Being in the 10% of C's doesn't mean you get fired, it is a tool for management to decide who to focus on.
The problem with the ranking is that there will ALWAYS be that bottom 10%. Sure you can "focus" on this year's bottom 10%. But there will be another bottom 10% next year. And the year after that. And so on and so on.
I hate to sound cynical, but I think there's too many PHBs who are going to use this as a measurement, no matter how stupid it sounds to us mortals. They'll wonder why there's still ten percent slackers in the department after five years of focusing.
managers will artificially lower the scores of employees who are near retirement
Just the opposite at my work. After a round of layoffs last year, we suddenly discovered that we have no one left that's expendable. There's twenty people in a department of twenty five whose departure would devastate the company. Two people are getting real close to retirement. One keeps saying "I don't know if I'll retire this year...it depends on how good of a raise they give me!"
There's one major difference between portage and ports, and that's FreeBSD separating the base system out from the ports, which are all third party software.
When updating the base system under FreeBSD, one DOES merge the configuration. This is done with "mergemaster", and is part of the documented upgrade process.. It is not automatic, but if you trust it, you can pipe yes through it.
Getting back on track, you originally said "Meanwhile over on FreeBSD you don't even know if you need to update the configuration. Way to go, FreeBSD!"
That's not the case. If a port's configuration files changes so that they need updating, the user will be notified. This would only happen if the new configuration format is incompatible with the old, and in real life that's a relatively rare occurance.
Not overwriting system configuration is a problem? How?
While FreeBSD (or Gentoo) is not suitable for the raw newbie unwilling to read the documentation, it more than meets the needs of those that don't want nameless packagers a continent away messing with their configuration.
Here's how things are done in FreeBSD: Install the CUPS package (either binary or from source). CUPS configuration files are installed to/usr/local/etc (nothing touches/etc under pain of excommunication), with suffixes of "sample". If those default configurations are good enough for you, just copy them over or rename them. Then the next time you update CUPS, the *.sample files will get overwritten, but not the real configuration files.
Could an automatic merge be done? Of course it could. But it couldn't be done safely. I have yet to see any merge tool that didn't need human intervention to keep it from messing up. The logic behind an automatic merge is just too complex to get right every time. It doesn't matter how user friendly an automatic merge seems, if it gets it wrong only one time in a hundred, it's going to cause more frustration than it prevents.
Configuration files COULD be written so that automatic merging would always work. But we're talking about third party packages here, and we have no control over them.
One problem that I've noticed is the fact the build from source people tend to install things in a way that's completely different than anyone else.
Actually most of us end up building the packages in precisely the manner that the authors intended. For example, I build KDE from scatch, and end up with a vanilla KDE that exactly matches the KDE documentation. The fact that this doesn't look the same as the Redhat's, Mandrake's, or SuSE's KDE is a Good Thing(tm).
While it's good for a distro to fix some known bugs, merely changing a package to differentiate yourself from other distros only increases the odds of adding new bugs and confusing the user.
"What's that new desktop you have there?"
"It's KDE 3.2.1"
"But it doesn't look like my KDE 3.2.1"
"That's because I changed the wallpaper"
"No, not that! I mean that icon there. What is it?"
"It's the trash can"
"I don't have one of those, all I have is a recycling bin. And how come your kicker is plain gray instead of swirly greens and yellows? And how come the home icon looks like a house instead of a penguin? And where's your NuBE(tm) Linux(tm) Web Browser? All I see is this thing called 'Konqueror'. Heck, I bet you're not even running Linux!"
"I'm not, it's FreeBSD..."
Re:Report it! Give TLDP Feedback!
on
CSS for the LDP?
·
· Score: 1
As a software developer, I fully understand what you're saying. I would rather have one of my users alert me to a problem rather than getting pissed and using something else.
But on the other hand, as a user I absolutely abhor this attitude. You're telling me it's my fault that some of these documents haven't been updated in EIGHT FSCKING YEARS! Do you guys at the LDP just sit around all day thinking you don't have any problems just because the phone isn't ringing off the hook with complaints?
I see where you coming from now. I think it's a difference of perspective though. Some things I agree with you on, while others I would defend to keep.
"Did you know..." dialog boxes at startup.
I also hate the tips of the day. While some people like this, I find it annoying and I turn it off. But KDE is hardly alone in this regard. The grandaddy of all GTK+ applications, Gimp, has them as well.
Tray icons and lots of tray icon functionality.
I run kbiff as a mail notifier. Having it in the systray is much less cluttering than the alternatives. I will agree that some of these systray icons have gone too far.
Deeply nested menus with applications I neither know nor care about.
Ah, but some of us do care about these applications. In fact, the first thing I do when I install a non-KDE GUI application is add it to the menu! It's much less cluttered than having several dozen icons on the desktop, and much easier to use than trying to remember the name of the program to launch it from an xterm.
I think you're real problem is that KDE comes with too many applications. While I do feel that KDE should be pared down a bit, having standard KDE applications like KMail and Konqueror installed by default is very usefull.
Lots of extra processes that get started up when KDE starts up.
Those processes are useful. Maybe not for everyone, so if some aren't useful to you, turn them off. These are daemons, just like all of the "extra processes" your system starts up before you even get XFCE started.
Complicated configuration dialogs.
Just this morning I went to rip a CD. This is at work behind a firewall. Configuration dialogs from earlier KDE releases allowed me to check "use a proxy". But in an effort at simplification it was removed. Because of this uncluttering, I am not unable to use cddb at work. Aaaargh!
The typical solution to "complicated" dialogs is to remove the functionality they configure. This is hardly a positive step.
Yet another help system.
This help system isn't redundant, because it's the ONLY help system on the GUI. While a consider man pages (and to a lesser extent, info pages) to be very useful, it's a usability hinderance to have to start an xterm to view them. Every desktop in the world (except XFCE apparently) has something similar. Windows, OS/2, CDE, Gnome, Openwindows, Aqua, Enlightenment, etc.
KDE also duplicates a lot of functionality that already exists in Linux, and it duplicates it just for the purpose of having a Qt-based implementation of something that otherwise already works perfectly well.
Well I guess you can through out the whole GUI then. The command line is all you need. Browse the web? Use lynx. Read email? Use pine. No need for multimedia GUI applications when there's tons of command line CD, MP3 and even video players. Emacs and vi should be good enough for everyone.
There is a purpose to the GUI otherwise XFCE wouldn't even have been created. But now that it's there, it ought to be useful for something other than running a bunch of xterms. If that's all I wanted I would have stuck with mwm.
It's good to know XFCE isn't copying the braindead CDE mistake for mistake:-)
But as it still being less cluttered than KDE, I guess it depends on what your definition of "cluttered" is. Using the screenshot of a default XFCE desktop as a comparison, the clutter is about the same. KDE does add two icons to the desktop on a default install (home, trash). In terms of panels, both KDE's and XFCE's default panels contain thirteen elements, including handles.
So I guess you're saying, in essence, that because of those two additional icons in KDE, XFCE is "much less clutered".
Already done! They're using DocBook XML. Of course, many of their docs are so out of date, that some are still in DocBook SGML, and I fear a few might still be LinuxDoc SGML!
Not using a "modern" browser, I don't see this in the lower left corner. But I do see an icon of a bug in the lower right corner, with tooltip that says "this webpage contains coding errors".
There's more than one person working on LDP, so do whatever you're best suited at. If that's CSS, then put in some CSS. On the other hand, if you were the only person working on it I would skip the CSS and put in some friggin content!
I'm a FreeBSD user who has to dabble in Linux from time to time. So every time I need some Linux info I go to LDP. What I generally find are horribly out of date HOWTO's and incomplete manpages. Quality content is lacking. For example, the XFree86-HOWTO was last updated September 2001. Maybe not a lot has changed since then, but considering the sparsity of information in this document, someone could have at least expanded a bit on several areas. Another example is ALSA. This was recently added to the 2.6 kernel, but the HOWTO was last updated November 1999!
So go ahead and work on your CSS. But find out who's in charge of content, and give them a swift kick in the butt!
p.s. Don't go too wild on the CSS. Make it use the standard DocBook-XSL produced HTML. For a good example see FreeBSD's stylesheet. It's not going to win any NEA grants, but it gives a consistant professional feel to all of the FreeBSD HTML docs.
Actually, the first (and last).cx site I saw was quite unsuitable for my impressionable eyes. It's two years later and I still wake up in the middle of the night screaming. As far as I'm concerned they can firewall off the.cx domain behind three feet of reinforced concrete.
So this distro set's itself apart by including less packages, then allowing users to download any more that they want.
Excellent idea! I've seen more than a few newbies frustrated by the myriad choices that SuSE (as just one example) threw at them. If you can't fit the full distro with packages on a single CD, you're doing something wrong.
I haven't used XFCE, but last time I looked at it, it was a CDE clone. To me that says "clutter". A busy control panel and icons that minimize to the desktop is visual clutter.
Hopefully they haven't cloned too many of CDE's mistakes...
Shareware has never really existed on the Unix platform (any Unix or Unix-like platform). But what we call "Open Source" has been there from the very beginning. It's pointless talking about the economic model of shareware in Unix, because it never has had one to talk about.
But Open Source is still uncommon under Windows, so you can't point to it as a cause for shareware's demise. I *suspct* shareware was common because of "make money quick" thinking. In some ways, it was the "MLM" of software. But after two decades of shareware and only handful who ever made more than $1000 on it, reality has trumped the fantasy.
Whether your software is truly excellent, or just mediocre, the just essentially comes down to selling it or giving it away. If this is your hobby (you do it on weekends for fun), there is no shame in giving it away. If you truly think you can make some decent money at it, then stop treating it like a hobby and give it some real marketing effort.
Now as an aside, you can STILL write shareware and have it be Open Source. Nothing is stopping you from releasing your software under an Open Source license, then politely asking for monetary contributions. Considering that most people don't bother registering their proprietary shareware anyway, what's there to lose?
The problem is it appears that only the big companies can money with open source.
Actually, nobody's making money *selling* Open Source. Instead, a few people are making money supporting Open Source, or selling adjunct products. The economic model is changing and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change it. Software is becoming a commodity product. If the economics forces you to give away your software you might as well open up the source code.
I have no idea about Swing. I'm not a Java developer, just a user trying to use Java applications. All I know is that maybe one in five java applications do not work for me. Maybe I need to install Swing and mangle CLASSPATH before I try to run them. Or maybe I should follow the herd and run Windows where cross platform Java applications are truly guaranteed to be cross platform.
Not that this is any different in the Windows world, but it'd be nice to give ISVs a completely royalty free solution.
Royalties? What royalties? There are no royalties! The price for using Qt Professional is per-developer, and is the same if you sell one application or one million.
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Being in the 10% of C's doesn't mean you get fired, it is a tool for management to decide who to focus on.
The problem with the ranking is that there will ALWAYS be that bottom 10%. Sure you can "focus" on this year's bottom 10%. But there will be another bottom 10% next year. And the year after that. And so on and so on.
I hate to sound cynical, but I think there's too many PHBs who are going to use this as a measurement, no matter how stupid it sounds to us mortals. They'll wonder why there's still ten percent slackers in the department after five years of focusing.
managers will artificially lower the scores of employees who are near retirement
Just the opposite at my work. After a round of layoffs last year, we suddenly discovered that we have no one left that's expendable. There's twenty people in a department of twenty five whose departure would devastate the company. Two people are getting real close to retirement. One keeps saying "I don't know if I'll retire this year...it depends on how good of a raise they give me!"
There's one major difference between portage and ports, and that's FreeBSD separating the base system out from the ports, which are all third party software.
When updating the base system under FreeBSD, one DOES merge the configuration. This is done with "mergemaster", and is part of the documented upgrade process.. It is not automatic, but if you trust it, you can pipe yes through it.
Getting back on track, you originally said "Meanwhile over on FreeBSD you don't even know if you need to update the configuration. Way to go, FreeBSD!"
That's not the case. If a port's configuration files changes so that they need updating, the user will be notified. This would only happen if the new configuration format is incompatible with the old, and in real life that's a relatively rare occurance.
Not overwriting system configuration is a problem? How?
/usr/local/etc (nothing touches /etc under pain of excommunication), with suffixes of "sample". If those default configurations are good enough for you, just copy them over or rename them. Then the next time you update CUPS, the *.sample files will get overwritten, but not the real configuration files.
While FreeBSD (or Gentoo) is not suitable for the raw newbie unwilling to read the documentation, it more than meets the needs of those that don't want nameless packagers a continent away messing with their configuration.
Here's how things are done in FreeBSD: Install the CUPS package (either binary or from source). CUPS configuration files are installed to
Could an automatic merge be done? Of course it could. But it couldn't be done safely. I have yet to see any merge tool that didn't need human intervention to keep it from messing up. The logic behind an automatic merge is just too complex to get right every time. It doesn't matter how user friendly an automatic merge seems, if it gets it wrong only one time in a hundred, it's going to cause more frustration than it prevents.
Configuration files COULD be written so that automatic merging would always work. But we're talking about third party packages here, and we have no control over them.
Meanwhile over on FreeBSD you don't even know if you need to update the configuration. Way to go, FreeBSD!
Over here on FreeBSD we never worry about that, because no package is allowed to overwrite any system configuration.
One problem that I've noticed is the fact the build from source people tend to install things in a way that's completely different than anyone else.
Actually most of us end up building the packages in precisely the manner that the authors intended. For example, I build KDE from scatch, and end up with a vanilla KDE that exactly matches the KDE documentation. The fact that this doesn't look the same as the Redhat's, Mandrake's, or SuSE's KDE is a Good Thing(tm).
While it's good for a distro to fix some known bugs, merely changing a package to differentiate yourself from other distros only increases the odds of adding new bugs and confusing the user.
"What's that new desktop you have there?"
"It's KDE 3.2.1"
"But it doesn't look like my KDE 3.2.1"
"That's because I changed the wallpaper"
"No, not that! I mean that icon there. What is it?"
"It's the trash can"
"I don't have one of those, all I have is a recycling bin. And how come your kicker is plain gray instead of swirly greens and yellows? And how come the home icon looks like a house instead of a penguin? And where's your NuBE(tm) Linux(tm) Web Browser? All I see is this thing called 'Konqueror'. Heck, I bet you're not even running Linux!"
"I'm not, it's FreeBSD..."
As a software developer, I fully understand what you're saying. I would rather have one of my users alert me to a problem rather than getting pissed and using something else.
But on the other hand, as a user I absolutely abhor this attitude. You're telling me it's my fault that some of these documents haven't been updated in EIGHT FSCKING YEARS! Do you guys at the LDP just sit around all day thinking you don't have any problems just because the phone isn't ringing off the hook with complaints?
I see where you coming from now. I think it's a difference of perspective though. Some things I agree with you on, while others I would defend to keep.
"Did you know..." dialog boxes at startup.
I also hate the tips of the day. While some people like this, I find it annoying and I turn it off. But KDE is hardly alone in this regard. The grandaddy of all GTK+ applications, Gimp, has them as well.
Tray icons and lots of tray icon functionality.
I run kbiff as a mail notifier. Having it in the systray is much less cluttering than the alternatives. I will agree that some of these systray icons have gone too far.
Deeply nested menus with applications I neither know nor care about.
Ah, but some of us do care about these applications. In fact, the first thing I do when I install a non-KDE GUI application is add it to the menu! It's much less cluttered than having several dozen icons on the desktop, and much easier to use than trying to remember the name of the program to launch it from an xterm.
I think you're real problem is that KDE comes with too many applications. While I do feel that KDE should be pared down a bit, having standard KDE applications like KMail and Konqueror installed by default is very usefull.
Lots of extra processes that get started up when KDE starts up.
Those processes are useful. Maybe not for everyone, so if some aren't useful to you, turn them off. These are daemons, just like all of the "extra processes" your system starts up before you even get XFCE started.
Complicated configuration dialogs.
Just this morning I went to rip a CD. This is at work behind a firewall. Configuration dialogs from earlier KDE releases allowed me to check "use a proxy". But in an effort at simplification it was removed. Because of this uncluttering, I am not unable to use cddb at work. Aaaargh!
The typical solution to "complicated" dialogs is to remove the functionality they configure. This is hardly a positive step.
Yet another help system.
This help system isn't redundant, because it's the ONLY help system on the GUI. While a consider man pages (and to a lesser extent, info pages) to be very useful, it's a usability hinderance to have to start an xterm to view them. Every desktop in the world (except XFCE apparently) has something similar. Windows, OS/2, CDE, Gnome, Openwindows, Aqua, Enlightenment, etc.
KDE also duplicates a lot of functionality that already exists in Linux, and it duplicates it just for the purpose of having a Qt-based implementation of something that otherwise already works perfectly well.
Well I guess you can through out the whole GUI then. The command line is all you need. Browse the web? Use lynx. Read email? Use pine. No need for multimedia GUI applications when there's tons of command line CD, MP3 and even video players. Emacs and vi should be good enough for everyone.
There is a purpose to the GUI otherwise XFCE wouldn't even have been created. But now that it's there, it ought to be useful for something other than running a bunch of xterms. If that's all I wanted I would have stuck with mwm.
It's good to know XFCE isn't copying the braindead CDE mistake for mistake :-)
But as it still being less cluttered than KDE, I guess it depends on what your definition of "cluttered" is. Using the screenshot of a default XFCE desktop as a comparison, the clutter is about the same. KDE does add two icons to the desktop on a default install (home, trash). In terms of panels, both KDE's and XFCE's default panels contain thirteen elements, including handles.
So I guess you're saying, in essence, that because of those two additional icons in KDE, XFCE is "much less clutered".
Already done! They're using DocBook XML. Of course, many of their docs are so out of date, that some are still in DocBook SGML, and I fear a few might still be LinuxDoc SGML!
For a decent example, see BluesNews.com
Not using a "modern" browser, I don't see this in the lower left corner. But I do see an icon of a bug in the lower right corner, with tooltip that says "this webpage contains coding errors".
There's more than one person working on LDP, so do whatever you're best suited at. If that's CSS, then put in some CSS. On the other hand, if you were the only person working on it I would skip the CSS and put in some friggin content!
I'm a FreeBSD user who has to dabble in Linux from time to time. So every time I need some Linux info I go to LDP. What I generally find are horribly out of date HOWTO's and incomplete manpages. Quality content is lacking. For example, the XFree86-HOWTO was last updated September 2001. Maybe not a lot has changed since then, but considering the sparsity of information in this document, someone could have at least expanded a bit on several areas. Another example is ALSA. This was recently added to the 2.6 kernel, but the HOWTO was last updated November 1999!
So go ahead and work on your CSS. But find out who's in charge of content, and give them a swift kick in the butt!
p.s. Don't go too wild on the CSS. Make it use the standard DocBook-XSL produced HTML. For a good example see FreeBSD's stylesheet. It's not going to win any NEA grants, but it gives a consistant professional feel to all of the FreeBSD HTML docs.
I've got an old 200MHz 86mb RAM laptop at work. It's running KDE 3.1. It's slow, of course, but once the desktop is up and running, it's very usable.
Actually, the first (and last) .cx site I saw was quite unsuitable for my impressionable eyes. It's two years later and I still wake up in the middle of the night screaming. As far as I'm concerned they can firewall off the .cx domain behind three feet of reinforced concrete.
So this distro set's itself apart by including less packages, then allowing users to download any more that they want.
Excellent idea! I've seen more than a few newbies frustrated by the myriad choices that SuSE (as just one example) threw at them. If you can't fit the full distro with packages on a single CD, you're doing something wrong.
I haven't used XFCE, but last time I looked at it, it was a CDE clone. To me that says "clutter". A busy control panel and icons that minimize to the desktop is visual clutter.
Hopefully they haven't cloned too many of CDE's mistakes...
I wish I still had mine. Unlike WinXP and Redhat boxes, OS/2 boxes were made with sturdy carboard, and not just a cardboard insert.
Shareware has never really existed on the Unix platform (any Unix or Unix-like platform). But what we call "Open Source" has been there from the very beginning. It's pointless talking about the economic model of shareware in Unix, because it never has had one to talk about.
But Open Source is still uncommon under Windows, so you can't point to it as a cause for shareware's demise. I *suspct* shareware was common because of "make money quick" thinking. In some ways, it was the "MLM" of software. But after two decades of shareware and only handful who ever made more than $1000 on it, reality has trumped the fantasy.
Whether your software is truly excellent, or just mediocre, the just essentially comes down to selling it or giving it away. If this is your hobby (you do it on weekends for fun), there is no shame in giving it away. If you truly think you can make some decent money at it, then stop treating it like a hobby and give it some real marketing effort.
Now as an aside, you can STILL write shareware and have it be Open Source. Nothing is stopping you from releasing your software under an Open Source license, then politely asking for monetary contributions. Considering that most people don't bother registering their proprietary shareware anyway, what's there to lose?
The problem is it appears that only the big companies can money with open source.
Actually, nobody's making money *selling* Open Source. Instead, a few people are making money supporting Open Source, or selling adjunct products. The economic model is changing and no amount of wishful thinking is going to change it. Software is becoming a commodity product. If the economics forces you to give away your software you might as well open up the source code.
I have no idea about Swing. I'm not a Java developer, just a user trying to use Java applications. All I know is that maybe one in five java applications do not work for me. Maybe I need to install Swing and mangle CLASSPATH before I try to run them. Or maybe I should follow the herd and run Windows where cross platform Java applications are truly guaranteed to be cross platform.
Here's what the dictionary says:
What's really funny is that the 'G' in both "GNOME" and "GTK+" stands for "GNU". They're both GNU projects. Sometimes the hypocrasy is deafening.
Evolution is not a commercial proprietary application. One, and only one, of its plugins is proprietary.
"Wooo! Woo! GTK+ r00lz Qt! LGPL kicks GPL butt! Ximian Connector frags KDE!"
Last time I checked, the GPL license for QT is only avaliable for QT/X11, NOT on QT for Windows.
It doesn't matter because the topic of the day is "Novell Linux Desktop".
Not that this is any different in the Windows world, but it'd be nice to give ISVs a completely royalty free solution.
Royalties? What royalties? There are no royalties! The price for using Qt Professional is per-developer, and is the same if you sell one application or one million.