I don't see the gray-hair-in-a-knot granny librarian soft-icing her way through the latest Safedisc protection...
That library is in your imagination. Modern libraries not only are computerized to an astonishing amount, they do train the next generation of librarians on stuff like Java, SQL and Internet topics.
I'm sure the bars etc. exist - in special planes. Likewise, some engineers are already planning custom-order A380s. Yes, there are people with enough money to buy one as their private plane. One idea I happen to know about is building a bowling lane into the lower deck.
And no, swimming pools are not realistic. You can't keep that much water under control in turbulences. Which is the same reason I doubt one with a fountain was ever actually built.
I've been a die-hard Afterstep fan for years, until I discovered WindowMaker and found it not only an adequate replacement, but a worthy and much better successor. Several years later, the same story repeated with WindowMaker being the old system and XFCE4 being the newcomer.
My only complaint with it is that I can't cover up the taskbar except for using the auto-hide feature, which I loathe. If I could do that, or even disable it altogether (most of the times I just about know what tasks I've running, thank you) then I would give it 10/10.
Ok, so we're mostly geeks here, and I figure geeks with massive math training and coding skills should be able to think logically.
So what's the purpose of this? It can't be being the first one in the theater, there's something called "internet pre-order" for that. Besides, the first people to see it will be invited VIPs at the official premiere anyways.
Actually, it would be much more interesting to find out that these same terror organisations actually do help the suffering population, and what then? Will the FBI freeze their accounts anyways? And what will the mass media report?
No, I'm not from another planet. Hamas, for example, the leading palaestinian terror group, is also a major development organisation, building schools and even hospitals in the israeli-occupied territories.
Several court cases have defined that the Privatkopie only covers personal acquaintances. Making some copies for strangers is not legal. Making one for your wife, one for your best friend and one for the chick you want to impress, is.
Neither. VG Wort ("Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort" - in english "collection agency word") is for written content, i.e. books et al, and has nothing to do with music.
So if you pay a "digital copying tax" on a computer, you must be allowed to do digital copying on it, surely?
Yes, that's the point. In Germany, copying for private purposes is explicitly allowed by law. There are many court cases setting the limits, of course. However, the "Privatkopie" right is quite broad, and it does include making a few (the generally agreed limit is 5 or 6 in total) copies for friends.
We can (probably rightly) assume that the GP is lying or has an otherwise unusual situation,
So why are you arguing against the - just as likely - assumption that he simply fucked up his system?
Nobody says Linux can not be made slow. I can certainly bring my system to a halt if I try hard (keyword: thrashing point). I can surely imagine people doing it unintentionally.
But that's not a problem with Linux, nor with Unix in general, and very certainly not of the kind that the GP claimed.
Actually, for the end-user even more so. My mother was very, very happy with Afterstep. It is a quantum leap easier for her than windos. And yes, she tried windos, she disliked it.
See, the point is that the end-user can not tailor the system to his or her needs, but they can have it tailored and very specifically so.
They don't need extra questions like, "Are you using KDE or Gnome?"
People have the same problem in windos, namely that they have no idea what the program is called, it's "the text editor" (and your tech support guy can guess whether they're using notepad, wordpad, word, or some 3rd party thing).
Beg pardon, but Mac OS X has a CLI much like Linux
A collegue of mine told me that he had to pay $5 an apple when visting there. Granted, they probably do not grow many apples in Japan, but here in Montreal we do not pay $5 the Marocan tangerine.
Japan is expensive, and Tokyo very much, but it's not that extreme, or at least I can't verify. In restaurants, we paid less than twice of what we pay at home. Substract another 10% because you don't tip in Japan. Then you're at roughly London prices.
That's a nice thing. When we went to Japan last year, we gathered lots of information beforehand, and had a few notices with us all the time. Having that in a PDA is certainly useful.
However, getting around Tokyo is fairly easy, and the japanese are extremely friendly and helpful. If you can bridge the language barrier, you're never on your own. Why, at one point all we had to do to have someone ask us if we needed help, walk us to the train and see to it that we got off at the right station, was look dumb at the ticket machine.
In the countryside, though, things are very different, or so we were told. Anything that helps there will be most useful.
Is Microsoft's Single Sign-On vision edging towards oblivion?"
Ever since day one, why?
This was one of the projects that was ripped apart from all sides before it was even launched. Then, as soon as the hype had died down, it was hardly mentioned anywhere. Hypeware, start to finish.
Re:IMHO, none of that matters to the typical end u
on
What's Wrong with Unix?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Installing software is highly unreliable, non-standard, a maze of twisty little interdependant passages, and deeply obscure. Really? For the end-user, it's as simple as an apt-get, rpm or emerge command (or whatever package manager you use). Ah, you're talking about the developer? About installing software that is not packaged? Well, try that on windos. Come back when you're done, like 2006 or so.
There is no standard "windowing" GUI Which is a huge advantage. I happen to hate the XP/windos standard GUI, and there's nothing I can do about it. I tried a few replacements, they all suck, are incomplete, break the system or simply don't work because the friggin GUI is so tied into the OS kernel. On Unix, you can choose which GUI suits you best. I prefer to choose myself instead of having some marketing monkey in Redmond make my choices for me.
Linux has a pretty poor cache and swap system, combined with zero user level control over cache and swap. As a result, over time, the OS runs slower, and s l o w e r and s... l.... o..... w...... r....... until you restart,
All of these are systems that are in constant use as desktop (nox) or servers (lemuria and Mandor). They're very snappy. I've driven one of them (nox) close to the thrashing point once, brought it back and it's been running well ever since, without a reboot. You, my friend, have fucked up your system, that's all. Don't blame it on the machine.
Oh, and it's a very, very good thing that regular users have no control over cache and swap. If you don't grasp the security and reliability dangers inherent in giving them that control, you should give back your root access.
The GUI, in the user sense, is an afterthought. You have to go to the command line to configure and/or adjust and/or install many things. Again, this is a strength, not a weakness. When your GUI breaks on windos, OS X or any other GUI-only system, you're fucked. On Linux, I can drop to the commandline and within a minute or two everything is running fine again. Sure, it may not really be faster than a reboot, but if you have stuff running in the background, then you don't really want to reboot.
How is this not better than the current Unix way of doing things?
Uh, you do realize that OS X is a Unix system, don't you?
They have a very nifty graphical install manager. I see no reason why you couldn't install, say, Debian packages the same way. A Nautilus extension, a virtual Applications directory and an interface to apt and you're done.
EVERYTHING right now goes in/usr, without a directory, because everybody is too lazy to have/usr/foo/bin and/usr/foo/lib in their respective environment variables
Please go back to windos, ok?
There's a reason why every binary is in/usr/bin and every library in/usr/lib, etc. and it's not laziness.
The idea behind is different from windos, which basically says "everything that I need to make coffee in this cupboard, everything I need for tea in that, everything I need for pizza here, everything for lasagne over there..." while Unix says "cuttlery in the drawer, dishes in the left cupboard, cups and glasses in the right cupboard".
Right now, if I want to uninstall a program, I have to remove it from about 10 different places,
Right now, if I want to uninstall a program, I either type "dpkg --purge (name)" or "cd (installdir) && make uninstall". Your problem isn't caused by Unix, it's caused by user stupidity.
Ideally all confi files would follow the same format and syntax
They are. You just need a little (not even much) flexibility of mind.
Every *nix config file I've encountered so far is:
plain text
contains only comment and configuration lines
comment lines are clearly marked with one of a small set of comment markers (# ;// or/* */)
config lines are in the format "variable = value", sometimes with quotes or ; line endings, sometimes with : instead of = or some other, minor variations
I'm sure it would be easy to write a generic config file parser that will tell you which variable the config file sets to which value, no matter which config file you throw at it. In Perl, it's probably a one-liner.:)
Only the minimal low-level core of the system should be based on C ; the rest should be developed in a modern, high-level language.
Nonsense. If you write the code that links hardware to software, you need a language that extends fully both ways.
C may not be the best choice for applications anymore, I certainly agree. But for the OS core, there's simply no contender. The various proof-of-concept attempts to write an entire OS in C++ or Java, for example, are solid failures.
There are many issues with actual implementations, but that is a different thing. Unix(tm) is a concept. Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, *BSD, etc. are operating systems implementing said concept - in different ways.
Complaining about shortcomings in these implementations is very, very different from proposals for changing the concept itself.
In the same vein "what's wrong with cars?" is not a question about whether or not the brake pedal is a little too far left in your model X. Changing the concept of a car requires much more radical thought, going back to the basics of what it is you desire - personal transportation? Cargo movement? Cool engine sound and hot babes?
As an OS concept, Unix has stood the test of time, and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it. Everything I've seen here so far is just incremental improvements of the actual implementations.
Real answers to the question should go along the lines of
Is there a better way for handling stuff than the "everything-is-a-file" philosophy?
What is wrong about the user/group and permissions concept, how can it be improved? (some RBAC implementations actually go that direction)
Is there a better way than the kernel/userspace seperation? I'm not talking about just merging them (i.e. windos, involuntarily) but of replacing it with an entirely new concept, maybe something along the lines of a VM, or a multi-kernel system, or even a non-von-Neumann concept. (add a dozen crazy ideas I don't know about)
So far, I love Unix to death, and I hope its implementations will get better and better. I'm also certain that Unix isn't the ultimate concept, but so far nobody has come up with a better one. As Hugh Daniels said (at HAL2001) "my [interstellar] spaceship won't be running Linux" - I doubt it would be running Unix.
You do have a point there, the Free Software and Open Source Software is not the same thing.
However, I'd really like to know an example that is Free Software, but not [o|O]pen [s|S]ource [s|S]oftware. I really can't imagine how it can give you the 4 freedoms without giving you the source. I can imagine that by some extremely convulted argument you could write a license that passes the Free Software test, but not the Open Source Software definition, but again I'd like to learn of an example, if such exists.
I really do believe that Free Software is the proper term and Open Source Software a marketing effort to sell it to the unwashed CEOs. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though I also believe that OSS is less free than Free Software, and that is a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see the gray-hair-in-a-knot granny librarian soft-icing her way through the latest Safedisc protection...
That library is in your imagination. Modern libraries not only are computerized to an astonishing amount, they do train the next generation of librarians on stuff like Java, SQL and Internet topics.
I'm sure the bars etc. exist - in special planes. Likewise, some engineers are already planning custom-order A380s. Yes, there are people with enough money to buy one as their private plane. One idea I happen to know about is building a bowling lane into the lower deck.
And no, swimming pools are not realistic. You can't keep that much water under control in turbulences. Which is the same reason I doubt one with a fountain was ever actually built.
I've been a die-hard Afterstep fan for years, until I discovered WindowMaker and found it not only an adequate replacement, but a worthy and much better successor.
Several years later, the same story repeated with WindowMaker being the old system and XFCE4 being the newcomer.
My only complaint with it is that I can't cover up the taskbar except for using the auto-hide feature, which I loathe. If I could do that, or even disable it altogether (most of the times I just about know what tasks I've running, thank you) then I would give it 10/10.
Ok, so we're mostly geeks here, and I figure geeks with massive math training and coding skills should be able to think logically.
So what's the purpose of this? It can't be being the first one in the theater, there's something called "internet pre-order" for that. Besides, the first people to see it will be invited VIPs at the official premiere anyways.
So what's it?
And before the usual trolls roll in to claim that most of the spam is from China and whatever:
Top 10 Spammer Countries
If you're too lazy to look, the US is 1st with over 3 times the score of the 2nd place, which is indeed China.
Who made you King?
Linksys did. Dude, read the post you're replying to, ok?
The only charitable organization I contribute to is the Salvation Army.
These people need food, water and housing, not salvation.
Actually, it would be much more interesting to find out that these same terror organisations actually do help the suffering population, and what then? Will the FBI freeze their accounts anyways? And what will the mass media report?
No, I'm not from another planet. Hamas, for example, the leading palaestinian terror group, is also a major development organisation, building schools and even hospitals in the israeli-occupied territories.
Several court cases have defined that the Privatkopie only covers personal acquaintances. Making some copies for strangers is not legal. Making one for your wife, one for your best friend and one for the chick you want to impress, is.
Neither. VG Wort ("Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort" - in english "collection agency word") is for written content, i.e. books et al, and has nothing to do with music.
So if you pay a "digital copying tax" on a computer, you must be allowed to do digital copying on it, surely?
Yes, that's the point. In Germany, copying for private purposes is explicitly allowed by law. There are many court cases setting the limits, of course. However, the "Privatkopie" right is quite broad, and it does include making a few (the generally agreed limit is 5 or 6 in total) copies for friends.
Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean a thing.
Pot, meet kettle.
The parent was giving even less data and was trying to claim a general problem.
Roughly london prices, but 10x london quality.
Very likely, yes. Any nation that is eating fish and meat raw has no other choice but to make fresh and high quality foods a preference.
We can (probably rightly) assume that the GP is lying or has an otherwise unusual situation,
So why are you arguing against the - just as likely - assumption that he simply fucked up his system?
Nobody says Linux can not be made slow. I can certainly bring my system to a halt if I try hard (keyword: thrashing point). I can surely imagine people doing it unintentionally.
But that's not a problem with Linux, nor with Unix in general, and very certainly not of the kind that the GP claimed.
For geeks like you and me, sure.
Actually, for the end-user even more so. My mother was very, very happy with Afterstep. It is a quantum leap easier for her than windos. And yes, she tried windos, she disliked it.
See, the point is that the end-user can not tailor the system to his or her needs, but they can have it tailored and very specifically so.
They don't need extra questions like, "Are you using KDE or Gnome?"
People have the same problem in windos, namely that they have no idea what the program is called, it's "the text editor" (and your tech support guy can guess whether they're using notepad, wordpad, word, or some 3rd party thing).
Beg pardon, but Mac OS X has a CLI much like Linux
You're right on that, of course. I forgot.
A collegue of mine told me that he had to pay $5 an apple when visting there. Granted, they probably do not grow many apples in Japan, but here in Montreal we do not pay $5 the Marocan tangerine.
Japan is expensive, and Tokyo very much, but it's not that extreme, or at least I can't verify.
In restaurants, we paid less than twice of what we pay at home. Substract another 10% because you don't tip in Japan. Then you're at roughly London prices.
That's a nice thing. When we went to Japan last year, we gathered lots of information beforehand, and had a few notices with us all the time. Having that in a PDA is certainly useful.
However, getting around Tokyo is fairly easy, and the japanese are extremely friendly and helpful. If you can bridge the language barrier, you're never on your own. Why, at one point all we had to do to have someone ask us if we needed help, walk us to the train and see to it that we got off at the right station, was look dumb at the ticket machine.
In the countryside, though, things are very different, or so we were told. Anything that helps there will be most useful.
Is Microsoft's Single Sign-On vision edging towards oblivion?"
Ever since day one, why?
This was one of the projects that was ripped apart from all sides before it was even launched. Then, as soon as the hype had died down, it was hardly mentioned anywhere. Hypeware, start to finish.
Installing software is highly unreliable, non-standard, a maze of twisty little interdependant passages, and deeply obscure.
Really?
For the end-user, it's as simple as an apt-get, rpm or emerge command (or whatever package manager you use).
Ah, you're talking about the developer? About installing software that is not packaged? Well, try that on windos. Come back when you're done, like 2006 or so.
There is no standard "windowing" GUI
Which is a huge advantage.
I happen to hate the XP/windos standard GUI, and there's nothing I can do about it. I tried a few replacements, they all suck, are incomplete, break the system or simply don't work because the friggin GUI is so tied into the OS kernel.
On Unix, you can choose which GUI suits you best. I prefer to choose myself instead of having some marketing monkey in Redmond make my choices for me.
Linux has a pretty poor cache and swap system, combined with zero user level control over cache and swap. As a result, over time, the OS runs slower, and s l o w e r and s... l.... o..... w...... r....... until you restart,
Troll
tom@nox:~$ uptime
10:04:32 up 132 days, 17:49, 3 users, load average: 0.08, 0.06, 0.07
tom@lemuria:~$ uptime
10:00:18 up 156 days, 2:00, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.03, 0.00
tom@Mandor:~$ uptime
10:02:44 up 31 days, 21:01, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00
All of these are systems that are in constant use as desktop (nox) or servers (lemuria and Mandor). They're very snappy. I've driven one of them (nox) close to the thrashing point once, brought it back and it's been running well ever since, without a reboot.
You, my friend, have fucked up your system, that's all. Don't blame it on the machine.
Oh, and it's a very, very good thing that regular users have no control over cache and swap. If you don't grasp the security and reliability dangers inherent in giving them that control, you should give back your root access.
The GUI, in the user sense, is an afterthought. You have to go to the command line to configure and/or adjust and/or install many things.
Again, this is a strength, not a weakness. When your GUI breaks on windos, OS X or any other GUI-only system, you're fucked. On Linux, I can drop to the commandline and within a minute or two everything is running fine again. Sure, it may not really be faster than a reboot, but if you have stuff running in the background, then you don't really want to reboot.
How is this not better than the current Unix way of doing things?
Uh, you do realize that OS X is a Unix system, don't you?
They have a very nifty graphical install manager. I see no reason why you couldn't install, say, Debian packages the same way. A Nautilus extension, a virtual Applications directory and an interface to apt and you're done.
EVERYTHING right now goes in /usr, without a directory, because everybody is too lazy to have /usr/foo/bin and /usr/foo/lib in their respective environment variables
/usr/bin and every library in /usr/lib, etc. and it's not laziness.
Please go back to windos, ok?
There's a reason why every binary is in
The idea behind is different from windos, which basically says "everything that I need to make coffee in this cupboard, everything I need for tea in that, everything I need for pizza here, everything for lasagne over there..." while Unix says "cuttlery in the drawer, dishes in the left cupboard, cups and glasses in the right cupboard".
Right now, if I want to uninstall a program, I have to remove it from about 10 different places,
Right now, if I want to uninstall a program, I either type "dpkg --purge (name)" or "cd (installdir) && make uninstall".
Your problem isn't caused by Unix, it's caused by user stupidity.
They are. You just need a little (not even much) flexibility of mind.
Every *nix config file I've encountered so far is:
I'm sure it would be easy to write a generic config file parser that will tell you which variable the config file sets to which value, no matter which config file you throw at it. In Perl, it's probably a one-liner.
Only the minimal low-level core of the system should be based on C ; the rest should be developed in a modern, high-level language.
Nonsense. If you write the code that links hardware to software, you need a language that extends fully both ways.
C may not be the best choice for applications anymore, I certainly agree. But for the OS core, there's simply no contender. The various proof-of-concept attempts to write an entire OS in C++ or Java, for example, are solid failures.
There are many issues with actual implementations, but that is a different thing. Unix(tm) is a concept. Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX, *BSD, etc. are operating systems implementing said concept - in different ways.
Complaining about shortcomings in these implementations is very, very different from proposals for changing the concept itself.
In the same vein "what's wrong with cars?" is not a question about whether or not the brake pedal is a little too far left in your model X. Changing the concept of a car requires much more radical thought, going back to the basics of what it is you desire - personal transportation? Cargo movement? Cool engine sound and hot babes?
As an OS concept, Unix has stood the test of time, and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it. Everything I've seen here so far is just incremental improvements of the actual implementations.
Real answers to the question should go along the lines of
So far, I love Unix to death, and I hope its implementations will get better and better. I'm also certain that Unix isn't the ultimate concept, but so far nobody has come up with a better one. As Hugh Daniels said (at HAL2001) "my [interstellar] spaceship won't be running Linux" - I doubt it would be running Unix.
You do have a point there, the Free Software and Open Source Software is not the same thing.
However, I'd really like to know an example that is Free Software, but not [o|O]pen [s|S]ource [s|S]oftware. I really can't imagine how it can give you the 4 freedoms without giving you the source. I can imagine that by some extremely convulted argument you could write a license that passes the Free Software test, but not the Open Source Software definition, but again I'd like to learn of an example, if such exists.
I really do believe that Free Software is the proper term and Open Source Software a marketing effort to sell it to the unwashed CEOs. That's not necessarily a bad thing, though I also believe that OSS is less free than Free Software, and that is a bad thing.