There can be only two answers to that. If you're a conspiracy theorist, it's just the beginning of Microsoft's new "Close (sic) Source" project. If you're a neo-con, he's a commie Linux bastard with an agenda.
A standard GUI would be nice, but for me a standard shell would be even better. Whenever I confront *nix users about stuff like the Delete button not doing anything, or left arrow inserts some escape character, or TAB completion doesn't work, there are two answers: "Historical reasons", and "Just configure it to be the way you want". Been there, done that. A few hours of asking around, googling, and man pages later, I get a setup I'm familiar with. Then I have to do some work on another machine, and it's got a completely different set of differences from my preferred setup. And oops, the configuration file I just made won't even work there, because it's a different shell. Oh, and it doesn't have Emacs/vi/vim/pico/nano, so I have to learn a completely new way to edit files. The result: SFTP to a Windows machine, and edit in jEdit. And *nix loses once again.
A related idea/question: Have you considered making add-ons a separate step in the installation wizard? It would be great to have the extensions available when running Firefox for the first time.
Putting aside the fact that my "anecdotal" evidence considered some of the most prominent Linux apps in existence, while you could probably find a text editor in Windows that doesn't support standard copy/paste, do you really want to start this discussion on a 1994 level?
Since it seemingly wasn't obvious enough, when I wrote "Linux" I meant "GNU/Linux distributions". I don't install only the kernel. And I've used pico, nano, vim, vi, vim for Windows, Emacs, XEmacs for Windows, Notepad, jEdit, TextPad, and Notepad2. Not to mention last year. Of these, AFAIK, all the Windows based ones support CTRL+X/C/V, and one of the Linux ones (jEdit, which ironically is my favorite editor in Windows). The others are basically different versions of three editors (pico, vi, Emacs), and all have completely different (internally, not just different from Windows) shortcuts.
The default settings behave exactly the way you want an OS to behave.
Nope. Sound doesn't work; not even stereo. And forget about my 5.1 optical.
To answer the rest of your post: I want Linux to be successful, but hanging on to the 70's won't help. And, like (probably) many others, I just want tools which allow me to do my job with as little unnecessary effort as possible.
You're using anecdotal evidence to imply that these are not problems in Linux. I'm not trying to say that Linux is all bad, but the cases I've listed are still valid.
Config files and the windows registry are about the same as usability goes.
Not when there's a different format for each app. People are not machines that can process any amount of documentation you throw at them, and then start using a completely new format flawlessly.
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V don't work in three major text editors in Linux: Emacs, vim, and pico/nano.
I've used several apps where I expected drag'n'drop to work, but it didn't. I don't remember their names right now; it's been a few months since I last installed and removed Ubuntu.
Yes, Linux is getting better at usability. Anything else would be absurd. But it's light years behind OS X and even Windows.
It's a good thing that you can learn everything about the system you're running. But it's not good when you have to learn a lot to do basic stuff.
I presume you're just trolling, but let me point to a few examples of the opposite:
Config format: INI files. name = value. And yeah, I know the registry sucks, but it's also quite consistent.
Shortcuts: How do you copy in Windows? CTRL-C. In Linux, take a look at pico, Emacs, and vim. Also, backspace is everything from d to CTRL-Backspace, Shift-Backspace, Del, or nonexistent. Home often does nothing or just inserts ~.
Input format: IDE works across a surprising amount of apps. Drag'n'drop / cut'n'paste rarely works between apps on Linux.
Output format: ISO-8859-1 is not my favorite, but at least all my apps understand it.
I'm one of those "power users". Started using DOS 6.2+Win 3.1 in 1993, and tried to learn as much as possible [to get Doom II running properly], that is: Norton Commander, QEMM, autoexec.bat/config.sys alternative configurations, etc.. And I didn't have Internet until 1999, the same year I installed Linux for the first time. SuSE 6.3 IIRC. After installing, the resolution was crap, the 3Com Ethernet card didn't work (HW+DNS auto-configured even in Win 98, f'gads sake), and even my friend, the administrator of 3+ company Linux servers, gave up getting sound working after a few hours.
So I re-installed Win 98, and kept going. Then I installed Debian. And Mandrake, FreeBSD, Fedora, CSL, and Ubuntu, before I realized the main problems: Consistency (1 program = 1 unique config format, 1 unique set of shortcuts, 1 semi-unique input format, 1 unique output format) and blocking bugs I didn't have the time or energy to fix myself.
If you got all the time in the world, or learn only one tool per task (vim/Emacs/pico, mutt/Pine), and you can develop whatever doesn't exist or work, Linux is perfect.
This is not a troll, it's a rant. To prove it, here's how to do something about it (if you really want to): Be willing to move away from truly arcane ways, enable smooth transition for users, and secure the beginners by default. Firefox and Google are both great examples to follow.
Regarding time, there's really only two things that matter over old-style HTML: Validation and using semantics (unfortunately, @lang, <label>, and <abbr> are rare). Validating a change takes a few seconds, and doing semantics right depends a lot on the complexity of the data. At the same time, both of these really do prevent extra work down the road. Size depends far more on the developer than which markup language you use.
XHTML has the advantage of being both a good source and a good target for XSLT. You can e.g. generate your feeds from new pages automatically, and generate pages from your feeds. Store XHTML in the database, and you'll be able to depend on that data tomorrow and 15 years down the road. Also, newer versions of XHTML hint more towards semantics, but as always the quality will depend on whether the developer is willing to learn it properly.
Shameless plug (but IMHO relevant): At my previous job I tried to convince the people in charge that using CSS and XHTML would be a smart move. The turning point was when I showed them that for three different cases, I was able to produce semantic and valid XHTML, plus valid CSS (without table layouts), while at the same time reducing code at least 53% and download size 60%. If that's not good enough to change...
7 years now without a TV. It's great! No ads (99.5% of them are $#!7 anyway, and 100% of them are $#!7 after watching once), no sports news, no celebrity news, no reality shows, no license, and no box taking up precious floor space. At the same time, a few news sites, online videos, and DVDs give me all the information and entertainment I could ever want.
Of course, that doesn't stop me from the occasional 20 hours/week in GTA, HL2, or Doom 3.
This kind of data is invaluable to root out false positives when looking for suspicious / interesting patterns. E.g., you'll probably be less likely to think of someone as a terrorist if they asked for a wheelchair or anything else which would make them stand out in the relatively small crowd of a airline passengers. Other things, like booking shortly before the flight, indicates little planning. Each indicator gives a small nudge in one or the other direction (provided you have good reference data), and helps data mining a lot.
Re:"IPv4 is going away for good"
on
IPv6 Essentials
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· Score: 1
The fact that these cowards call themselves "patriots" and back actions taken to the point where it is now the EU and not the US complaining about too much information being collected about individuals speaks volumes about what continues to be wrong with the cowards thinking.
I've long believed that the real "land of freedom" is Europe, with the possible exception of Turkey. Short of denying the existence of the Holocaust, there's not much you can say anywhere here to get arrested. We have real choice when going to elections (e.g., in the 2005 election in Norway, a full seven parties each got more than 5% of the votes).
If I ever invent a time machine, the first mission would be to make sure the process of fusion was renamed to hot non-bomby difficult controllable process, or HNBDCP, to make sure these concepts were never, ever, confused again!
You, sir, have just won the price for inventing the 1000th way of formatting quotes. Congratulations! You can now choose between a cute and compact , or the big, Slashdot-friendly
For Flash, that's mostly just View Page Info -> Media -> Save As. Of course, some sites mess up even that. And Java applets are spawn of the devil anyway - I've only used a handful of them, but all of those would have been better of as static web pages (sic) or Flash. Dunno about those "online desktops" which have popped up lately, but don't they allow you to add any URL?
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't that be "Sincerely, The Architect"?
No go. There are plenty of sites giving instructions for making JavaScript, Flash, and even AJAX sites accessible. Try googling.
There can be only two answers to that. If you're a conspiracy theorist, it's just the beginning of Microsoft's new "Close (sic) Source" project. If you're a neo-con, he's a commie Linux bastard with an agenda.
A standard GUI would be nice, but for me a standard shell would be even better. Whenever I confront *nix users about stuff like the Delete button not doing anything, or left arrow inserts some escape character, or TAB completion doesn't work, there are two answers: "Historical reasons", and "Just configure it to be the way you want". Been there, done that. A few hours of asking around, googling, and man pages later, I get a setup I'm familiar with. Then I have to do some work on another machine, and it's got a completely different set of differences from my preferred setup. And oops, the configuration file I just made won't even work there, because it's a different shell. Oh, and it doesn't have Emacs/vi/vim/pico/nano, so I have to learn a completely new way to edit files. The result: SFTP to a Windows machine, and edit in jEdit. And *nix loses once again.
A related idea/question: Have you considered making add-ons a separate step in the installation wizard? It would be great to have the extensions available when running Firefox for the first time.
Putting aside the fact that my "anecdotal" evidence considered some of the most prominent Linux apps in existence, while you could probably find a text editor in Windows that doesn't support standard copy/paste, do you really want to start this discussion on a 1994 level?
Since it seemingly wasn't obvious enough, when I wrote "Linux" I meant "GNU/Linux distributions". I don't install only the kernel. And I've used pico, nano, vim, vi, vim for Windows, Emacs, XEmacs for Windows, Notepad, jEdit, TextPad, and Notepad2. Not to mention last year. Of these, AFAIK, all the Windows based ones support CTRL+X/C/V, and one of the Linux ones (jEdit, which ironically is my favorite editor in Windows). The others are basically different versions of three editors (pico, vi, Emacs), and all have completely different (internally, not just different from Windows) shortcuts.
Nope. Sound doesn't work; not even stereo. And forget about my 5.1 optical.
To answer the rest of your post: I want Linux to be successful, but hanging on to the 70's won't help. And, like (probably) many others, I just want tools which allow me to do my job with as little unnecessary effort as possible.
You're using anecdotal evidence to imply that these are not problems in Linux. I'm not trying to say that Linux is all bad, but the cases I've listed are still valid.
Not when there's a different format for each app. People are not machines that can process any amount of documentation you throw at them, and then start using a completely new format flawlessly.
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, and Ctrl-V don't work in three major text editors in Linux: Emacs, vim, and pico/nano.
I've used several apps where I expected drag'n'drop to work, but it didn't. I don't remember their names right now; it's been a few months since I last installed and removed Ubuntu.
Yes, Linux is getting better at usability. Anything else would be absurd. But it's light years behind OS X and even Windows.
It's a good thing that you can learn everything about the system you're running. But it's not good when you have to learn a lot to do basic stuff.
I'm one of those "power users". Started using DOS 6.2+Win 3.1 in 1993, and tried to learn as much as possible [to get Doom II running properly], that is: Norton Commander, QEMM, autoexec.bat/config.sys alternative configurations, etc.. And I didn't have Internet until 1999, the same year I installed Linux for the first time. SuSE 6.3 IIRC. After installing, the resolution was crap, the 3Com Ethernet card didn't work (HW+DNS auto-configured even in Win 98, f'gads sake), and even my friend, the administrator of 3+ company Linux servers, gave up getting sound working after a few hours.
So I re-installed Win 98, and kept going. Then I installed Debian. And Mandrake, FreeBSD, Fedora, CSL, and Ubuntu, before I realized the main problems: Consistency (1 program = 1 unique config format, 1 unique set of shortcuts, 1 semi-unique input format, 1 unique output format) and blocking bugs I didn't have the time or energy to fix myself.
If you got all the time in the world, or learn only one tool per task (vim/Emacs/pico, mutt/Pine), and you can develop whatever doesn't exist or work, Linux is perfect.
This is not a troll, it's a rant. To prove it, here's how to do something about it (if you really want to): Be willing to move away from truly arcane ways, enable smooth transition for users, and secure the beginners by default. Firefox and Google are both great examples to follow.
We need a new mod: Only insightful when ironic.
Regarding time, there's really only two things that matter over old-style HTML: Validation and using semantics (unfortunately, @lang, <label>, and <abbr> are rare). Validating a change takes a few seconds, and doing semantics right depends a lot on the complexity of the data. At the same time, both of these really do prevent extra work down the road. Size depends far more on the developer than which markup language you use.
XHTML has the advantage of being both a good source and a good target for XSLT. You can e.g. generate your feeds from new pages automatically, and generate pages from your feeds. Store XHTML in the database, and you'll be able to depend on that data tomorrow and 15 years down the road. Also, newer versions of XHTML hint more towards semantics, but as always the quality will depend on whether the developer is willing to learn it properly.
Shameless plug (but IMHO relevant): At my previous job I tried to convince the people in charge that using CSS and XHTML would be a smart move. The turning point was when I showed them that for three different cases, I was able to produce semantic and valid XHTML, plus valid CSS (without table layouts), while at the same time reducing code at least 53% and download size 60%. If that's not good enough to change...
Do you realize you would have been modded troll and insightful if you'd typed C-x r k C-y?
Adblock, baby. Adblock Plus, that is. Oh, and AdBlock Updater. And Flashblock. And TargetKiller.
I, for one, have long ago said good riddance to our filthy, spamridden web overlords.
7 years now without a TV. It's great! No ads (99.5% of them are $#!7 anyway, and 100% of them are $#!7 after watching once), no sports news, no celebrity news, no reality shows, no license, and no box taking up precious floor space. At the same time, a few news sites, online videos, and DVDs give me all the information and entertainment I could ever want.
Of course, that doesn't stop me from the occasional 20 hours/week in GTA, HL2, or Doom 3.
This kind of data is invaluable to root out false positives when looking for suspicious / interesting patterns. E.g., you'll probably be less likely to think of someone as a terrorist if they asked for a wheelchair or anything else which would make them stand out in the relatively small crowd of a airline passengers. Other things, like booking shortly before the flight, indicates little planning. Each indicator gives a small nudge in one or the other direction (provided you have good reference data), and helps data mining a lot.
I hope you'll take better care of her than that. "As of September 2005, Tony Hain (Cisco) estimated the unallocated IANA pool to run out by 2008. Geoff Huston (APNIC) then estimated in November 2005 this to happen in early 2012."
Dude, where did you learn your arithmetics? 6/2=3, dammit.
This message was brought to you by the CTO.
I've long believed that the real "land of freedom" is Europe, with the possible exception of Turkey. Short of denying the existence of the Holocaust, there's not much you can say anywhere here to get arrested. We have real choice when going to elections (e.g., in the 2005 election in Norway, a full seven parties each got more than 5% of the votes).
You, Sir, have just invented another way of telling people where to "stick it". I salute thee.
If I ever invent a time machine, the first mission would be to make sure the process of fusion was renamed to hot non-bomby difficult controllable process, or HNBDCP, to make sure these concepts were never, ever, confused again!
Yeah, I knew Fred. His Redundant XML Object Compiler was really cool!
For Flash, that's mostly just View Page Info -> Media -> Save As. Of course, some sites mess up even that. And Java applets are spawn of the devil anyway - I've only used a handful of them, but all of those would have been better of as static web pages (sic) or Flash. Dunno about those "online desktops" which have popped up lately, but don't they allow you to add any URL?