I switched to Suse 9 the day Red Hat sent me the email, offering me the choice of moving to the very expensive enterprise version, or using the "hobbyist" version, Fedora Core.
BTW, I refuse to call that hobbyist version "Fedora", since that name has been in use since 1998 by Cornell University and the University of Virginia for a different project.
In my experience, SuSe 9 is much better at recognizing, using, and configuring hardware than RHL 9. Even the installation of the nVidia drivers was easier.
You're calling "Deep Six 9" the highpoint of Trek? Pa-leeze! When the high point of a series is a character like Quark and his brother, it's time to hang-up the old phaser.
Shows like DS9, Andromeda, and Mutant-X are the kind of shows that give Sci-Fi a bad name. Of course, the SciFi channel itself tends to give SciFi a bad name with its awful made-for-trashcan movies, but that's a topic for another day.
As for Enterprise, with any luck, its last episode will change history so that the entire series will never have existed. One could only hope.
A large portion of the 'graduates' in the Dallas school system can not read or write at the 3rd grade level.
That's why the computers: since the kids can't read, you have to show them pretty pictures. Personally, I think comic books would be cheaper, and just as effective.
"A child's set of textbooks costs $350," Smith said. "If they can get these notebooks down to $500, it gets cost-effective in a hurry."
30 years ago, the price of college text books was staggering, and took a chunk of my summer full-time earnings to buy them. It's nice to see that textbook publishers are continuing the fine tradition of ripping people off (of course, colleges and universities are doing a better job of carrying on this tradition, but that's a topic for another day)! To think that buying and equipping a laptop could be price-competitive with just buying the books, just staggers the imagination!
Of course, the textbook publishers will charge more money for the electronic version, and a copy will have to be purchased for each laptop, so the school won't save any money. It's like that professor in college that wrote his own textbook, and checked to make sure nobody had a used copy (I had two of them that did this, in fact). If nothing else, it's certainly an education in Economics.
I question, though, whether laptops today are built to withstand the abuse of a normal 5th grader. Even $500 is a lot to spend on replacements when the kid drops the thing in the schoolyard. But think of the potential market for such a product if it really can stand up to such abuse.
A few months ago ( I can't find the link right now), scientists were claiming that "Global Warming" is not the problem the media, and some politicians say it is. According to the original Global Warning theory, the Earth's temperature is higher than it's ever been due to the influence of technology (greenhouse gasses). The scientists in this new study pointed out that the original Global Warming research ignored historical data documenting temperatures in Europe, in the Middle Ages, that were higher than today. It would appear that the original scientists chose a date range for their research that supported their already-made conclusion of Global Warming.
It would seem that the Earth's climate is normal, and we're not going to suffer a slow broil (so put away the onions, and get that apple out of your mouth).
As for the ice age theory, one of the last ice ages was caused by a lot of fresh water pouring into the North Atlantic. The difference in salinity caused the warm Gulf Stream waters to submerge, reducing the overall temperature in Europe and North America enough to cause an Ice Age. The effect took only 70 years.
It would indeed be ironic, though, if the only way to save civilization as we know is would be to increase greenhouse gasses, not reduce them.
About 20 years ago, a friend of mine in the IT department of a company where I used to work was nearly fired for pressing the company to write user documentation for the company's purchasing system. The head of IT firmly believed that User Friendliness was a threat to corporate security.
It's nice to see that this sort of attitude hasn't changed much in the intervening time.
User Friendliness is platform and interface agnostic. It is a state of mind, not a set of tools, keywords, or icons. What works for the normal user might be inappropriate for the programmer or system administrator. Good UI design considers who the person is that's using the program, not try to apply one person's standards on all sorts of users.
One common problem I've seen is the "dumbing down" of an interface to meet the needs of the lowest common denominator. This is just as bad as forcing everyone to use an obscure, hard-to-figure-out interface.
The best solution, in my opinion, is to give people a choice of both lowest-common-denominator and power-user interface, since even among a group of users, abilities differ.
A poorly designed interface is what gives rise to security problems. Another factor in security risk is allowing programs and system code to interact too closely together, as Windows does, with no effort made to enforce security restrictions. Thus, the problem isn't giving an email program an easy-to-use interface, but giving that email program abilities it shouldn't have had in the first place.
Catering to the lazy user (as opposed to the non-expert user) is another area where security problems may arise.
User Friendliness and Ease of Use is not the cause of security risks, and making Linux easier to use will not increase the security risk of using it. Security through Obscurity has never worked, and never will.
My understanding is that the broadcast flag (at least in the US) is primarily aimed at High Definition broadcasts sent over the air, not via cable or satellite. Analog VCR's, and non-HD Direct Tivos won't be affected (I don't know about cable).
The way I see it, this will threaten the adaptation of HDTV by the American public before the deadline set by Congress (2006? 2007?), and cause the broadcasters more angst than copying.
For myself, I'm quite happy with analog TV (the little that I watch it). I have no intentions of spending a fortune for a High Def home theater. And, if I have to choose between High Def and my Tivo, the Tivo will win hands-down.
The reason TV broadcasters want this is not to stop piracy. In a nutshell, they need to stop Tivo (and Replay, and all PVR's) for two reasons:
1. They have lost all control of their schedules. With easy, good-quality time-shifting, they can no longer target a particular show for a particular day and time. Counter-programming one show against another is futile.
2. They have to stop people from easily skipping commercials. With any PVR, that's a simple matter of recording a show, and starting to watch it about 20 minutes after it starts.
Instead of adapting to the new reality of the consumer being in charge of their own entertainment, the broadcast networks are forced into these draconian measures.
The first network to use this flag will get a lot of complaints, and lose viewers to the competition. That competition will be most happy to use its lack of the broadcast flag as a major selling point.
Corporate greed created this flag, and that same corporate greed will prevent its widespread use. This whole issue will become a tempest in a TV plot.
Nothing in this world is new, stupidity in particular.
Commodore was unbelievably stupid, and made some things harder for programmers. For example, the C-64 and C-128 computers both had a software-emulated UART chip, instead of a real one (to save money, as I understand it, about $5), limiting the baud rate to how fast the computer could process code in what was called a "non-maskable interrupt". The C-64 allowed a max of 1200 baud. The C-128, because it could run at double the clock speed of the C-64 ("Fast Mode", or about 2Mhz), could in theory run at 2400 baud, but you had to write your own version of the UART emulator using well-optimized machine language. Faster connection speeds were out of the question.
As the author of a few C-64 programs (e.g., "Prototerm"), I can't tell you how many times I wanted to drive to West Chester, and strangle someone. Nowadays, of course, I periodically get the urge to strangle a person or two in Redmond. Fortunately, it's too long a drive.
This is more or less a comment on this whole thread, not just on the parent.
Having spent 20 years as a programmer, I can tell you that the first thing I have to do when working with someone straight out of school is to deprogram him/her. CompSci teachers just don't live in the real world of budgets and deadlines. Schools are geared to teach you how to take tests, nothing more. It takes a lot of personal effort to really learn something, and all a school can do is expose you to information. If all you do is pass tests, then you haven't really learned anything.
Programming is an art, and not a science. You may know the words and the grammar, but that doesn't mean you know how to write a novel. I can't tell you how many times I've had to clean up someone's "Gee, see what I can do" code that is overly complex, using language features that are inappropriate for the task at hand in the attempt to gain the appearance of proficiency.
A lot of programmers today forget that the purpose behind writing a program is to actually help another human being. They get caught up in the joys of this language, or that syntax, or -- heavan forbid -- which license is better to release the program under -- that they forget why they're here. You don't learn that in school. You learn that by being a user yourself, and remembering your struggles.
The reason that programming has turned into an assembly plant operation is that there aren't enough "artists" to go around. The economy in general, and IT in particular, will be seriously hurt by this, because companies don't recognize the distinction between the "artist" and the "factory worker". The artist is put on the assembly line for low wages, and has neither the urge, nor the means to innovate. Open Source will also be hurt by this, as such programming requires both time and money (hardware, at least, is not free), neither of which will be provided in abundance by the assembly plant.
Some days, I swear I should've learned to be a Plumber. At the very least, it's difficult to do that job from India!
P.S., Do you really expect that anyone in a place like/. would get your reference to Donald Knuth? Come on.
The underpinnings of the GPL is copyright law. If that law now required contributors to go through the "copyright formalities" for them to get copyright protection under the law, then wouldn't this result in the contributed code ending up in the public domain, since a lot of people wouldn't have the time or the money to go through the process?
I can just see the legal tangle such a change would cause for Linux, et al. I also question how well such a change would work with the Berne Convention, since we're not talking about a novel here, written in one country, but a product written by hundreds of contributors from around the planet, both US and elsewhere. IANAL, but this looks like it would be a real mess, with no one winning but the lawyers.
Last October, I started migrating from Windows XP to Linux, and I agree with your points. Linux should "just work", but doesn't quite. Hardware support is one of the two weaknesses in Linux. The other has to do with software installation and its headaches (compiling source code, dependencies, etc).
I tried Mandrake (8.1), and it worked fine, even though it didn't support all my hardware. So, I managed to work around it. Then I increased memory to 1GB, and Mandrake refused to work. I went to Red Hat, and it supported more hardware, but not all. And configuring what it did support was a matter of tweaking those endless/etc text files. Not fun.
I'm currently on Suse 9. It runs all my hardware, and configuration is almost as easy as Windows, thanks to a GUI tool called Yast. It's still not as easy as I'd like it to be. Installing Oracle 9 was a real blast, in fact, but easier in Suse than in Red Hat.
The thing is, it seems to me that the people developing Linux don't see hardware support, drivers, or software installation as a problem. The attitude I've seen is "It works just fine for us. If you don't like it, go back to Windows". Perhaps that will change with IBM, Novell, and others trying to make a buck out of Linux. There's nothing like money to make someone sit up and take notice. I think games can be a big part of it, too, but only time will tell.
We have a few years (decades?) until Bill "Custer" Gates releases Little Big Horn, so there's still time.
What we need is more companies to make games that run on Linux, but many of them don't think there's a market out there. There isn't a market out there, because there aren't many games...and so on.
I've been playing the demo of Unreal Tournament 2004 on Linux, and it seems to run better than Unreal 2 (should be similar engine under the hood, if not the same) does in Windows XP. So, if we can just get this ball rolling, then Linux will be a popular game OS, more companies will make games for it, and Linux will win the hearts and minds of desktop users everywhere.
Business applications will win the Server front. I believe the desktop will be won not by the OS that is the fastest, or the most reliable, but by the one with the applications people want. The only applications Linux is missing, IMO, are all those flashy, expensive commercial games that now only exist on Windows. That's what makes money, and in the end, it's the money that matters. (Is that cynical enough for you?)
OS/2's programming API's were compatible with the Windows of the time (3.1), so in theory you could just recompile your source-code. You could even use Borland's compiler on both.
One problem: The screen co-ordinates were different! How can you port GUI code, when Windows measures from the top of the screen, and OS/2 measures from the bottom? Oy, how dumb can you get? This was undoutedly an IBM engineer saying "But this is the correct way to lay-out a positive Y-Coordinate".
OS/2 failed for the same reason the Amiga OS did: what few ads and commercials existed were brain-dead stupid! IBM did do a few things right, like giving away a free version of Presentation Manager for Windows 3.1, that gave you a taste of what OS/2 could do, but it wasn't enough.
OS/2 had a lead time over Windows 95, just as Linux now has over Microsoft's Little Big Horn, and they wasted it.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, I refuse to call that hobbyist version "Fedora", since that name has been in use since 1998 by Cornell University and the University of Virginia for a different project.
In my experience, SuSe 9 is much better at recognizing, using, and configuring hardware than RHL 9. Even the installation of the nVidia drivers was easier.
You're calling "Deep Six 9" the highpoint of Trek? Pa-leeze! When the high point of a series is a character like Quark and his brother, it's time to hang-up the old phaser.
Shows like DS9, Andromeda, and Mutant-X are the kind of shows that give Sci-Fi a bad name. Of course, the SciFi channel itself tends to give SciFi a bad name with its awful made-for-trashcan movies, but that's a topic for another day.
As for Enterprise, with any luck, its last episode will change history so that the entire series will never have existed. One could only hope.
A large portion of the 'graduates' in the Dallas school system can not read or write at the 3rd grade level. That's why the computers: since the kids can't read, you have to show them pretty pictures. Personally, I think comic books would be cheaper, and just as effective.
30 years ago, the price of college text books was staggering, and took a chunk of my summer full-time earnings to buy them. It's nice to see that textbook publishers are continuing the fine tradition of ripping people off (of course, colleges and universities are doing a better job of carrying on this tradition, but that's a topic for another day)! To think that buying and equipping a laptop could be price-competitive with just buying the books, just staggers the imagination!
Of course, the textbook publishers will charge more money for the electronic version, and a copy will have to be purchased for each laptop, so the school won't save any money. It's like that professor in college that wrote his own textbook, and checked to make sure nobody had a used copy (I had two of them that did this, in fact). If nothing else, it's certainly an education in Economics.
I question, though, whether laptops today are built to withstand the abuse of a normal 5th grader. Even $500 is a lot to spend on replacements when the kid drops the thing in the schoolyard. But think of the potential market for such a product if it really can stand up to such abuse.
It would seem that the Earth's climate is normal, and we're not going to suffer a slow broil (so put away the onions, and get that apple out of your mouth).
As for the ice age theory, one of the last ice ages was caused by a lot of fresh water pouring into the North Atlantic. The difference in salinity caused the warm Gulf Stream waters to submerge, reducing the overall temperature in Europe and North America enough to cause an Ice Age. The effect took only 70 years.
It would indeed be ironic, though, if the only way to save civilization as we know is would be to increase greenhouse gasses, not reduce them.
About 20 years ago, a friend of mine in the IT department of a company where I used to work was nearly fired for pressing the company to write user documentation for the company's purchasing system. The head of IT firmly believed that User Friendliness was a threat to corporate security.
It's nice to see that this sort of attitude hasn't changed much in the intervening time.
User Friendliness is platform and interface agnostic. It is a state of mind, not a set of tools, keywords, or icons. What works for the normal user might be inappropriate for the programmer or system administrator. Good UI design considers who the person is that's using the program, not try to apply one person's standards on all sorts of users.
One common problem I've seen is the "dumbing down" of an interface to meet the needs of the lowest common denominator. This is just as bad as forcing everyone to use an obscure, hard-to-figure-out interface.
The best solution, in my opinion, is to give people a choice of both lowest-common-denominator and power-user interface, since even among a group of users, abilities differ.
A poorly designed interface is what gives rise to security problems. Another factor in security risk is allowing programs and system code to interact too closely together, as Windows does, with no effort made to enforce security restrictions. Thus, the problem isn't giving an email program an easy-to-use interface, but giving that email program abilities it shouldn't have had in the first place.
Catering to the lazy user (as opposed to the non-expert user) is another area where security problems may arise.
User Friendliness and Ease of Use is not the cause of security risks, and making Linux easier to use will not increase the security risk of using it. Security through Obscurity has never worked, and never will.
My understanding is that the broadcast flag (at least in the US) is primarily aimed at High Definition broadcasts sent over the air, not via cable or satellite. Analog VCR's, and non-HD Direct Tivos won't be affected (I don't know about cable).
The way I see it, this will threaten the adaptation of HDTV by the American public before the deadline set by Congress (2006? 2007?), and cause the broadcasters more angst than copying.
For myself, I'm quite happy with analog TV (the little that I watch it). I have no intentions of spending a fortune for a High Def home theater. And, if I have to choose between High Def and my Tivo, the Tivo will win hands-down.
1. They have lost all control of their schedules. With easy, good-quality time-shifting, they can no longer target a particular show for a particular day and time. Counter-programming one show against another is futile.
2. They have to stop people from easily skipping commercials. With any PVR, that's a simple matter of recording a show, and starting to watch it about 20 minutes after it starts.
Instead of adapting to the new reality of the consumer being in charge of their own entertainment, the broadcast networks are forced into these draconian measures.
The first network to use this flag will get a lot of complaints, and lose viewers to the competition. That competition will be most happy to use its lack of the broadcast flag as a major selling point.
Corporate greed created this flag, and that same corporate greed will prevent its widespread use. This whole issue will become a tempest in a TV plot.
Unfortunately, the Webcast flag prevents anyone from giving you that information, sorry.
Commodore was unbelievably stupid, and made some things harder for programmers. For example, the C-64 and C-128 computers both had a software-emulated UART chip, instead of a real one (to save money, as I understand it, about $5), limiting the baud rate to how fast the computer could process code in what was called a "non-maskable interrupt". The C-64 allowed a max of 1200 baud. The C-128, because it could run at double the clock speed of the C-64 ("Fast Mode", or about 2Mhz), could in theory run at 2400 baud, but you had to write your own version of the UART emulator using well-optimized machine language. Faster connection speeds were out of the question.
As the author of a few C-64 programs (e.g., "Prototerm"), I can't tell you how many times I wanted to drive to West Chester, and strangle someone. Nowadays, of course, I periodically get the urge to strangle a person or two in Redmond. Fortunately, it's too long a drive.
Nothing every changes, just the names and faces.
Yes, but it only applies to programmers. It's called a Sin Tax.
Having spent 20 years as a programmer, I can tell you that the first thing I have to do when working with someone straight out of school is to deprogram him/her. CompSci teachers just don't live in the real world of budgets and deadlines. Schools are geared to teach you how to take tests, nothing more. It takes a lot of personal effort to really learn something, and all a school can do is expose you to information. If all you do is pass tests, then you haven't really learned anything.
Programming is an art, and not a science. You may know the words and the grammar, but that doesn't mean you know how to write a novel. I can't tell you how many times I've had to clean up someone's "Gee, see what I can do" code that is overly complex, using language features that are inappropriate for the task at hand in the attempt to gain the appearance of proficiency.
A lot of programmers today forget that the purpose behind writing a program is to actually help another human being. They get caught up in the joys of this language, or that syntax, or -- heavan forbid -- which license is better to release the program under -- that they forget why they're here. You don't learn that in school. You learn that by being a user yourself, and remembering your struggles.
The reason that programming has turned into an assembly plant operation is that there aren't enough "artists" to go around. The economy in general, and IT in particular, will be seriously hurt by this, because companies don't recognize the distinction between the "artist" and the "factory worker". The artist is put on the assembly line for low wages, and has neither the urge, nor the means to innovate. Open Source will also be hurt by this, as such programming requires both time and money (hardware, at least, is not free), neither of which will be provided in abundance by the assembly plant.
Some days, I swear I should've learned to be a Plumber. At the very least, it's difficult to do that job from India!
P.S., Do you really expect that anyone in a place like /. would get your reference to Donald Knuth? Come on.
I can just see the legal tangle such a change would cause for Linux, et al. I also question how well such a change would work with the Berne Convention, since we're not talking about a novel here, written in one country, but a product written by hundreds of contributors from around the planet, both US and elsewhere. IANAL, but this looks like it would be a real mess, with no one winning but the lawyers.
Linux has Tux Racer, what more do you need?
I tried Mandrake (8.1), and it worked fine, even though it didn't support all my hardware. So, I managed to work around it. Then I increased memory to 1GB, and Mandrake refused to work. I went to Red Hat, and it supported more hardware, but not all. And configuring what it did support was a matter of tweaking those endless /etc text files. Not fun.
I'm currently on Suse 9. It runs all my hardware, and configuration is almost as easy as Windows, thanks to a GUI tool called Yast. It's still not as easy as I'd like it to be. Installing Oracle 9 was a real blast, in fact, but easier in Suse than in Red Hat.
The thing is, it seems to me that the people developing Linux don't see hardware support, drivers, or software installation as a problem. The attitude I've seen is "It works just fine for us. If you don't like it, go back to Windows". Perhaps that will change with IBM, Novell, and others trying to make a buck out of Linux. There's nothing like money to make someone sit up and take notice. I think games can be a big part of it, too, but only time will tell.
We have a few years (decades?) until Bill "Custer" Gates releases Little Big Horn, so there's still time.
I've been playing the demo of Unreal Tournament 2004 on Linux, and it seems to run better than Unreal 2 (should be similar engine under the hood, if not the same) does in Windows XP. So, if we can just get this ball rolling, then Linux will be a popular game OS, more companies will make games for it, and Linux will win the hearts and minds of desktop users everywhere.
Business applications will win the Server front. I believe the desktop will be won not by the OS that is the fastest, or the most reliable, but by the one with the applications people want. The only applications Linux is missing, IMO, are all those flashy, expensive commercial games that now only exist on Windows. That's what makes money, and in the end, it's the money that matters. (Is that cynical enough for you?)
OS/2's programming API's were compatible with the Windows of the time (3.1), so in theory you could just recompile your source-code. You could even use Borland's compiler on both.
One problem: The screen co-ordinates were different! How can you port GUI code, when Windows measures from the top of the screen, and OS/2 measures from the bottom? Oy, how dumb can you get? This was undoutedly an IBM engineer saying "But this is the correct way to lay-out a positive Y-Coordinate".
OS/2 failed for the same reason the Amiga OS did: what few ads and commercials existed were brain-dead stupid! IBM did do a few things right, like giving away a free version of Presentation Manager for Windows 3.1, that gave you a taste of what OS/2 could do, but it wasn't enough.
OS/2 had a lead time over Windows 95, just as Linux now has over Microsoft's Little Big Horn, and they wasted it.