So many idiots like you claim that it's all about "having balls", and that's where you're wrong. If that were all it were about I'd switch in a moment. You seem to forget that I have some huge college loans I have to pay off. I simply CAN'T take the risks many other people can because if I miss too many payments on those loans (they are FEDERAL loans, BTW) then I can get hauled off to federal prison.
So as you can see, there's a big difference between "having balls" and being stupid, and you seem not to know the difference.
- Taxes
- 401k deductions
- housewares & clothes
- telephone bill
- cable bill
- emergency shit that always comes up
(computer dies and needs to be replaced;
car needs a new transmission;
thief breaks into my car and steals $750
worth of stuff not covered by my insurance;
plane flights back home)
By the time everything is done each month, I find that no matter how carefully I've budgeted and planned, I can't come out more than about $300 positive each month. It's not as if I'm buying tons of electronics and fancy cars and lots of stocks every month--I just buy basic living stuff that I need to live a lower-middle-class lifestyle. That's not adequate savings for a person in their young twenties.
There are some shocking human rights and sexual and racial discrimination abuses taking place in our country's jails and prison systems. Inmates are often denied proper physical or medical care. And on a pure gender or racial basis, female and/or minority inmates are often denied the same access to programs and facilities that male and/or majority inmates receive daily.
My girlfriend is an inmate in county jail right now. She is diabetic, and yet the facility feeds her totally inappropriate "diabetic" meals (high in sugars and carbohydrates) and refuse to give her proper dosages of (or the right kind of) insulin. This kind of treatment over a several month period can lead to permanent physical damage to her kidneys and circulatory system. However, whenever I place calls to the jail directly or via her lawyer, we are told that they are already "following standard policy" and "doing everything we can do". Obviously this is not the case, and the facility simply feels that they have no responsibility either to the physical state of the inmates in their "care" or to address the concerns of friends or family members in the general public.
If elected to the Presidency, what concrete steps would you take to absolutely halt the unethical human rights violations that are taking place in our country's correctional facilities?
What concrete things would you do to start forcing publicly-funded correctional facilities (among other government agencies) to live up to their responsbility to address inquiries and complaints from members of the general public without individuals having to fork out millions of dollars to bring a negligence lawsuit against the state?
Do you believe that simply because someone has committed a crime, that this means we no longer have a responsibility to provide accurate and adequate medical and physical care for that person?
So let me ask you something: as a young (23 years old) guy with $18,000 in college debt who is now working as a software developer at Microsoft for $55k/year and living in the uber-expensive-cost-of-living Seattle area, how can I possibly stand up and demand any better compensation?
I do strongly believe that Microsoft seriously underpays its software developers for the intense (and sometimes extended time) work that we do, but there's nothing I can do about that. There's no one at Microsoft I can ask for more money, and if I were to try, I'd lose my job. If I were to go hunting for another software development job around the area, I would run into similar pay and (from what I've heard) even more ludicrous demands on what ought to be my personal time. I certainly don't have the luxury of taking a few months off from work to hunt around for a better job, since I have over $300 in loan payments and over $900 in basic living expenses (rent, food, car) each month.
I'm young and relatively inexperienced, and so no employer is willing to pay me the kind of money I need to make in order to live reasonably, pay off my debt, AND set some aside in savings every month. It's a very frustrating situation.
While I love the work I do, and I'm satisfied to be doing it, I cannot escape the feeling that I'm missing out on some of the most crucial personal time and opportunities I could ever have. I would be happy with a $55k/year job in this area if I could be guaranteed a 9-5, no weekends work schedule. But if I don't take this kind of job at these kinds of wages, then I'm SOL.
This sounds much more accurate. I don't deny the exaggeration in the comic--my point was just that the situations have a strong basis in reality. The enjoyment (relief?) *does* come in part from knowing we are lucky enough to have escaped work environments like that:-)
The accusation by media and politicians that violent video games and movies corrupt children is just another example of scare tactics.
News companies and politicians need to win the popular attention of the public in order to succeed. One way to do this is to turn an issue into a scare tactic, because as soon as you can get people panicked then you can make them believe anything you say while they hang on your every word.
If we (as intelligent people with clues) actually want to halt this absolute idiocy, the only way to do it is through education.
If you are a normal young person who loves movies and games that happen to include violence--better yet, if you are an honor student or a national merit scholar or an over-achieving grade schooler--then you need to demonstrate to the world that it is not the violence in media that screws kids up. Host Quake II competitions at your schools after hours; offer community education courses on video games and the Internet; make it obvious to the uninformed adults in your community that YOU'VE turned out just fine and dandy despite thriving on this stuff! And then point out (and specifically name) all the troublemaking jock kids in your school to parents and administrators, and explain how they have never even used the Internet in their spare time!
In other words, make it PAINFULLY OBVIOUS to people who are otherwise too stupid to use their own brains that it is BAD PARENTING and TOLERATED CIVIL RIGHTS ABUSE BY SCHOOL PEERS, not VIOLENT MEDIA, that causes kids to go bad.
If you think the situations in Dilbert are "freakin' unreal", and if you think the comic's appeal lies in the unreality of the situations, then maybe you should try spending some time in the shoes of an engineer in corporate America.
The situations in Dilbert are usually very realistic. The appeal of the comic lies in the reader's ability to identify with the insanity of very real situations.
Scott Adams simply takes reality and then has his characters comment on it in a brutally honest way. In real life, people often don't say what they really think or mean, which is what makes Dilbert such a feel-good comic: it expresses the sentiments we all hold but never have the nerve to really say.
False. Demonstrably so. It costs nothing to vote, and people are free to vote their conscience, not for some media-hyped buffoon whose Daddy was a big politician.
Not false. Demosntrably so. If you actually think that your freedom to vote means that your single vote bears any realistic weight next to the monetary influences of large corporations on the political process, then you need to consult the congressional records for your senators and representatives and compare their voting behaviors against a list of contributing interest groups to their campaigns.
False again. You can vote for a Libertarian for President and for a majority of the U.S. House seats.
Not false. A vote for a Libertarian candidate bears about as much weight as a snowball in hell. Why do so few people vote for Libertarian candidates relative to Republican and Democratic candidates? I'll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with the issues, and nearly everything to do with the strength of the campagining machines of the Republican and Democratic parties. Special interest groups want to give their dollars to the parties that can push an agenda on the largest scale, and that certainly isn't the Libertarian party.
Mostly false. If you vote for lawyers and professional politicians like Bush, Gore, Nader and Buchanan, you will be missing the UnPolitical choice of the Libertarians.
No, mostly true. Although I could vote for a Libertarian presidential candidate, my vote obviously won't count for anything in the face of the Republican and Democratic votes. And even if by some miracle that candidate gets elected, they will be just as likely to accept big money as anyone else once they are in office.
There's a piece of Campaign Finance Reform legislation led by Senator John McCain undergoing the final Senate scrutiny as they wrap up their current session. It has already passed two votes in the House of Reps and all but 7 Senators needed to pass the bill have announced their committment to vote for it.
This legislation is incredibly important--it closes the notion of "soft money" and makes it a crime in indisputable terms for anyone to offer money to a public candidate or official in exchange for an influenced vote, and makes it equally unlawful for any public candidate or official to accept such bribes. We need this to get enacted into law in order to remove the influence of the corporations and wealthy on our political process and daily governmental operations.
I'm disenchanted with the existing system for the same reasons most other people are:
(1) the only real political power comes from having a large pocketbook, not from having the right to vote;
(2) the only candidates we are really permitted to choose from in elections are ones who take and raise tons of money, so your everyday citizen with a sharp mind and a genuine concern for the well-being of the general public simply can't afford to run a competitive campaign;
(3) the only candidates we are permitted to choose from are part of the same insidious little elite of lawyers, corporatists, and career politicians that have caused all the problems for this country in the first place.
By enacting a separation of government and special interest money, we can take the entire political process back and put it in the hands of the general public once again. A single vote will actually count for something fair again.
The current disgruntlement with politics doesn't signal the end of politics at all--it just signals an end to the way politics have been heading for many years now. Politics will continue to exist, but the entire system will morph and change just like an economic system or a sociologic system, depending upon the needs of the time and the desires of the people.
Why in the world would you set your web browser cache to a RAM drive? Most web browsers already have the ability for you to set up a RAM cache that will be used in its entirety before caching anything to disk.
And besides, if a program would benefit from a faster RAM-first, disk-last style cache, it should be the program designer's job to cache things as memory and let the OS vmm swap memory pages in and out to disk as needed.
Well obviously there has to be at least one key point in the bootstrapping process where the kernal has to look up a global config file... but this doesn't have to be assumed to exist at any particular location in the filesystem. The path to the config file in the filesystem can be passed to the kernal as a boot-time option.
While I agree that his statement is bullshit, your reply implies some steaming hot crap of its own.
In such an architecture, you can make the GUI as "easy to use" as you want, without affecting another user's ability to "get at the guts", because he doesn't have to use your GUI.
While you can make the GUI itself as usable as you want, you certainly can't make the system as a whole easy to use unless the underlying non-GUI architecture is clean, consistent, tight, and well-organized. Typical end-users need more than a pretty symbolic graphic interface slapped over top of a chaotic, complex system; they need a system that is simple and well-organized in every place it is exposed, including the filesystem hierarchy and the ability to install and configure hardware and applications.
GNU/Linux or GNU/BSD systems are the furthest thing from this. They are chaotic and their overall organization (or lack thereof) hasn't been thought out well at all. It's not that the development community is incapable of developing a well-organized GNU/Linux or GNU/BSD system; it's that no one seems even remotely interested in doing so.
For instance, every program uses a different configuration file format, often times with its own steep learning curve. This is a headahce not only for expert users who want to configure everything with a text editor (they must usually learn a new and different scripting language just to configure each new app!), but for developers who have to implement a custom GUI configurator app and different file format parsing code for every program. What is needed in this instance is a common XML/schema-based configuration file format so that developers can write a single configurator app and have it suck in a schema that comes with every app it is used to configure; the configurator dynamically creates dialogs, controls, etc, based on the schema and can then be used to configure any program in existence--while expert users or administrators who want to telnet in and edit a configuration by hand can easily do so to an XML-based config file, and can then even run a common XML validator that verifies the syntactical correctness and well-formedness of the XML configuration file before doing something crucial like restarting a key system service.
Another foolish oversight in underlying GNU/Linux design is the practice of hard-coding absolute directory path references into programs. For instance, if you relocate gcc to a new directory, it breaks unless you (1) recompile it from sources and compile in a different hard-coded directory expectation, or (2) download binaries that someone else has already gone to the trouble of compiling that way for you. As an end-user or administrator, you have very little choice about where you can install a new program's files within the filesystem. This sucks for distribution makers who might want to make a simpler, better-organized filesystem hierarchy to make a GNU/Linux system that is more suited to normal people. For instance, I might want to create a distribution that has only 3 major root-level directories:/apps,/docs, and/system. But I can't do this now without hacking around on source code and rewriting every single app and utility and daemon I include in my system--and that's preposterous. Instead, every app should have been smartly programmed to not expect the existence of a file in a particular place in the filesystem, but instead to assume the existence of an environment variable in which it can look to retrieve the needed path; in this way, I (as an end user of intermmediate knowledge or as a distribution maker) can rearrange the filesystem hierarchy as I see fit, without having to hack around on the source for every installed program and recompiling it. In fact, I can even relocate installed binaries and other files and still have the program work--something that's a clear advantage over the world of Windows.
The real issue here (as with DeCSS) is that proper reverse-engineering is not unethical. Therefore, it should not be illegal either. Unfortunately, laws have been unfairly passed and mangled to the point that many ethical actions are now illegal.
Just because a company doesn't like people reverse-engineering their products, that doesn't mean that reverse-engineering is ethically wrong. What it means is that companies need to find ways of making profits that do not depend on keeping information secrets! Consumers should have a basic human right to figure out how something works and then take advantage of that knowledge in any way they wish.
Unfortunately, companies have succeeded in pushing government to outlaw reverse-engineering in many cases.
You can't encourage companies to behave ethically because they don't care about ethics. And you can't make legal arguments against these companies because the law is now usually on their side. The only thing you CAN do is make ethical arguments to your representatives and politicians urging them to retract legislation such as DMCA.
What's really needed is to assign every device on the Internet a UUID (universal unique ID) which is a large, partly-random number that incorporates info from the hardware of the particular machine. Then integrate some Napster-like distributed directory service into web browsers, so that every time you log onto the Web you are automatically and globally registered (no propagation time nonsense necessary) in the distributed database via whatever info you want associated with your site (search keywords, topic, geographic location, etc).
Using this method, you are entirely responsible for maintaining how others locate your site. No two UUIDs can be registered into the database at the same time so there are no conflicts. Each UUID is licensed out to a particular server for a certain span of time, just like DHCP and IP addys. No one will be motivated to take over a particular UUID for name recognizability, since they will all be equally gibberish-like. There's no need for commercially-tainted "crawler" search engines since the distributed directory has a built-in search capability. And people with servers that are only up some of the time won't show up as search results while the server is offline, so you won't get a list that contains 20 sites that don't currently exist live on the web.
So let's see--we could put search engines, registrars, ICANN, and many others completely out of business. Hrmm... no wonder no one in control is interested in doing things a better way.
Good luck trying to get anything smart done in this world; there will always be dumber, richer people than you.
I don't consider ESR to be a very intelligent or objective person--he is highly over-rated. The fact that he was actually chastising a group of people who were taking the right approach (focusing on how to make computers as usable as possible by normal people) simply demonstrates how out of touch he is with reality.
- It forces hardware and software makers
to either sell stuff that works
correctly or else sell nothing at all;
- It forces hardware and software makers
to finally make their products easy enough
to use that normal people won't have to
call technical support lines just to figure
out how to install an application or
copy a file;
- It forces companies to be financially
responsible for the quality of their products,
which is the closest thing you can do to
holding them ethically responsible;
- It forces companies to continue to fully
support their products for at least two
years.
I don't care if this stuff doesn't benefit the companies, because I'm not interested in benefitting the companies. I'm interested in benefitting everyday people, even if that means companies have to suffer. They SHOULD suffer for not meeting these kinds of guidelines of their own free will in the first place.
And no, this is not flame-bait. This is my honest opinion.
I invented breathing. Really, I did. It was quite an innovation, I must say.
Now that the enlightend US Patent Office has finally granted me my long overdue and well-deserved patent on breathing, it is my official stance that any human being caught breathing without paying me royalties should get the heebeejeebies sued out of them.
Excellent post. GNU/Linux is still tens of years behind Macintosh and Windows because the development community continues to ignore the most important aspect of computer design: human interface.
I've written up a brief web site on this particular topic, including not only my own thoughts but links to related articles. Interested readers can go to http://members.tripod.com/~syrinx2000 to see what I have to say and to discuss the topic with me.
I'm very interested in helping motivate a movement within the GNU/Linux community to focus on design from the outside-in, starting with a detailed specification for a GUI and human interface guidelines, and then working backward to technical implementation.
This approach is the opposite of projects like GNOME and KDE, which are starting out by arguing about open-source licenses and choosing which technologies to use, and then trying to sum it all up to produce something user-friendly. The end result of that approach has been slow, fragmented development and poor imitations of existing commercial interfaces; it's time we did better.
Graders of submitted programming projects simply don't have the time, breadth of knowledge, or obligation to deal with an open-ended variety of student-chosen platforms and configurations. And they can't make an exception for the one or two students in the class that happen to know Linux development. Like it or not, the rule is in place for one reason--consistency for the graders--and you should not try to push for your own platform of preference.
After all, isn't one sign of a truly good developer the ability to jump into any platform, IDE, or debugger and pick it up rather quickly? You complain about being tied to a single platform by the class rule, but it sounds to me like you are already tied to a single platform and now that you're asked to learn another one you would rather whine about it!
Mainsoft makes a product called MainWin, which is an implementation of the Win32 API. They aren't actually modifying Microsoft product code to port it to Linux, they are just creating a compatible API layer and working to make it compatible enough that major Microsoft apps will run on Linux. It's no different than WINe.
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So many idiots like you claim that it's all about "having balls", and that's where you're wrong. If that were all it were about I'd switch in a moment. You seem to forget that I have some huge college loans I have to pay off. I simply CAN'T take the risks many other people can because if I miss too many payments on those loans (they are FEDERAL loans, BTW) then I can get hauled off to federal prison.
So as you can see, there's a big difference between "having balls" and being stupid, and you seem not to know the difference.
Okay, here are some fun things you're forgetting:
- Taxes
- 401k deductions
- housewares & clothes
- telephone bill
- cable bill
- emergency shit that always comes up
(computer dies and needs to be replaced;
car needs a new transmission;
thief breaks into my car and steals $750
worth of stuff not covered by my insurance;
plane flights back home)
By the time everything is done each month, I find that no matter how carefully I've budgeted and planned, I can't come out more than about $300 positive each month. It's not as if I'm buying tons of electronics and fancy cars and lots of stocks every month--I just buy basic living stuff that I need to live a lower-middle-class lifestyle. That's not adequate savings for a person in their young twenties.
The options are meaningless because they aren't worth jack with the way the stock's been, and I'm not even vested anyway.
I'd get the hell away from Seattle if I hadn't already grown into a new life out here. I'm not willing to start my life over again just over a job.
There are some shocking human rights and sexual and racial discrimination abuses taking place in our country's jails and prison systems. Inmates are often denied proper physical or medical care. And on a pure gender or racial basis, female and/or minority inmates are often denied the same access to programs and facilities that male and/or majority inmates receive daily.
My girlfriend is an inmate in county jail right now. She is diabetic, and yet the facility feeds her totally inappropriate "diabetic" meals (high in sugars and carbohydrates) and refuse to give her proper dosages of (or the right kind of) insulin. This kind of treatment over a several month period can lead to permanent physical damage to her kidneys and circulatory system. However, whenever I place calls to the jail directly or via her lawyer, we are told that they are already "following standard policy" and "doing everything we can do". Obviously this is not the case, and the facility simply feels that they have no responsibility either to the physical state of the inmates in their "care" or to address the concerns of friends or family members in the general public.
If elected to the Presidency, what concrete steps would you take to absolutely halt the unethical human rights violations that are taking place in our country's correctional facilities?
What concrete things would you do to start forcing publicly-funded correctional facilities (among other government agencies) to live up to their responsbility to address inquiries and complaints from members of the general public without individuals having to fork out millions of dollars to bring a negligence lawsuit against the state?
Do you believe that simply because someone has committed a crime, that this means we no longer have a responsibility to provide accurate and adequate medical and physical care for that person?
So let me ask you something: as a young (23 years old) guy with $18,000 in college debt who is now working as a software developer at Microsoft for $55k/year and living in the uber-expensive-cost-of-living Seattle area, how can I possibly stand up and demand any better compensation?
I do strongly believe that Microsoft seriously underpays its software developers for the intense (and sometimes extended time) work that we do, but there's nothing I can do about that. There's no one at Microsoft I can ask for more money, and if I were to try, I'd lose my job. If I were to go hunting for another software development job around the area, I would run into similar pay and (from what I've heard) even more ludicrous demands on what ought to be my personal time. I certainly don't have the luxury of taking a few months off from work to hunt around for a better job, since I have over $300 in loan payments and over $900 in basic living expenses (rent, food, car) each month.
I'm young and relatively inexperienced, and so no employer is willing to pay me the kind of money I need to make in order to live reasonably, pay off my debt, AND set some aside in savings every month. It's a very frustrating situation.
While I love the work I do, and I'm satisfied to be doing it, I cannot escape the feeling that I'm missing out on some of the most crucial personal time and opportunities I could ever have. I would be happy with a $55k/year job in this area if I could be guaranteed a 9-5, no weekends work schedule. But if I don't take this kind of job at these kinds of wages, then I'm SOL.
but me R 23 d00dz and 3y3 no how to tipe and spel better 3rd gr4derz me know use run on sintinces what u think?>
This sounds much more accurate. I don't deny the exaggeration in the comic--my point was just that the situations have a strong basis in reality. The enjoyment (relief?) *does* come in part from knowing we are lucky enough to have escaped work environments like that :-)
This is cool, but when will someone FINALLY make a GameBoy accessory that turns it into a collapsable Apache attack helicopter?
The accusation by media and politicians that violent video games and movies corrupt children is just another example of scare tactics.
News companies and politicians need to win the popular attention of the public in order to succeed. One way to do this is to turn an issue into a scare tactic, because as soon as you can get people panicked then you can make them believe anything you say while they hang on your every word.
If we (as intelligent people with clues) actually want to halt this absolute idiocy, the only way to do it is through education.
If you are a normal young person who loves movies and games that happen to include violence--better yet, if you are an honor student or a national merit scholar or an over-achieving grade schooler--then you need to demonstrate to the world that it is not the violence in media that screws kids up. Host Quake II competitions at your schools after hours; offer community education courses on video games and the Internet; make it obvious to the uninformed adults in your community that YOU'VE turned out just fine and dandy despite thriving on this stuff! And then point out (and specifically name) all the troublemaking jock kids in your school to parents and administrators, and explain how they have never even used the Internet in their spare time!
In other words, make it PAINFULLY OBVIOUS to people who are otherwise too stupid to use their own brains that it is BAD PARENTING and TOLERATED CIVIL RIGHTS ABUSE BY SCHOOL PEERS, not VIOLENT MEDIA, that causes kids to go bad.
If you think the situations in Dilbert are "freakin' unreal", and if you think the comic's appeal lies in the unreality of the situations, then maybe you should try spending some time in the shoes of an engineer in corporate America.
The situations in Dilbert are usually very realistic. The appeal of the comic lies in the reader's ability to identify with the insanity of very real situations.
Scott Adams simply takes reality and then has his characters comment on it in a brutally honest way. In real life, people often don't say what they really think or mean, which is what makes Dilbert such a feel-good comic: it expresses the sentiments we all hold but never have the nerve to really say.
False. Demonstrably so. It costs nothing to vote, and people are free to vote their conscience, not for some media-hyped buffoon whose Daddy was a big politician.
Not false. Demosntrably so. If you actually think that your freedom to vote means that your single vote bears any realistic weight next to the monetary influences of large corporations on the political process, then you need to consult the congressional records for your senators and representatives and compare their voting behaviors against a list of contributing interest groups to their campaigns.
False again. You can vote for a Libertarian for President and for a majority of the U.S. House seats.
Not false. A vote for a Libertarian candidate bears about as much weight as a snowball in hell. Why do so few people vote for Libertarian candidates relative to Republican and Democratic candidates? I'll give you a hint: it has nothing to do with the issues, and nearly everything to do with the strength of the campagining machines of the Republican and Democratic parties. Special interest groups want to give their dollars to the parties that can push an agenda on the largest scale, and that certainly isn't the Libertarian party.
Mostly false. If you vote for lawyers and professional politicians like Bush, Gore, Nader and Buchanan, you will be missing the UnPolitical choice of the Libertarians.
No, mostly true. Although I could vote for a Libertarian presidential candidate, my vote obviously won't count for anything in the face of the Republican and Democratic votes. And even if by some miracle that candidate gets elected, they will be just as likely to accept big money as anyone else once they are in office.
There's a piece of Campaign Finance Reform legislation led by Senator John McCain undergoing the final Senate scrutiny as they wrap up their current session. It has already passed two votes in the House of Reps and all but 7 Senators needed to pass the bill have announced their committment to vote for it.
This legislation is incredibly important--it closes the notion of "soft money" and makes it a crime in indisputable terms for anyone to offer money to a public candidate or official in exchange for an influenced vote, and makes it equally unlawful for any public candidate or official to accept such bribes. We need this to get enacted into law in order to remove the influence of the corporations and wealthy on our political process and daily governmental operations.
I'm disenchanted with the existing system for the same reasons most other people are:
(1) the only real political power comes from having a large pocketbook, not from having the right to vote;
(2) the only candidates we are really permitted to choose from in elections are ones who take and raise tons of money, so your everyday citizen with a sharp mind and a genuine concern for the well-being of the general public simply can't afford to run a competitive campaign;
(3) the only candidates we are permitted to choose from are part of the same insidious little elite of lawyers, corporatists, and career politicians that have caused all the problems for this country in the first place.
By enacting a separation of government and special interest money, we can take the entire political process back and put it in the hands of the general public once again. A single vote will actually count for something fair again.
The current disgruntlement with politics doesn't signal the end of politics at all--it just signals an end to the way politics have been heading for many years now. Politics will continue to exist, but the entire system will morph and change just like an economic system or a sociologic system, depending upon the needs of the time and the desires of the people.
Why in the world would you set your web browser cache to a RAM drive? Most web browsers already have the ability for you to set up a RAM cache that will be used in its entirety before caching anything to disk.
And besides, if a program would benefit from a faster RAM-first, disk-last style cache, it should be the program designer's job to cache things as memory and let the OS vmm swap memory pages in and out to disk as needed.
Well obviously there has to be at least one key point in the bootstrapping process where the kernal has to look up a global config file... but this doesn't have to be assumed to exist at any particular location in the filesystem. The path to the config file in the filesystem can be passed to the kernal as a boot-time option.
If any BSD system includes some essential GNU tools of any kind, then I consider it to be GNU/BSD.
While I agree that his statement is bullshit, your reply implies some steaming hot crap of its own.
While you can make the GUI itself as usable as you want, you certainly can't make the system as a whole easy to use unless the underlying non-GUI architecture is clean, consistent, tight, and well-organized. Typical end-users need more than a pretty symbolic graphic interface slapped over top of a chaotic, complex system; they need a system that is simple and well-organized in every place it is exposed, including the filesystem hierarchy and the ability to install and configure hardware and applications.
GNU/Linux or GNU/BSD systems are the furthest thing from this. They are chaotic and their overall organization (or lack thereof) hasn't been thought out well at all. It's not that the development community is incapable of developing a well-organized GNU/Linux or GNU/BSD system; it's that no one seems even remotely interested in doing so.
For instance, every program uses a different configuration file format, often times with its own steep learning curve. This is a headahce not only for expert users who want to configure everything with a text editor (they must usually learn a new and different scripting language just to configure each new app!), but for developers who have to implement a custom GUI configurator app and different file format parsing code for every program. What is needed in this instance is a common XML/schema-based configuration file format so that developers can write a single configurator app and have it suck in a schema that comes with every app it is used to configure; the configurator dynamically creates dialogs, controls, etc, based on the schema and can then be used to configure any program in existence--while expert users or administrators who want to telnet in and edit a configuration by hand can easily do so to an XML-based config file, and can then even run a common XML validator that verifies the syntactical correctness and well-formedness of the XML configuration file before doing something crucial like restarting a key system service.
Another foolish oversight in underlying GNU/Linux design is the practice of hard-coding absolute directory path references into programs. For instance, if you relocate gcc to a new directory, it breaks unless you (1) recompile it from sources and compile in a different hard-coded directory expectation, or (2) download binaries that someone else has already gone to the trouble of compiling that way for you. As an end-user or administrator, you have very little choice about where you can install a new program's files within the filesystem. This sucks for distribution makers who might want to make a simpler, better-organized filesystem hierarchy to make a GNU/Linux system that is more suited to normal people. For instance, I might want to create a distribution that has only 3 major root-level directories: /apps, /docs, and /system. But I can't do this now without hacking around on source code and rewriting every single app and utility and daemon I include in my system--and that's preposterous. Instead, every app should have been smartly programmed to not expect the existence of a file in a particular place in the filesystem, but instead to assume the existence of an environment variable in which it can look to retrieve the needed path; in this way, I (as an end user of intermmediate knowledge or as a distribution maker) can rearrange the filesystem hierarchy as I see fit, without having to hack around on the source for every installed program and recompiling it. In fact, I can even relocate installed binaries and other files and still have the program work--something that's a clear advantage over the world of Windows.
The real issue here (as with DeCSS) is that proper reverse-engineering is not unethical. Therefore, it should not be illegal either. Unfortunately, laws have been unfairly passed and mangled to the point that many ethical actions are now illegal.
Just because a company doesn't like people reverse-engineering their products, that doesn't mean that reverse-engineering is ethically wrong. What it means is that companies need to find ways of making profits that do not depend on keeping information secrets! Consumers should have a basic human right to figure out how something works and then take advantage of that knowledge in any way they wish.
Unfortunately, companies have succeeded in pushing government to outlaw reverse-engineering in many cases.
You can't encourage companies to behave ethically because they don't care about ethics. And you can't make legal arguments against these companies because the law is now usually on their side. The only thing you CAN do is make ethical arguments to your representatives and politicians urging them to retract legislation such as DMCA.
What's really needed is to assign every device on the Internet a UUID (universal unique ID) which is a large, partly-random number that incorporates info from the hardware of the particular machine. Then integrate some Napster-like distributed directory service into web browsers, so that every time you log onto the Web you are automatically and globally registered (no propagation time nonsense necessary) in the distributed database via whatever info you want associated with your site (search keywords, topic, geographic location, etc).
Using this method, you are entirely responsible for maintaining how others locate your site. No two UUIDs can be registered into the database at the same time so there are no conflicts. Each UUID is licensed out to a particular server for a certain span of time, just like DHCP and IP addys. No one will be motivated to take over a particular UUID for name recognizability, since they will all be equally gibberish-like. There's no need for commercially-tainted "crawler" search engines since the distributed directory has a built-in search capability. And people with servers that are only up some of the time won't show up as search results while the server is offline, so you won't get a list that contains 20 sites that don't currently exist live on the web.
So let's see--we could put search engines, registrars, ICANN, and many others completely out of business. Hrmm... no wonder no one in control is interested in doing things a better way.
Good luck trying to get anything smart done in this world; there will always be dumber, richer people than you.
I don't consider ESR to be a very intelligent or objective person--he is highly over-rated. The fact that he was actually chastising a group of people who were taking the right approach (focusing on how to make computers as usable as possible by normal people) simply demonstrates how out of touch he is with reality.
For multiple reasons:
- It forces hardware and software makers
to either sell stuff that works
correctly or else sell nothing at all;
- It forces hardware and software makers
to finally make their products easy enough
to use that normal people won't have to
call technical support lines just to figure
out how to install an application or
copy a file;
- It forces companies to be financially
responsible for the quality of their products,
which is the closest thing you can do to
holding them ethically responsible;
- It forces companies to continue to fully
support their products for at least two
years.
I don't care if this stuff doesn't benefit the companies, because I'm not interested in benefitting the companies. I'm interested in benefitting everyday people, even if that means companies have to suffer. They SHOULD suffer for not meeting these kinds of guidelines of their own free will in the first place.
And no, this is not flame-bait. This is my honest opinion.
I invented breathing. Really, I did. It was quite an innovation, I must say.
Now that the enlightend US Patent Office has finally granted me my long overdue and well-deserved patent on breathing, it is my official stance that any human being caught breathing without paying me royalties should get the heebeejeebies sued out of them.
Pay up! Now!
Excellent post. GNU/Linux is still tens of years behind Macintosh and Windows because the development community continues to ignore the most important aspect of computer design: human interface.
I've written up a brief web site on this particular topic, including not only my own thoughts but links to related articles. Interested readers can go to http://members.tripod.com/~syrinx2000 to see what I have to say and to discuss the topic with me.
I'm very interested in helping motivate a movement within the GNU/Linux community to focus on design from the outside-in, starting with a detailed specification for a GUI and human interface guidelines, and then working backward to technical implementation.
This approach is the opposite of projects like GNOME and KDE, which are starting out by arguing about open-source licenses and choosing which technologies to use, and then trying to sum it all up to produce something user-friendly. The end result of that approach has been slow, fragmented development and poor imitations of existing commercial interfaces; it's time we did better.
Graders of submitted programming projects simply don't have the time, breadth of knowledge, or obligation to deal with an open-ended variety of student-chosen platforms and configurations. And they can't make an exception for the one or two students in the class that happen to know Linux development. Like it or not, the rule is in place for one reason--consistency for the graders--and you should not try to push for your own platform of preference.
After all, isn't one sign of a truly good developer the ability to jump into any platform, IDE, or debugger and pick it up rather quickly? You complain about being tied to a single platform by the class rule, but it sounds to me like you are already tied to a single platform and now that you're asked to learn another one you would rather whine about it!
Actually, MainWin includes a run-time Win32 API layer in addition to development tools and libraries that allow native recompilation.
Mainsoft makes a product called MainWin, which is an implementation of the Win32 API. They aren't actually modifying Microsoft product code to port it to Linux, they are just creating a compatible API layer and working to make it compatible enough that major Microsoft apps will run on Linux. It's no different than WINe.