"Common sense" is alas neither of those things. Particularly when you've got a limited amount of engineering time, and provided the "functions acceptably within Windows, even when the correct drivers are not installed" tickbox is checked, for a lot of OEMs that's really as far as they're prepared to go.
There are therefore two minor issues:
1. VESA mode support doesn't seem to be terribly well tested these days - certainly not at higher resolutions. 2. Most modern graphics chipsets are dog slow with generic VESA drivers.
This is where Microsoft and Apple have done a very good job of making it easy for a typical person with limited or no technical background to configure and use the machines.
Apple have a nice easy job there. They know exactly what hardware they've used so supporting it isn't that hard.
Microsoft have a harder job, but they're the 800lb gorilla of the marketplace. They have the resources and the power to guarantee that any graphics card, however unusual, can always be persuaded to do something useful - even if that means "basic VESA graphics mode while the user downloads the correct driver, which we can be fairly certain will actually exist".
Out of the box Xorg supports more video cards than Windows does.
This is a variant on the "linux supports more hardware than Windows" argument which is sometimes espoused.
This argument does not count when most of the "supported" bits of hardware in question are antique esoteric lumps which have not been sold in years, where the manufacturer has gone out of business and there are a sum total of 4 such items still in use across the entire planet.
Maybe the malware it dishes out only affects Windows users. But if that part of the site has been compromised, what's to say there isn't also some surreptitious logging of user credentials going on?
Slashdot, contrary to what a lot of people on here believe, is not generally a particularly great place to seek legal advice.
Particularly considering you haven't stated which country you're in.
If the IP you want to protect is worth any serious quantity of money, then an hour or so of a lawyers time is a worthwhile investment.
Alternatively, if you're a cheapskate, I understand the traditional method was for authors to post themselves a copy but not open it. That way, if a dispute ever arose, there was a sealed envelope containing the work which a disinterested third party (the Post Office) had printed a date on.
They could also mandate that all state and federal business be done using open file formats and open protocols. That would go a long way toward encouraging alternatives right there.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 2 years, many governments have been doing exactly this. Microsoft's answer is to try to get OOXML ratified as an ISO standard so they can tick the "stores documents in an ISO standard form" box.
I think you've just discovered why Microsoft are keen on pushing DRM in emails which would make it possible for emails to remotely self-desctruct with 100% reliability at a later date.
I'm not sure an abstention (sp?) does any good. If the ISO has rules regarding what constitutes quorum it might, but otherwise it's functionally identical to "we don't care so we'll go with everyone else".
Did you see who bought it? A company which... unlocks phones.
He's just done a lot of their research for them. It probably would have cost them a similar amount in man hours had they done it themselves anyway, so it seems like a quick easy solution for them.
What I'm looking for is a printer (or printer driver or whatever) that correctly prints files encoded as UTF-8. I have a bunch of multi-language postscript files that I can show contain the right text. I just edit them with vi(m) on my Mac or linux boxes, and you can see the Chinese or Arabic or whatever there on the screen. But when I send the files to any of the available printers, the Chinese or Arabic (or whatever) text comes out as Latin1 gibberish.
My God, an intelligent reply. We should have you stuffed!
That's actually a very good question. It's also the kind of thing which may not be mentioned when the manufacturer claims "Postscript support". I guess as a workaround you could convert your postscript to PDF - Adobe Acrobat reader allows you to send PDF to the printer as graphics rather than text. Which is damn slow and memory hungry but tends to fix rendering issues in the printer.
It is partly the fault of CUPS. For instance, CUPS tries to remember too much state, and it's difficult to get it back into a known-good state when it's messed up.
Eh? CUPS is just a framework. It's down to the driver to know what state it's in. If the driver's trying to do too much then yes, what you describe is indeed a problem.
If you take a look at my post, you'll see that I was talking about GPL'd drivers that Brother hired the CUPS developers to write.
Had you read the next sentence I wrote, you'll note that I addressed that. GPL'd code doesn't do you any good if it's specific to one particular model of printer, hardly any Linux users have that printer and none have the expertise to maintain it.
If you look at what drivers for a lot of modern inkjet printers do,
Ahem. The paragraph you are replying to started with: If you're buying a laser printer with a view to Linux compatability in the future.
Inkjets are another beast entirely.
Also, low-end printers don't have postscript, and it's not a very good situation to tell prospective linux users that they have to buy a new, expensive printer because their old one won't work with linux.
Neither is it a very good situation to purchase printers which depend on a proprietary language which essentially means that if the manufacturer drops support, you're stuck with the current version of the driver forever. If that version of the driver is rendered inoperable by Vista Service Pack 1, that's your problem.
Printers which support Postscript are, granted, slightly more expensive. But they're nowhere near as expensive as they were 10 years ago.
CUPS and printing suck to high heaven. This is the single biggest problem I'm facing now. It's not as much of a disaster as it was in earlier versions like Breezy, but it's still a disaster. I have pages and pages of notes on how to get my printer working with Feisty, and it still doesn't work very well -- the printer freezes unpredictably and needs to be power cycled. No, this is not a case where the problem is just that the manufacturer won't release specs; it's a Brother laser printer, and Brother actually hired the CUPS developers to write GPL'd drivers.
Printing in Linux has sucked for years, and will probably continue to do so. It's not actually the fault of CUPS which basically provides a framework for drivers to sit in and communicate with the printer - more the manufacturers.
If you're buying a laser printer with a view to Linux compatability in the future, look for one which supports Postscript. All this talk of "Drivers this... drivers that...." - it's cobblers. Postscript has been a perfectly good language for printers for something like 20 years, and postscript printers don't command anything like the same premium that they did 10 years ago.
I don't care if the manufacturer provides a Linux driver. If it's binary only - then installation is distribution-dependent and may not be possible in a typical Linux distribution a few years from now. This could also happen in Windows, so those who have winprinters and aren't planning to use Linux can wipe that smug grin off their face.
If a driver in source code and specs for the language the printer speaks do exist - it won't do a great deal of good if you're the only person wanting to use it in Linux and you don't have the expertise to write your own driver.
The other alternative is to deprive them of a reason to exist as paramilitary orgs by involving them (for real) in the above-board political game, like the Brits did with the IRA, i.e. to grant them at least a partial victory.
Now, I don't know how true this is so take it with as much salt as you think it needs - but I'm given to understand that a lot of it with the IRA was to do with funding.
Pre-9/11, the IRA got a lot of money from the US. Since then, a lot of US folk suddenly discovered that perhaps terrorists aren't that great when you're on the receiving end and decided to stop funding them.
The conclusion that you assume is that by making it easier people will become more interested.
Well, I'm not assuming that. I think the exam boards are. I also think they're wrong, and that the government would be better off looking at how to make teachers better than make exams easier.
I agree with you entirely vis. good and bad teachers. I think everyone remembers at least one really good teacher and at least one terrible one. Experiments help with getting ideas across - and I'd have taken great delight in watching my physics teacher pour a bucket of water over herself - but at the end of the day good teaching is an art, even if the subject matter is a science.
A large part of teaching involves drawing people into the subject and trying to make them interested.
If the exam boards reckon that it is necessary to have more multiple choice questions because there aren't enough people interested in science, I think it's reasonable to infer from that that the standard of teaching isn't actually that great.
On a more serious note, there seem to be three main sorts of manager, at least initially:
1. Doesn't change a thing, goes with the flow. This works fine as long as what you're inheriting people and procedures which work OK and don't really need your help - but doesn't do anyone any good if you hit issues.
2. Makes radical changes without stopping to think of the potential impact of them. Things like deciding "Let's cancel the staff christmas party" some time around the end of November. Yes, it gets you known as someone who's not afraid to make decisions. It also gets you known as a thoughtless moron who cares not one whit for his staff if he can save a little cash - which is an extremely good way to guarantee that the feeling is reciprocated by your staff. Realistically, unless your company or team is in real trouble the "radical changes" bit shouldn't be necessary - and even if they are, "failure to think about what you're doing" is still a bad move.
3. Looks at what's currently happening, tries to engage brain and see what could be improved while leaving well alone if all is well.
I've tried to follow 3.
One other piece of advice: Learn to delegate. It's hard initially but at the end of the day, there's no point managing a team if you're going to try and do all the work yourself. Make sure you know all the strengths and weaknesses of the people who work for you, and delegate work to them accordingly.
Well, you can change the resolution in Ubuntu if it detects your screen resolutions properly, unfortunately my monitors are 1440x900
Sounds like you're using widescreen displays. Not all graphics cards officially support them (even though if the chipset supports it, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement in a driver) so it's possible that your graphics card wasn't reporting accurate resolutions back to X. a The vexing thing is, X has supported multiple monitors for some time, and can happily span desktops across monitors with xinerama - but it can be a nightmare to set up. I configured it correctly once about 6 years ago and I've been rehashing and tweaking the same config file ever since. Unless something has changed drastically (and I'm prepared to accept it may have - I got a Mac bout 18 months ago because I was sick of digging around in text files to configure stuff and not getting paid for it), I have never yet seen a half-decent generic graphical tool to do it properly.
Well, it's not as bad today as it was 5 years ago.
But even now, there are a few mailing lists and groups which are notoriously hostile towards anyone who asks what they consider to be a newbie question. Fortunately, such lists are mostly those dedicated to fairly technical pieces of software which most desktop users won't ever go near (will they, OpenLDAP?) but if you think they've died out altogether, I regret you are much mistaken.
Every once in a while, you'll come up with some esoteric hardware combination where two drivers clash with each other. (People who regularly build PCs know what I mean). And if you're an OEM, you're encouraged to provide either no reinstallation mechanism (easy), an automated building CD (rather than a standard Windows install CD) or a second-partition based installer. Neither of these are a case of "click... click... job done" - particularly not if you're working with lots of different configurations. However, any OEM worth their salt has been doing it so long that they've got it down to a fairly fine art by now.
All the hardware incompatability nonsense is a smokescreen. It shields you from the real issue: that OEMs who refuse to ship Linux are likely doing so either because they think not enough people want it or because they're scared that they'll lose what little discount Microsoft offers them. Not because they're scared of a little hard work. Were that situation to change dramatically, I think hardware support for Linux would become dramatically better very quickly.
Not true, if it's implemented properly. If implemented properly, they'd use a half-decent symmetric key cipher based on a passphrase entered by the user to encrypt the data on the stick itself.
But there have been instances where the manufacturers have crippled the security, generally by storing the passphrase in plain text. Of course, such a route isn't practical with a biometric device so I wouldn't expect it to be hugely secure.
Maybe formatting USB memories before usage would be a good move.
It might, but this is a biometric USB memory stick - it requires a fingerprint before you can access files.
Most of these devices do the fingerprint reading in software, so without it you may as well buy a normal memory stick and save a bit of money. (On a side note: has anyone seriously investigated how secure these biometric memory sticks are?).
And using OS that won't run anything from the newly attached memry as a default would also help.
Good point. Does pressing shift when you insert the stick work like it does with CDs?
ESRs essay demonstrates a case of "Microsoft-itis" on the part of the developers of the print config tool in FC1.
IPP (the main protocol CUPS uses) makes it dead easy to share printers over a network. It periodically broadcasts across a network an announcement of what print queues are available on the host. You then have a daemon which listens to these broadcasts and a user interface which presents the user a list of printers it knows about - which is exactly what CUPS does and exactly what most modern networked printers do. Mac OS X uses CUPS under the hood, and it actually works pretty damn well when it's properly configured.
However, "Microsoft-itis" makes this feature a lot less useful. "Microsoft-itis" is where the OS, despite being developed from very early stages to run as part of a network of many, insists on presenting itself to the user as if there is only one computer in the world - the one that they're sat at - and no such thing as networking.
AFAICT, this was compounded in ESRs case by the other computer being configured not to share printers. Laudable from a security perspective but unless you think carefully about what you're going to present to the user, lousy from a UI perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
And heads an organisation set up in order to avoid the otherwise inevitable collapse of the Roman Empire.
"Common sense" is alas neither of those things. Particularly when you've got a limited amount of engineering time, and provided the "functions acceptably within Windows, even when the correct drivers are not installed" tickbox is checked, for a lot of OEMs that's really as far as they're prepared to go.
There are therefore two minor issues:
1. VESA mode support doesn't seem to be terribly well tested these days - certainly not at higher resolutions.
2. Most modern graphics chipsets are dog slow with generic VESA drivers.
This is where Microsoft and Apple have done a very good job of making it easy for a typical person with limited or no technical background to configure and use the machines.
Apple have a nice easy job there. They know exactly what hardware they've used so supporting it isn't that hard.
Microsoft have a harder job, but they're the 800lb gorilla of the marketplace. They have the resources and the power to guarantee that any graphics card, however unusual, can always be persuaded to do something useful - even if that means "basic VESA graphics mode while the user downloads the correct driver, which we can be fairly certain will actually exist".
Out of the box Xorg supports more video cards than Windows does.
This is a variant on the "linux supports more hardware than Windows" argument which is sometimes espoused.
This argument does not count when most of the "supported" bits of hardware in question are antique esoteric lumps which have not been sold in years, where the manufacturer has gone out of business and there are a sum total of 4 such items still in use across the entire planet.
Maybe the malware it dishes out only affects Windows users. But if that part of the site has been compromised, what's to say there isn't also some surreptitious logging of user credentials going on?
Have you tested that? I'd imagine that if the cat has been dead long enough, it would land with a sort of damp splat.
Slashdot, contrary to what a lot of people on here believe, is not generally a particularly great place to seek legal advice.
Particularly considering you haven't stated which country you're in.
If the IP you want to protect is worth any serious quantity of money, then an hour or so of a lawyers time is a worthwhile investment.
Alternatively, if you're a cheapskate, I understand the traditional method was for authors to post themselves a copy but not open it. That way, if a dispute ever arose, there was a sealed envelope containing the work which a disinterested third party (the Post Office) had printed a date on.
They could also mandate that all state and federal business be done using open file formats and open protocols. That would go a long way toward encouraging alternatives right there.
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 2 years, many governments have been doing exactly this. Microsoft's answer is to try to get OOXML ratified as an ISO standard so they can tick the "stores documents in an ISO standard form" box.
So, unless you know ahead of time that the thing you are buying is in some way defective, it's best not to get the insurance.
Contrariwise, if you know ahead of time that the thing you are buying is in some way defective, WHY IN GOD'S NAME ARE YOU BUYING IT??!
I think you've just discovered why Microsoft are keen on pushing DRM in emails which would make it possible for emails to remotely self-desctruct with 100% reliability at a later date.
I'm not sure an abstention (sp?) does any good. If the ISO has rules regarding what constitutes quorum it might, but otherwise it's functionally identical to "we don't care so we'll go with everyone else".
Did you see who bought it? A company which... unlocks phones.
He's just done a lot of their research for them. It probably would have cost them a similar amount in man hours had they done it themselves anyway, so it seems like a quick easy solution for them.
What I'm looking for is a printer (or printer driver or whatever) that correctly prints files encoded as UTF-8. I have a bunch of multi-language postscript files that I can show contain the right text. I just edit them with vi(m) on my Mac or linux boxes, and you can see the Chinese or Arabic or whatever there on the screen. But when I send the files to any of the available printers, the Chinese or Arabic (or whatever) text comes out as Latin1 gibberish.
My God, an intelligent reply. We should have you stuffed!
That's actually a very good question. It's also the kind of thing which may not be mentioned when the manufacturer claims "Postscript support". I guess as a workaround you could convert your postscript to PDF - Adobe Acrobat reader allows you to send PDF to the printer as graphics rather than text. Which is damn slow and memory hungry but tends to fix rendering issues in the printer.
It is partly the fault of CUPS. For instance, CUPS tries to remember too much state, and it's difficult to get it back into a known-good state when it's messed up.
Eh? CUPS is just a framework. It's down to the driver to know what state it's in. If the driver's trying to do too much then yes, what you describe is indeed a problem.
If you take a look at my post, you'll see that I was talking about GPL'd drivers that Brother hired the CUPS developers to write.
Had you read the next sentence I wrote, you'll note that I addressed that. GPL'd code doesn't do you any good if it's specific to one particular model of printer, hardly any Linux users have that printer and none have the expertise to maintain it.
If you look at what drivers for a lot of modern inkjet printers do,
Ahem. The paragraph you are replying to started with: If you're buying a laser printer with a view to Linux compatability in the future.
Inkjets are another beast entirely.
Also, low-end printers don't have postscript, and it's not a very good situation to tell prospective linux users that they have to buy a new, expensive printer because their old one won't work with linux.
Neither is it a very good situation to purchase printers which depend on a proprietary language which essentially means that if the manufacturer drops support, you're stuck with the current version of the driver forever. If that version of the driver is rendered inoperable by Vista Service Pack 1, that's your problem.
Printers which support Postscript are, granted, slightly more expensive. But they're nowhere near as expensive as they were 10 years ago.
CUPS and printing suck to high heaven. This is the single biggest problem I'm facing now. It's not as much of a disaster as it was in earlier versions like Breezy, but it's still a disaster. I have pages and pages of notes on how to get my printer working with Feisty, and it still doesn't work very well -- the printer freezes unpredictably and needs to be power cycled. No, this is not a case where the problem is just that the manufacturer won't release specs; it's a Brother laser printer, and Brother actually hired the CUPS developers to write GPL'd drivers.
Printing in Linux has sucked for years, and will probably continue to do so. It's not actually the fault of CUPS which basically provides a framework for drivers to sit in and communicate with the printer - more the manufacturers.
If you're buying a laser printer with a view to Linux compatability in the future, look for one which supports Postscript. All this talk of "Drivers this... drivers that...." - it's cobblers. Postscript has been a perfectly good language for printers for something like 20 years, and postscript printers don't command anything like the same premium that they did 10 years ago.
I don't care if the manufacturer provides a Linux driver. If it's binary only - then installation is distribution-dependent and may not be possible in a typical Linux distribution a few years from now. This could also happen in Windows, so those who have winprinters and aren't planning to use Linux can wipe that smug grin off their face.
If a driver in source code and specs for the language the printer speaks do exist - it won't do a great deal of good if you're the only person wanting to use it in Linux and you don't have the expertise to write your own driver.
The other alternative is to deprive them of a reason to exist as paramilitary orgs by involving them (for real) in the above-board political game, like the Brits did with the IRA, i.e. to grant them at least a partial victory.
Now, I don't know how true this is so take it with as much salt as you think it needs - but I'm given to understand that a lot of it with the IRA was to do with funding.
Pre-9/11, the IRA got a lot of money from the US. Since then, a lot of US folk suddenly discovered that perhaps terrorists aren't that great when you're on the receiving end and decided to stop funding them.
The conclusion that you assume is that by making it easier people will become more interested.
Well, I'm not assuming that. I think the exam boards are. I also think they're wrong, and that the government would be better off looking at how to make teachers better than make exams easier.
I agree with you entirely vis. good and bad teachers. I think everyone remembers at least one really good teacher and at least one terrible one. Experiments help with getting ideas across - and I'd have taken great delight in watching my physics teacher pour a bucket of water over herself - but at the end of the day good teaching is an art, even if the subject matter is a science.
A large part of teaching involves drawing people into the subject and trying to make them interested.
If the exam boards reckon that it is necessary to have more multiple choice questions because there aren't enough people interested in science, I think it's reasonable to infer from that that the standard of teaching isn't actually that great.
I'm in the transition phase from sysadmin to manager, and the most help I've had came from Dogbert's Top Secret Management Handbook.
On a more serious note, there seem to be three main sorts of manager, at least initially:
1. Doesn't change a thing, goes with the flow. This works fine as long as what you're inheriting people and procedures which work OK and don't really need your help - but doesn't do anyone any good if you hit issues.
2. Makes radical changes without stopping to think of the potential impact of them. Things like deciding "Let's cancel the staff christmas party" some time around the end of November. Yes, it gets you known as someone who's not afraid to make decisions. It also gets you known as a thoughtless moron who cares not one whit for his staff if he can save a little cash - which is an extremely good way to guarantee that the feeling is reciprocated by your staff. Realistically, unless your company or team is in real trouble the "radical changes" bit shouldn't be necessary - and even if they are, "failure to think about what you're doing" is still a bad move.
3. Looks at what's currently happening, tries to engage brain and see what could be improved while leaving well alone if all is well.
I've tried to follow 3.
One other piece of advice: Learn to delegate. It's hard initially but at the end of the day, there's no point managing a team if you're going to try and do all the work yourself. Make sure you know all the strengths and weaknesses of the people who work for you, and delegate work to them accordingly.
Well, you can change the resolution in Ubuntu if it detects your screen resolutions properly, unfortunately my monitors are 1440x900
Sounds like you're using widescreen displays. Not all graphics cards officially support them (even though if the chipset supports it, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement in a driver) so it's possible that your graphics card wasn't reporting accurate resolutions back to X.
a
The vexing thing is, X has supported multiple monitors for some time, and can happily span desktops across monitors with xinerama - but it can be a nightmare to set up. I configured it correctly once about 6 years ago and I've been rehashing and tweaking the same config file ever since. Unless something has changed drastically (and I'm prepared to accept it may have - I got a Mac bout 18 months ago because I was sick of digging around in text files to configure stuff and not getting paid for it), I have never yet seen a half-decent generic graphical tool to do it properly.
That is not the standard response!
Well, it's not as bad today as it was 5 years ago.
But even now, there are a few mailing lists and groups which are notoriously hostile towards anyone who asks what they consider to be a newbie question. Fortunately, such lists are mostly those dedicated to fairly technical pieces of software which most desktop users won't ever go near (will they, OpenLDAP?) but if you think they've died out altogether, I regret you are much mistaken.
Windows, however, does not "just work".
Every once in a while, you'll come up with some esoteric hardware combination where two drivers clash with each other. (People who regularly build PCs know what I mean). And if you're an OEM, you're encouraged to provide either no reinstallation mechanism (easy), an automated building CD (rather than a standard Windows install CD) or a second-partition based installer. Neither of these are a case of "click... click... job done" - particularly not if you're working with lots of different configurations. However, any OEM worth their salt has been doing it so long that they've got it down to a fairly fine art by now.
All the hardware incompatability nonsense is a smokescreen. It shields you from the real issue: that OEMs who refuse to ship Linux are likely doing so either because they think not enough people want it or because they're scared that they'll lose what little discount Microsoft offers them. Not because they're scared of a little hard work. Were that situation to change dramatically, I think hardware support for Linux would become dramatically better very quickly.
Not true, if it's implemented properly. If implemented properly, they'd use a half-decent symmetric key cipher based on a passphrase entered by the user to encrypt the data on the stick itself.
But there have been instances where the manufacturers have crippled the security, generally by storing the passphrase in plain text. Of course, such a route isn't practical with a biometric device so I wouldn't expect it to be hugely secure.
Maybe formatting USB memories before usage would be a good move.
It might, but this is a biometric USB memory stick - it requires a fingerprint before you can access files.
Most of these devices do the fingerprint reading in software, so without it you may as well buy a normal memory stick and save a bit of money. (On a side note: has anyone seriously investigated how secure these biometric memory sticks are?).
And using OS that won't run anything from the newly attached memry as a default would also help.
Good point. Does pressing shift when you insert the stick work like it does with CDs?
ESRs essay demonstrates a case of "Microsoft-itis" on the part of the developers of the print config tool in FC1.
IPP (the main protocol CUPS uses) makes it dead easy to share printers over a network. It periodically broadcasts across a network an announcement of what print queues are available on the host. You then have a daemon which listens to these broadcasts and a user interface which presents the user a list of printers it knows about - which is exactly what CUPS does and exactly what most modern networked printers do. Mac OS X uses CUPS under the hood, and it actually works pretty damn well when it's properly configured.
However, "Microsoft-itis" makes this feature a lot less useful. "Microsoft-itis" is where the OS, despite being developed from very early stages to run as part of a network of many, insists on presenting itself to the user as if there is only one computer in the world - the one that they're sat at - and no such thing as networking.
AFAICT, this was compounded in ESRs case by the other computer being configured not to share printers. Laudable from a security perspective but unless you think carefully about what you're going to present to the user, lousy from a UI perspective.