The trashcan is just the wrongest metaphor for these operations. They should have invented a new icon. Like a "door", or a magic eightball. Anything would've been better than abusing the trashcan...
The trashcan should be just that, use it seldomly and only when you are sure you want to get rid of something. Conditioning the user to use the trashcan for whatever random task is, again, probably the most retarded design decision that ever came out of apple.
Once you are used to dropping just about anything onto the trash, expecting something useful to happen, you might in some mindless moment go and drag that important document there...
As any admin who has to babysit wintendo boxes I have to regularly re-image them. One day I'll get around and write a little thingy that lets me start the job by dragging the trashcan onto the workspace icon...
And the cool thing was: it worked. Even without the click. It's amazing that even today the amigaOS is still superior in some basic design decisions.
The handling of removable devices would be one. Like, why doesn't windows pop up a message "USB stick removed, re-attach or lose your data" and only if there were files open on the stick? If there were no files open it could just silently let it go.
Another thing would be the consequental use of volume labels instead of drive names. The amiga would never tell you to "insert XY into drive Z" like the redmond crap does. It would just say "Insert volume 'BlahBlah" and you were free to insert it into any drive.
Last time I was hit by the misfortune of having to babysit a wintendo-box the installer of whatever crapware I bothered with still demanded to get its stuff from E:. Unfornationally E: was no longer a cd-rom but now a harddisk partition and I had point it to the right location multiple times.
Uhm, what's the point here? Ofcourse they can run any code they want, but they run it under their uid and gid. Problems arise only when a user manages to elevate his/her privileges. And that shouldn't happen unless there's a bug.
Some stuff probably just shouldn't be packaged before the code has reached a certain level of stability. Packaging up a beast as complex as wine properly is hard. A smart build-script that fetches and builds the required depends is often better than trying to wrap up a distro package...
Yup, and I'd like to add that its pretty simple to stay out of trouble. Just don't bother with debs or rpms download from "somewhere".
If the piece of software you want is not packaged for your distro then just go and compile it from scratch. The build system (e.g. autoconf) can usually work with the libraries you have even if they're not the exact version the package maintainer mentioned in the dependencies.
On debian I usually just dl the tarball and shot off a./configure. When it complains about libfoo missing I do an 'apt-get install libfoo-dev', then try again. This works more often than it fails and definately avoids introduction of wierd depends into the local package list.
True that. I also think that esp. the so-called "power users" (on windows *snicker*) think like that.
I think we could give them what they want simply by developing a tiny meta fileformat and slapping the mime-type into the browser default install.
Imagine a user stumbles into the homepage of SoCoolMediaPlayer and wants to install it. He'd click a link "Install now" and the meta-file tells the pkg manager which package to fetch/install from the distro repository.
The meta file would be only a few bytes and basically just contain the package name for different distros (which the software author created and added to the various repositories). So for my little example it would prolly look like:
System File Protection exist to prevent old-style installers from doing this. If a vendor wants to overwrite their own DLL, good for them.
You're saying the mfc42.dll that my USB WebCam Software installed will not be overwritten by the one coming with the Scanner Sp^H^HDriver? That's news to me as I have seen it happen just recently. The installer will pop up a little box and ask "Overwrite? Yes, No, Cancel".
> waste diskspace and memory by dumping yet another copy of bozo.dll That's basically the Linux solution (short of recompiling everything).
With linux you either know what you're doing or you'd better stick to what other people suggest.
Dealing with outdated RPMs (esp. mixing them into an up-to-date system) usually doesn't make sense at all. You either compile the required software from scratch or get a newer version of the RPM.
Obviously not. For his enlightenment: apt (the debian package manager) does all the "dependency-chasing" for you. You say "apt-get install kde" and it happens.
Nice summary of DLL-Hell. But how exactly does that collide with grandparents point?
You have stated yourself that any installer is free to use any of the quierks you've described (in short: rely on registry in hope it's not messed up yet again, overwrite DLLs that other programs may be using or waste diskspace and memory by dumping yet another copy of bozo.dll to be loaded at runtime).
So it's only a matter of time until you run into a piece of software that picks the route that breaks your system.
Yup, that's probably a good idea. I havent tried other Deb-based distros (except knoppix) myself but they might make installation easier. Last time I checked the debian installer was still a bit unfriendly.
Just make sure to choose a variant distro that you can upgrade to "real" debian later or you might find yourself stuck with incompatible packages and "locked" into the small distro that doesn't have all the pkgs you want.
I read somewhere that recent knoppix-livecds can optionally drop a Debian installation to your hdd. I have mo expirience with that either but it sounds like it'd be the easiest way to get a base-install going (I imagine you just boot a knoppix and run whatever their disk-installer is called).
In other words, I want users of yum/apt/portage to tell me they've never encountered dependency problems if they've been using them for more than a couple of years. (No, seriously. I would really like to hear, because then I would know which dist to choose)
Okay, you asked for it so here I am, telling you to give debian a shot. After installation set your/etc/apt/sources.list to the 'testing'-branch and run apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade. Wait a while, answer a couple interactive questions (most have sane defaults, you shouldn't run into trouble that can't be solved with a bit of googling), now your box is up to date. Next install the stuff you want but don't have yet, this might be a good kickstart: apt-get install kde firefox madman xmms kernel-package abiword pan.
There's a simple rule to avoid breaking debian's package management and that is: don't try to do something that it doesn't want to (don't use the "force"-option) unless you know what you're doing. The other advice would be to stick with the 'testing'-branch for desktop machines. The packages in 'stable' are pretty outdated (but well, stable!) and 'unstable' can indeed lead to depency hell if, again, you don't know how the the whole thing ticks.
I don't know of anyone who discovered debian and would go back to a RPM based distro.
In fact I'd say that a common route for the linux kids of nowadays is:
1. Knoppix, RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake or similar for the first intro 2. Debian once they're fed up with the little annoyances of the former 3. Gentoo ("Slackware XP") 4. Slack or LFS
RAM is not an issue at all, you can go with 256M or less and be fine. You'll likely take a performance penalty from the IDE bus though because when writing to the array your data is sent to n drives instead of one. Caching helps here but if you're paranoid about power outages you'd better turn that off. Other than that linux softraid is perfectly fine and quite a lot people use it in production systems. If you need better performance you'll have to spend on SCSI or one of these hardware-raid IDE cards or a bit of RAM for caching but don't expect wonders from the latter...
It doesn't really dig into Nike's profit because the cost of the warranty is factored into the price of the shoe.
Sorry but you are wrong there. Nothing is factored into the price that way. The price is the exact amount that their market research reported the kids will be able to squeeze out of their parents. Or, more bluntly, it is the amount that they conditioned the target audience to pay for the nike-image.
Remember, the shoe costs $5 to make in a cheap labor country. Compare that to the retail-price (and add another $10 for package/shipping/whatever if you like).
The rest goes straight into advertising (to feed the loop) and into nike's pocket.
Well, you're modded troll but I still think you have more of a point than the acidic moralist. Yes, I am not buying nike products and think that's the best way to handle it. Still I don't see why poor people shouldn't take advantage of them if they can. It's not gonna make anything better but it's also not making anything worse (maybe cutting a few sub% into nike's profit).
I'm not buying nike products so I cannot say what I *would* put down for a reason. I'd recommend others to put the shoe in water until it bleaches or breaks otherwise and use that for a reason, tho.
Yep, that's highly "immoral" but since the shoes cost only $5 to make you can repeat the procedure 20 times before it starts to "hurt" poor nike's bottom line. If some poor sucker manages to get some free shoes that way I wouldn't judge him.
Well, according to OP the warranty does exist. I have never heard of it either but I wouldn't be surprised if it exists (maybe only in some states or for some "premium" shoes).
And as I understood the OP the warranty is not limited so I wouldn't have to put down anything. Just send in old shoes, get new shoes. That easy.
When Nike begins to feel like they're getting ripped off by too many people taking advantage of their generous offer they can take it back - any time. But while the marketing effort is in effect (supposedly aimed at branding their target demographic) I see no reason why we shouldn't take advantage of it. Can you provide one? Didn't poor nike managers do the math before coming up with that offer? Hightly doubt so. As I understood OP their warranty says no more and no less than that you can turn in broken shoes and get a new pair. So when I do exactly that then I'm ripping them off, on their own terms?
I'll just ignore your drug dealer "analogy" here. Try again when you're back in the real world...
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The trashcan is just the wrongest metaphor for these operations.
They should have invented a new icon. Like a "door", or a magic eightball.
Anything would've been better than abusing the trashcan...
The trashcan should be just that, use it seldomly and only when you are sure you want to get rid of something. Conditioning the user to use the trashcan for whatever random task is, again, probably the most retarded design decision that ever came out of apple.
Once you are used to dropping just about anything onto the trash, expecting something useful to happen, you might in some mindless moment go and drag that important document there...
What then?
"Oh, but I just wanted to burn it"?
Shame on you apple.
As any admin who has to babysit wintendo boxes I have to regularly re-image them. One day I'll get around and write a little thingy that lets me start the job by dragging the trashcan onto the workspace icon...
And the cool thing was: it worked. Even without the click.
It's amazing that even today the amigaOS is still superior in some basic design decisions.
The handling of removable devices would be one. Like, why doesn't windows pop up a message "USB stick removed, re-attach or lose your data" and only if there were files open on the stick? If there were no files open it could just silently let it go.
Another thing would be the consequental use of volume labels instead of drive names. The amiga would never tell you to "insert XY into drive Z" like the redmond crap does. It would just say "Insert volume 'BlahBlah" and you were free to insert it into any drive.
Last time I was hit by the misfortune of having to babysit a wintendo-box the installer of whatever crapware I bothered with still demanded to get its stuff from E:. Unfornationally E: was no longer a cd-rom but now a harddisk partition and I had point it to the right location multiple times.
Uhm, what's the point here?
Ofcourse they can run any code they want, but they run it under their uid and gid. Problems arise only when a user manages to elevate his/her privileges. And that shouldn't happen unless there's a bug.
Some stuff probably just shouldn't be packaged before the code has reached a certain level of stability. Packaging up a beast as complex as wine properly is hard. A smart build-script that fetches and builds the required depends is often better than trying to wrap up a distro package...
Yup, and I'd like to add that its pretty simple to stay out of trouble.
./configure. When it complains about libfoo missing I do an 'apt-get install libfoo-dev', then try again. This works more often than it fails and definately avoids introduction of wierd depends into the local package list.
Just don't bother with debs or rpms download from "somewhere".
If the piece of software you want is not packaged for your distro then just go and compile it from scratch. The build system (e.g. autoconf) can usually work with the libraries you have even if they're not the exact version the package maintainer mentioned in the dependencies.
On debian I usually just dl the tarball and shot off a
True that. I also think that esp. the so-called "power users" (on windows *snicker*) think like that.
I think we could give them what they want simply by developing a tiny meta fileformat and slapping the mime-type into the browser default install.
Imagine a user stumbles into the homepage of SoCoolMediaPlayer and wants to install it. He'd click a link "Install now" and the meta-file tells the pkg manager which package to fetch/install from the distro repository.
The meta file would be only a few bytes and basically just contain the package name for different distros (which the software author created and added to the various repositories). So for my little example it would prolly look like:
debian SoCoolMediaPlayer
redhat SoCoolMediaPlayer.rpm
gentoo SoCoMePl
etc
just an idea...
As opposed to, say, running on a code base newer than 2002?
Ever heard about debian/testing? No? Then why are you talking?
System File Protection exist to prevent old-style installers from doing this. If a vendor wants to overwrite their own DLL, good for them.
You're saying the mfc42.dll that my USB WebCam Software installed will not be overwritten by the one coming with the Scanner Sp^H^HDriver?
That's news to me as I have seen it happen just recently. The installer will pop up a little box and ask "Overwrite? Yes, No, Cancel".
> waste diskspace and memory by dumping yet another copy of bozo.dll
That's basically the Linux solution (short of recompiling everything).
You're mistaken, again.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
apt will not put you into 'dependency hell' unless at least one of the following preconditions is met:
1) You are running debian/unstable
2) You are overriding warnings (using the --force switch)
3) You are doing something stupid, as root
sincerly,
the truth
With linux you either know what you're doing or you'd better stick to what other people suggest.
Dealing with outdated RPMs (esp. mixing them into an up-to-date system) usually doesn't make sense at all. You either compile the required software from scratch or get a newer version of the RPM.
Anyways here's my suggestion: try debian.
Obviously not.
For his enlightenment: apt (the debian package manager) does all the "dependency-chasing" for you. You say "apt-get install kde" and it happens.
Nice summary of DLL-Hell.
But how exactly does that collide with grandparents point?
You have stated yourself that any installer is free to use any of the quierks you've described (in short: rely on registry in hope it's not messed up yet again, overwrite DLLs that other programs may be using or waste diskspace and memory by dumping yet another copy of bozo.dll to be loaded at runtime).
So it's only a matter of time until you run into a piece of software that picks the route that breaks your system.
Yup, that's probably a good idea. I havent tried other Deb-based distros (except knoppix) myself but they might make installation easier.
:)
Last time I checked the debian installer was still a bit unfriendly.
Just make sure to choose a variant distro that you can upgrade to "real" debian later or you might find yourself stuck with incompatible packages and "locked" into the small distro that doesn't have all the pkgs you want.
I read somewhere that recent knoppix-livecds can optionally drop a Debian installation to your hdd. I have mo expirience with that either but it sounds like it'd be the easiest way to get a base-install going (I imagine you just boot a knoppix and run whatever their disk-installer is called).
Good luck and have fun!
In other words, I want users of yum/apt/portage to tell me they've never encountered dependency problems if they've been using them for more than a couple of years. (No, seriously. I would really like to hear, because then I would know which dist to choose)
/etc/apt/sources.list to the 'testing'-branch and run
Okay, you asked for it so here I am, telling you to give debian a shot.
After installation set your
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade.
Wait a while, answer a couple interactive questions (most have sane defaults, you shouldn't run into trouble that can't be solved with a bit of googling), now your box is up to date.
Next install the stuff you want but don't have yet,
this might be a good kickstart:
apt-get install kde firefox madman xmms kernel-package abiword pan.
There's a simple rule to avoid breaking debian's package management and that is: don't try to do something that it doesn't want to (don't use the "force"-option) unless you know what you're doing.
The other advice would be to stick with the 'testing'-branch for desktop machines. The packages in 'stable' are pretty outdated (but well, stable!) and 'unstable' can indeed lead to depency hell if, again, you don't know how the the whole thing ticks.
I don't know of anyone who discovered debian and would go back to a RPM based distro.
In fact I'd say that a common route for the linux kids of nowadays is:
1. Knoppix, RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake or similar for the first intro
2. Debian once they're fed up with the little annoyances of the former
3. Gentoo ("Slackware XP")
4. Slack or LFS
You're now on stage 1, insert coin to advance.
Considered by whom? By Mr.Anonymous Coward?
Sign me up.
Anyone know where to get some acid for my supersooker?
Congrats, that's the biggest pile of bullshit I've seen in a while.
It hurts to only think about it so I'll leave you to the mods...
Bullshit.
RAM is not an issue at all, you can go with 256M or less and be fine.
You'll likely take a performance penalty from the IDE bus though because when writing to the array your data is sent to n drives instead of one. Caching helps here but if you're paranoid about power outages you'd better turn that off. Other than that linux softraid is perfectly fine and quite a lot people use it in production systems. If you need better performance you'll have to spend on SCSI or one of these hardware-raid IDE cards or a bit of RAM for caching but don't expect wonders from the latter...
It doesn't really dig into Nike's profit because the cost of the warranty is factored into the price of the shoe.
Sorry but you are wrong there. Nothing is factored into the price that way. The price is the exact amount that their market research reported the kids will be able to squeeze out of their parents. Or, more bluntly, it is the amount that they conditioned the target audience to pay for the nike-image.
Remember, the shoe costs $5 to make in a cheap labor country.
Compare that to the retail-price (and add another $10 for package/shipping/whatever if you like).
The rest goes straight into advertising (to feed the loop) and into nike's pocket.
When you can afford it get out of your box a bit and visit one of them sweatshops. Then we talk again.
Well, you're modded troll but I still think you have more of a point than the acidic moralist. Yes, I am not buying nike products and think that's the best way to handle it. Still I don't see why poor people shouldn't take advantage of them if they can. It's not gonna make anything better but it's also not making anything worse (maybe cutting a few sub% into nike's profit).
I'm not buying nike products so I cannot say what I *would* put down for a reason. I'd recommend others to put the shoe in water until it bleaches or breaks otherwise and use that for a reason, tho.
Yep, that's highly "immoral" but since the shoes cost only $5 to make you can repeat the procedure 20 times before it starts to "hurt" poor nike's bottom line. If some poor sucker manages to get some free shoes that way I wouldn't judge him.
Well, according to OP the warranty does exist. I have never heard of it either but I wouldn't be surprised if it exists (maybe only in some states or for some "premium" shoes).
And as I understood the OP the warranty is not limited so I wouldn't have to put down anything. Just send in old shoes, get new shoes. That easy.
When Nike begins to feel like they're getting ripped off by too many people taking advantage of their generous offer they can take it back - any time. But while the marketing effort is in effect (supposedly aimed at branding their target demographic) I see no reason why we shouldn't take advantage of it. Can you provide one?
Didn't poor nike managers do the math before coming up with that offer?
Hightly doubt so. As I understood OP their warranty says no more and no less than that you can turn in broken shoes and get a new pair. So when I do exactly that then I'm ripping them off, on their own terms?
I'll just ignore your drug dealer "analogy" here. Try again when you're back in the real world...