration. So what is it?
As a Unix developer who has also managed to do quite a number of Windows installs (from 3.1 to XP), please point out to me the areas in which you can make things work with a "SINGLE CLICK
Granted, some things in Windows are much easier than Linux/BSD/Unix if you happen to have various manufacturer's CDROMs, but I've never seen anything under Windows work with a single click out of the box that didn't also work with a single click out of the box under Linux or FreeBSD (mouse, keyboard, etc).
Okay, if you're boss is walking by your cubicle you might not want him to instantly realize you aren't running Windows. But other than that, is there any sane reason to use this?
.NET propaganda. Or it supports their hardware. Or any of several other dozen reasons. But they ARE NOT using it solely to get a specific appearance.
If Windows users are so completely hostile to changes in their working environment's look then WHY aren't they still using Win98 or Win2K? Windows XP brought a huge difference in look, feel and layout to Windows, but people don't seem to have a problem with that. In fact, now that I think about it, the ONLY people who say Linux needs to look like Windows are Linux people!
The reason people stick with Windows is not because it looks like Windows. The look and feel differences between 98 and XP should be ample evidence of that. The reason they're sticking is simply because it's Windows. They use it because it runs the software they need. Or they're more comfortable using what everyone else is using. Or because they've bought into the