Well, if you were Greenpeace and you had a choice between targeting something that was colored like natural manure or something that was colored like bleached paper, which product would you go after?
Who said anything about linux only? ACPI is a standard that all sorts of folks agreed to... like IBM and Intel, as well as MS. If people would comply with the standard that would be a useful first step. A handy second step would be letting at least developers know about what your specific modifications are. Some BIOS manufacturers can't seem to do either. Coding a BIOS that works properly may be tricky for specific hardware may be tricky in some instances. Telling dev's what gets triggered when you push a button shouldn't be any harder in one OS than it is in another. Unless politics get in the way.
What's the big mystery?
ACPI features work seamlessly under windows for any laptop I've ever had with a phenix BIOS... getting even the simplest features to work under linux has been a major chore. Do hot keys work? Under windows, yes, under linux no. Do lcd controls work, under linux no, under windows yes.
Have a look at the ACPI for linux web page at http://acpi.sourceforge.net/
Anything phoenix related is completely screwed for Linux.
There is not hiding this
phoenix is onzered by MS. PERIOD.
Look at your dsdt. Depending on when you made your purchase you will find several entries for MS operating systems. If you are lucky, you will find one for Linux (that's one of the uses for the acpi_os_name= parameter in the kernel flags... trick BIOS's from completely braindead/lazy BIOS manufactureres into thinking you have an OS you don't.
The Steve who should go is Ballmer. Just don't give him too many chairs. Complex concepts like conservation of momentum tend to be a little beyond the grasp of some apes... he might mess up the orbit.
I recently started teaching in a mixed crowd (read reasonable portion of mac users in a sea of windows users) and have been using linux since '96-ish. I do my overheads in Latex/beamer (the idea of doing any of those with Powerpoint and Equation Editor just gives me shivers, and not the good kind) so they go up as pdf's. I consistently get a group of about five windows users who complain that they have the newest drivers and everything is up to date and yet they print the pdf's all they get is giberish. If windows is such a simple thing for the end user to maintain, howcome UNIVERSITY students can't figure out how to open a pdf file under windows? For the record, I deliver the lectures in a multimedia equiped lecture room using a Adobe reader on a WinXP computer connected to the network (all provided by the university)... I use the exact same file as the one the students have access to for this so I know the files do open under windows and they look the same as they do on my Linux box.
The point is, the printer thing is not just a linux issue.
If they would just make a laptop that is fully compatible (ie, every piece of hardware, right down to the fscking hotkeys on the the keyboard and standards compliance in every single fscking aspect of ACPI) all they would need is a token distro and any linux user with a preference could at least feel safe that they weren't wasting money on hardware that they could never make use of. Put Ubuntu on it and let the user format/install their distro of preference. Who cares once the compatibility is settled.
NO (absolutely none what-so-ever) ATI cards unless ATI decides to at least produce a binary driver that works (prefereably source, but at the very least, something that actually works as advertised and works in linux, not just for Toms hardware under the most fully patched version of WinXP)
NO (absolutely none what-so-ever) Phoenix BIOS unless they're willing to release every single last detail about ACPI, etc. to the kernel devs... ditto for any other BIOS manufacturer.
Basically if Dell could do that, it wouldn't matter what distro they put on (I said Ubuntu because it's nice and flashy and is free and has left most of the libraries reasonably unmollested, unlike some distros... I use Slackware myself)
This much should not be hard for a company with resources like Dell or Gateway or Toshiba to pull off...
"infix notation" (putting the operator between the operands)
Compared to Reverse Polish Notation and Polish Notation. The name comes from the fact that the original Polish Notation was developed by a Polish mathematician.
RPN is actually easy to get used to. If your grade 1 teacher had told you to write equations that way, you'd be griping about infix and having to keep track of all those stupid brackets. Think of it like the difference between English grammar and German grammar. As far as memory/technology goes, I doubt there's much of a saving with RPN since all those numbers still have to be stored in a stack.
Had an HP48SX for years. I used to use it in the lab for plotting data as I went (good way to see if you should keep going into the wee hours or scrap an experiment before it wastes too much time). It finally died about half way through my PhD (chemistry) when it had a bottle of THF spill on it.
They are rugged. My old one got dropped all over the place, crushed in a book bag on numerous occasions, you name it. It took some heavy duty organic solvents to finally kill it dead.
They have a truck load of built in libraries and functionality (from simple math, to symbolic calculus, and handling of units).
The replacement that I finally bought is a 48gII and it will even do fft's.
And don't let RPN scare you. Once you get the hang of it, RPN is great.
Now, if only I could get it to interface properly with my linux box...
One of the nice things about being a sociopath (or a sociopathic corporation) is that you don't have to care when your accusers are right and you can get away with whining about other people picking on you. I suppose technically, that's two nice things.
This has always been the root of the issue for me on any laptop that doesn't work properly for suspend/resume (or any other power management issue). Severely mangled ACPI just makes things a nightmare. Acer and Toshiba are the only ones that I've had much experience with but it usually takes about two to three kernel versions before there's decent functionality for any given laptop. If you want, under linux, you can get your hands on your dsdt file (under/proc/acpi/dsdt... it's basically the stuff built into your bios that tells the system how acpi is supposed to work) and then hop over to the intel site and grab their tools to try to debug your dsdt yourself. I did it once, and never want to do it again. It would be nice if some of these companies could just follow the standards (especially when some of them are on the comities that set them). I suspect that there's a lot more that would work properly if they did. Hey, Toshiba, if you setup your dsdt's properly so they didn't confuse the bios and the os, do you think things might boot just a little faster?
For the record, it was meant pretty tongue in cheek (i.e., with a heavy dose of irony). Up here in Canada, we're generally quite happy to welcome foreign students into our schools. Even American ones. So come on up to the great white north while you Papa Bush still lets you get away with it.
On a side note, is there a better link available than the one in the article? I don't have time right now to hunt one down, but something better than what seems like an op-ed piece from a tabloid would be nice. The PDF linked at the end of the article is better, but some sort of reasoned summary without all the paranoia of the original article would be nice.
Another aspect in which this would "help" the Americans is in limiting the number of American youth would would be at risk of exposure to foreign ideals through studies abroad. Today, any American who can afford it could be exposed to all sorts of crazy ideas, just by enrolling in a foreign school. If they also had to ask permission before leaving the country, then many of them would probably not risk their souls in this way.
Maybe/. needs some sort of metaediting (editing equivalent of metamoderating)
Grade the editing in terms of
awsome, fine, shitty with regards to the following categories: dupe, accuracy of summary, choice of link (is there a better article), clarity (grammar) of summary, choice of icon.
this is a joke... mostly.
Is someone asleep up there in the editing room? What does a sci-fi author have to do with the Enlightenment window manager? He may have written some nifty (well, strange) books, but AFAIK, he's never coded a epplet in his life. (click the article's icon if you don't know what I'm talking about)
I'm putting off buying a new laptop until Slackware 11.0 comes out. All I care about as far as Vista goes is if I can get out of paying any money to Uncle Bill.
There was this one guy you might remember... Timothy something? I think he used a van to hurt some people in one of those big american cities. I'm surprized they still allow white people to rent vans in america. And there was that other guy... David something? Him and his followers had this huge cache of guns and stuff down in Texas. I realize that the ATF cleaned him out real good, but it's still surprizing, given the current reactionary nature of the american government, that white christians are allowed to own fire-arms. Think of the children!
On a less facetious note... apart from 9/11, name one terrorist act occuring on american soil that was perpetrated by islamic extremists. I can't think of any myself, but I don't obsess about it day and night like any good citizen of cnn.
Technically, it's "XWindow", singular. As in "The X Window System". But they've been struggling with trying to make people get it right for decades now.
It's probably been suggested before, but what MS should do is what games used to do back in the '80s. When you turn on your computer, it asks you "on page 10 of the manual, what is the 7th word in line 13?"
Espeically since windows has become too complex for a purely software based solution to ever work reliably.
Well in this example the problem lies in buggy software,not with OS per se. I had my share of troubles with some bad software...
Fair enough. But the counter to that is that it should not be so easy for flaky 3rd party software to mess up the OS. It should also not be so difficult to track down turds left by bad software. This is where my original complaint with regedit came from.
What really makes my day is that I can write and admin script using well documented API and it will "just work" for windows platform - most of my script work for all win machines in the office (from win2k pro sp4 to w2k3 x64 r2 enterprise) without any modifcation or exception handling code...
Sweet. I wish I had that skill with windows. But I do this with Linux all the time. Scriptability is one of the main things that makes *nix (including Linux) so nice to maintain. Maybe it's just a difference in style or a lack of VB skill on my part, but I've found scripting to be problematic at best underwindows. I do have to agree with you on the config files thing. It can be frustrating with some apps/distros to try and find where the config file is. However, most of the big ones come with both a gui and documentation if you don't know how to use "find" and "grep". In the end, it's really no worse than trying to hunt down some obscure key in the registry. If you want to stop a program from autolaunching when a user logs in, under windows, how many places do you have to look for it in the registry? Last time I had to do this there were almost 10 places to look (think about symantic being cute and placing stuff on the task bar, start menu, and scattered around registry.) I don't see any significant difference beyond one being what you are used to.
MS really does an excellent job providing unified management and administration interface to its whole stack (not only OSes but AD, Exchange,SQL -you name it ) and maintains this interface well...
Most distros are also pretty consistent internally. Even between distros there are a lot of standard libraries. This is why, eg. Firefox, Samba, LAMP, SSH, and a whack of other software are able to work on my favourite little niche distro (Slackware) just as well as they do in the major ones like RH, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse,... And if something doesn't work right away, I know where to find some documentation, even if it has to be source code, to find what the problem is, and how to fix it. I've very rarely gotten good help from MS, either in the form of documentation, online help, or over the phone. This is probably a large part of my frustration with using various generations of their OS.
p.s. And I do have a little clue about *nix/OSS...
Sorry, it's been a while since I layed into someone like that and you didn't deserve it. As far as lack of vision goes though, in my experience, it is MS and the various incarnations of Windows that have demonstrated poor design and lack of vision... and been overly complex and frustrating to work with as a result. If their system correlates well with the way your mind works and you can find your way around easily enough, then keep using Windows. To me, it looks like an insane mess compared to the OSS and *nix stuff that I prefer to work with. Both systems have their complexity, but OSS, in my experience, has done a better job of providing a way for the user to get through it.
Yes, I have. Mostly on our test boxes. Test some software for some user. Find it makes the system unstable. Uninstall it (several reboots later...) Test the system and find it didn't get it's stability back. Call tech support. Oh, well you have to go to regedit and remove key H_BLAH_BLAHBLAH/FOO_195/12348907610785/bork/pop/ou ch451/poop. Why didn't the uninstall do that? Why isn't it called something more indicative of what it does?
As for "just works" well, I've had some fun with beta software on linux that didn't "just work" but apart from that, I can't think of an official release that I've played with that didn't "just work". We have a pretty diverse (computer wise) setup out where I work. We use OpenBSD for file,print,mail,web server. We connect to the server with w2k, XP, OSX and several flavours of linux. It's reliable, stable, and (OMG, ) documented! Shelling out the extra cash for almost non-existent and all too often incompetant tech support and a couple CD's of bloat would not have been worth the effort for us. The whole "just works" thing, in my experience, only applies as long as you only want to do things exactly the way MS dictates that you should want it to. Everything is simple as long as you don't need to tweak it for a specific need.
I stand by my main assertions. Complexity/simplicity is not a good reason to switch. Microsoft has no business pointing at other systems and whining about them being complex.
You may understand the layout of a MS system pretty well, and therefor, don't find it to be as complex as people who don't have to deal with them on an daily basis. But they're no less complex than OSS. Just different. If you had a clue about how to maintain *nix/OSS, you'd find the assertion that OSS is too complex as laughable as you found my original post annoying. I am not a Windows expert. After the few times that I've had to deal with the guts of a Windows computer, I really don't think I want to be. They're complicated, finicky, and just plain obscure once you have to do anything at all interesting.
Seriously, has this guy ever tried to fix anything involving the use of regedit. Or tried to uninstall anything more complicated than minesweaper? Complexity is no basis for avoiding OSS in favour of MS.
Worste case scenario, RedHat becomes another niche distro. But even that is unlikely. They have earned the trust of a lot of people and businesses, and haven't (yet) done anything major enough to alienate these users. From another perspective, too many comercial Linux products are tested specifically against RH for it to suddenly vanish either. That covers the silly part.
Even if RH does lose some serious market share to Ubuntu... so what? As long as there are a few distro's out there that comply with enough standards so that all the training and development that people have gone through are still valid, who cares if you use RH, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, or whatever.
For the record, I use Slackware. I haven't touched RH since the days when they were trying to compete with windows 95. Trying so hard, in fact, that they kept mangling important libraries and generating the vast majority of the (few) bugs/security flaws that tarnished Linux' otherwise good name. I found it klunky and difficult to manage back then, and to this day, I still don't understand why RH chose to set things up the way they did. But to say it's going to die because of the latest fad in distro's is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you were Greenpeace and you had a choice between targeting something that was colored like natural manure or something that was colored like bleached paper, which product would you go after?
Who said anything about linux only? ACPI is a standard that all sorts of folks agreed to ... like IBM and Intel, as well as MS. If people would comply with the standard that would be a useful first step. A handy second step would be letting at least developers know about what your specific modifications are. Some BIOS manufacturers can't seem to do either. Coding a BIOS that works properly may be tricky for specific hardware may be tricky in some instances. Telling dev's what gets triggered when you push a button shouldn't be any harder in one OS than it is in another. Unless politics get in the way.
What's the big mystery? ACPI features work seamlessly under windows for any laptop I've ever had with a phenix BIOS ... getting even the simplest features to work under linux has been a major chore. Do hot keys work? Under windows, yes, under linux no. Do lcd controls work, under linux no, under windows yes.
Have a look at the ACPI for linux web page at http://acpi.sourceforge.net/
Anything phoenix related is completely screwed for Linux.
There is not hiding this
phoenix is onzered by MS. PERIOD.
Look at your dsdt. Depending on when you made your purchase you will find several entries for MS operating systems. If you are lucky, you will find one for Linux (that's one of the uses for the acpi_os_name= parameter in the kernel flags ... trick BIOS's from completely braindead/lazy BIOS manufactureres into thinking you have an OS you don't.
Try running
egrep -ri "cleartype" * | less -S
from the top of the source tree. I only have the source for 2.1.10 handy right now and it just shows up in the ChangeLog.
The Steve who should go is Ballmer. Just don't give him too many chairs. Complex concepts like conservation of momentum tend to be a little beyond the grasp of some apes ... he might mess up the orbit.
I recently started teaching in a mixed crowd (read reasonable portion of mac users in a sea of windows users) and have been using linux since '96-ish. I do my overheads in Latex/beamer (the idea of doing any of those with Powerpoint and Equation Editor just gives me shivers, and not the good kind) so they go up as pdf's. I consistently get a group of about five windows users who complain that they have the newest drivers and everything is up to date and yet they print the pdf's all they get is giberish. If windows is such a simple thing for the end user to maintain, howcome UNIVERSITY students can't figure out how to open a pdf file under windows? For the record, I deliver the lectures in a multimedia equiped lecture room using a Adobe reader on a WinXP computer connected to the network (all provided by the university) ... I use the exact same file as the one the students have access to for this so I know the files do open under windows and they look the same as they do on my Linux box.
The point is, the printer thing is not just a linux issue.
NO (absolutely none what-so-ever) ATI cards unless ATI decides to at least produce a binary driver that works (prefereably source, but at the very least, something that actually works as advertised and works in linux, not just for Toms hardware under the most fully patched version of WinXP)
NO (absolutely none what-so-ever) Phoenix BIOS unless they're willing to release every single last detail about ACPI, etc. to the kernel devs ... ditto for any other BIOS manufacturer.
Basically if Dell could do that, it wouldn't matter what distro they put on (I said Ubuntu because it's nice and flashy and is free and has left most of the libraries reasonably unmollested, unlike some distros ... I use Slackware myself)
This much should not be hard for a company with resources like Dell or Gateway or Toshiba to pull off ...
"infix notation" (putting the operator between the operands)
Compared to Reverse Polish Notation and Polish Notation. The name comes from the fact that the original Polish Notation was developed by a Polish mathematician.
RPN is actually easy to get used to. If your grade 1 teacher had told you to write equations that way, you'd be griping about infix and having to keep track of all those stupid brackets. Think of it like the difference between English grammar and German grammar. As far as memory/technology goes, I doubt there's much of a saving with RPN since all those numbers still have to be stored in a stack.
They are rugged. My old one got dropped all over the place, crushed in a book bag on numerous occasions, you name it. It took some heavy duty organic solvents to finally kill it dead.
They have a truck load of built in libraries and functionality (from simple math, to symbolic calculus, and handling of units).
The replacement that I finally bought is a 48gII and it will even do fft's.
And don't let RPN scare you. Once you get the hang of it, RPN is great.
Now, if only I could get it to interface properly with my linux box ...
One of the nice things about being a sociopath (or a sociopathic corporation) is that you don't have to care when your accusers are right and you can get away with whining about other people picking on you. I suppose technically, that's two nice things.
This has always been the root of the issue for me on any laptop that doesn't work properly for suspend/resume (or any other power management issue). Severely mangled ACPI just makes things a nightmare. Acer and Toshiba are the only ones that I've had much experience with but it usually takes about two to three kernel versions before there's decent functionality for any given laptop. If you want, under linux, you can get your hands on your dsdt file (under /proc/acpi/dsdt ... it's basically the stuff built into your bios that tells the system how acpi is supposed to work) and then hop over to the intel site and grab their tools to try to debug your dsdt yourself. I did it once, and never want to do it again. It would be nice if some of these companies could just follow the standards (especially when some of them are on the comities that set them). I suspect that there's a lot more that would work properly if they did. Hey, Toshiba, if you setup your dsdt's properly so they didn't confuse the bios and the os, do you think things might boot just a little faster?
For the record, it was meant pretty tongue in cheek (i.e., with a heavy dose of irony). Up here in Canada, we're generally quite happy to welcome foreign students into our schools. Even American ones. So come on up to the great white north while you Papa Bush still lets you get away with it.
On a side note, is there a better link available than the one in the article? I don't have time right now to hunt one down, but something better than what seems like an op-ed piece from a tabloid would be nice. The PDF linked at the end of the article is better, but some sort of reasoned summary without all the paranoia of the original article would be nice.
Another aspect in which this would "help" the Americans is in limiting the number of American youth would would be at risk of exposure to foreign ideals through studies abroad. Today, any American who can afford it could be exposed to all sorts of crazy ideas, just by enrolling in a foreign school. If they also had to ask permission before leaving the country, then many of them would probably not risk their souls in this way.
Maybe /. needs some sort of metaediting (editing equivalent of metamoderating)
... mostly.
Grade the editing in terms of
awsome, fine, shitty with regards to the following categories: dupe, accuracy of summary, choice of link (is there a better article), clarity (grammar) of summary, choice of icon.
this is a joke
Is someone asleep up there in the editing room? What does a sci-fi author have to do with the Enlightenment window manager? He may have written some nifty (well, strange) books, but AFAIK, he's never coded a epplet in his life. (click the article's icon if you don't know what I'm talking about)
I'm putting off buying a new laptop until Slackware 11.0 comes out. All I care about as far as Vista goes is if I can get out of paying any money to Uncle Bill.
There was this one guy you might remember ... Timothy something? I think he used a van to hurt some people in one of those big american cities. I'm surprized they still allow white people to rent vans in america. And there was that other guy ... David something? Him and his followers had this huge cache of guns and stuff down in Texas. I realize that the ATF cleaned him out real good, but it's still surprizing, given the current reactionary nature of the american government, that white christians are allowed to own fire-arms. Think of the children!
... apart from 9/11, name one terrorist act occuring on american soil that was perpetrated by islamic extremists. I can't think of any myself, but I don't obsess about it day and night like any good citizen of cnn.
On a less facetious note
That was suposed to be part of the joke ... I can't believe it got rated +1 ineresting.
It's probably been suggested before, but what MS should do is what games used to do back in the '80s. When you turn on your computer, it asks you "on page 10 of the manual, what is the 7th word in line 13?"
Espeically since windows has become too complex for a purely software based solution to ever work reliably.
Sweet. I wish I had that skill with windows. But I do this with Linux all the time. Scriptability is one of the main things that makes *nix (including Linux) so nice to maintain. Maybe it's just a difference in style or a lack of VB skill on my part, but I've found scripting to be problematic at best underwindows. I do have to agree with you on the config files thing. It can be frustrating with some apps/distros to try and find where the config file is. However, most of the big ones come with both a gui and documentation if you don't know how to use "find" and "grep". In the end, it's really no worse than trying to hunt down some obscure key in the registry. If you want to stop a program from autolaunching when a user logs in, under windows, how many places do you have to look for it in the registry? Last time I had to do this there were almost 10 places to look (think about symantic being cute and placing stuff on the task bar, start menu, and scattered around registry.) I don't see any significant difference beyond one being what you are used to. Most distros are also pretty consistent internally. Even between distros there are a lot of standard libraries. This is why, eg. Firefox, Samba, LAMP, SSH, and a whack of other software are able to work on my favourite little niche distro (Slackware) just as well as they do in the major ones like RH, Debian, Ubuntu, Suse,
Yes, I have. Mostly on our test boxes. Test some software for some user. Find it makes the system unstable. Uninstall it (several reboots later...) Test the system and find it didn't get it's stability back. Call tech support. Oh, well you have to go to regedit and remove key H_BLAH_BLAHBLAH/FOO_195/12348907610785/bork/pop/ou ch451/poop. Why didn't the uninstall do that? Why isn't it called something more indicative of what it does?
As for "just works" well, I've had some fun with beta software on linux that didn't "just work" but apart from that, I can't think of an official release that I've played with that didn't "just work". We have a pretty diverse (computer wise) setup out where I work. We use OpenBSD for file,print,mail,web server. We connect to the server with w2k, XP, OSX and several flavours of linux. It's reliable, stable, and (OMG, ) documented! Shelling out the extra cash for almost non-existent and all too often incompetant tech support and a couple CD's of bloat would not have been worth the effort for us. The whole "just works" thing, in my experience, only applies as long as you only want to do things exactly the way MS dictates that you should want it to. Everything is simple as long as you don't need to tweak it for a specific need.
I stand by my main assertions. Complexity/simplicity is not a good reason to switch. Microsoft has no business pointing at other systems and whining about them being complex.
You may understand the layout of a MS system pretty well, and therefor, don't find it to be as complex as people who don't have to deal with them on an daily basis. But they're no less complex than OSS. Just different. If you had a clue about how to maintain *nix/OSS, you'd find the assertion that OSS is too complex as laughable as you found my original post annoying. I am not a Windows expert. After the few times that I've had to deal with the guts of a Windows computer, I really don't think I want to be. They're complicated, finicky, and just plain obscure once you have to do anything at all interesting.
Regedit
Seriously, has this guy ever tried to fix anything involving the use of regedit. Or tried to uninstall anything more complicated than minesweaper? Complexity is no basis for avoiding OSS in favour of MS.
Even if RH does lose some serious market share to Ubuntu ... so what? As long as there are a few distro's out there that comply with enough standards so that all the training and development that people have gone through are still valid, who cares if you use RH, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, or whatever.
For the record, I use Slackware. I haven't touched RH since the days when they were trying to compete with windows 95. Trying so hard, in fact, that they kept mangling important libraries and generating the vast majority of the (few) bugs/security flaws that tarnished Linux' otherwise good name. I found it klunky and difficult to manage back then, and to this day, I still don't understand why RH chose to set things up the way they did. But to say it's going to die because of the latest fad in distro's is just silly.
And grill your dinner to a crispy state in five seconds flat.