(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process went smoothly.
Yeah, and my company was going to use Windows Vista Ultimate network server sql, but it did not supported WWMCCS and the RSTS file system.
If you learn Slackware, you know Linux! Why is that you ask? Because Slackware does not come with a bunch of highly modified packages, Bah you whippersnappers kids who want everything spoon fed. If you *really* want to know Liux you should get LFS . And not that "Slackware" kiddie distributions. Where is the fun on that?
sucks because people use the system even when they don't need it so the whole thing is one big congested nightmare.
You must be from the UK, (thinking that your NHS sucks and whatnot). Actually, the UK's NHS system is really good.
To think that you can go to a Gastroenterologist, then get a Sigmuidoscopy, some time later get a radioscopy, some blood tests and several visits to your GP between all those. COMPLETELY FREE.
Zilch cost nothing to worry about (no need to hide X or Y to anyone for fear that your "health insurance" might not pay for the bills).
The system is incredible. And I say that from personal experience. All those things would have costed an arm and leg in the USA or in Mexico (or wait one year to use the IMSS).
And, what better thing to hear from your GP saying "we will continue doing whatever tests you need until YOU are completely satisfied and sure it is IBS (although the doctor already told you it is IBS but you want to be 200% sure)". And of course, not having to pay for any of the test (even if it is a complete colonoscopy, or an x-ray or whatever else).
However, I certainly do feel bad for any kids out there who end up with an OLPC running XP.
Letting Windows XP run in the OLPC computers is shit. Do you know who will end paying for the WinXP Licenses?, not the poor kids in PerÃ, but you and me, and the other people that donates money to the NGOs that develop programs and buy such computers.
I do not know why people are so paranoid of Adobe. Shure, their PDF reader sucks really bad but IMO they do not seem to be "open source" unfriendly (for a company which business is to/sell/ software).
They provided the PDF specification for free (unlike other DOCument formaxls). They have released a [free] version of their reader for Unix like (linux/bsd/etc...) systems since a long time ago. Now they are doing the same with a technology that certainly *is* a defacto standard and which some other company would have chosen to guard so closed and milk all they could from it (shit... even the GIF guys tried to sue teh internetz).
And on top of that they have pretty much one or two of the best software in their respective markets (Photoshop, ilustrator, etc).
I do not see anything inherently bad in what they have done. And I deffinitely would not compare them to Microsoft.
IMHO it was a good language for its time. It was my "second" programming language (after Logo... if you consider it a PL). And I remember getting into "hacking" or "cracking" programs for the first time trying to get the listing from a Poker program written in basic (there where two options to prevent that [BASICA or GWBASIC], one was only an instruction which could be easily bypassed, the other IIRC encrypted the actual code). aaah the memories.
I wrote some games for myself, including a pong clone where the "padles" where circles with small shoes, "eyes" and a racket... all via DRAW "U10l10...." haha... I found very cool that when some of my friends came to my house and spent some time before going out, they prefered to play that game (featured multiplayer AND simple multilevel AI) to any of the other available games (I think there was Wolf3d, dangerous dave, price of persia and the others...)
On the second game I made, I learnt about bitmaps =oP
aaah the memories. BTW that was all around 1990 or something so I do not consider myself an old fart... I just started programming pretty young.
However, until someone comes up with a way to store the, apparently, unlimited fuel necessary to power a suit such as Iron Mans, and have it weigh, again, apparently, next to nothing, we will never see flying suits of armor.
That is why I have always thought that in order to create a real/usable flying mechanism for things like rocket belts and the like, we would have to find something (in nature) that is "normally" suspended in the air. This is, something which natural state is to be floating.
We kind got it with Zepellins (gases) but of course we need something which does not require that much volume.
After we get that, then it would just be a matter of "modulating" the efficacy of such thing to get higher or lower in the sky.
Until them, we are bound by Newtons law, "Everything that goes up, must come down"
Oh, and anyone who throws in a "but my grandma has been using Linux since 1965 for $fooTinyUseCase" gets a kick in the backside.
Translation:
And anyone who dares to disagree with me gets a kick in the backside...
Threatening posts that you disagree with is also censorship;-)
Re:Feature freeze, no new features only bugfixing?
on
KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Plasma aims to change that, incorporating semantic application elements, and bringing cooperating technologies to the user's fingertips in a way that is visually appealing while easing work flow.
Howdy, it seems some of the Apple and Microsoft marketing guys are contributing to KDE!. BTW, you forgot to add the word synegry. It always sounds more buzzworthy:).
Forks are not always bad. IIRC there was even a gcc fork which was just recently combined with the GNU gcc.
IMHO someone should "invent" an Open Source developing process called something like "user oriented development process" where everything done to the program is a direct result of the user's requests.
Of course such thing won't be popular because no kiddo hacking their open source project ever wants to do the boring things. And if they did not think it, it must be wrong.
That is one of the differences between software made by a company and software made by Jode Coder. The company can spend money on UI designers and usability tests whereas the majority of open source projects are just (a) a bunch of buttons thrown together or (b) a rip-off of some commercial program.
The original Pidgin coders may get down of their pedestal when they see the majority of people migrating to the forked version. And maybe then it can be combined and integrated again. Or maybe the original pidgin can disappear.
For god's sake, it is Russia you are talking about. Just to yourself a favour and take a look at Russia in google maps. The place is *huge*. The woman could very well be in any small/medium town, living a great life and maybe (just maybe) reading the news of Hans literally LOL.
Not that I am anybody to judge her or him. Because she could very well be dead by this time. Although I do not know how -bad- is that he was found guilty (is it possible for him to get the deat penaly?) I certainly would consider, as other people said that, unless a body is found, he should not be punished with "all the weight of the law".
Too bad... If he get's life sentence, is it possible to take laptop's to the jail in the USA? hey, the guy is still a good programmer, and IMHO Open Source should not differentiate between "status".
All this to say that I'm by no means convinced that adding more balloons, wizards, and dialog boxes will magically make it easier for users to figure out what's going on.
Spot on. Back around 1994 when I was just starting to do serious programming, my dad told me it would be a really good idea to make a program that "read" the instructions of what to do next in the computer. Because a lot of his students (he is a Biologist and used to do teaching at a Unversity) just stared at the screen but never did *read* the info (much of that because we speak Spanish natively, but from my experience even happens with native speakers).
I think it would be an interesting usuability test to do something like that. Make a voice equivalent message for each message of the operating system and see if people pay more attention.
Of course, with some of the current messages appearing on Ubuntu and other linux distros (like "Attention, your NTFS filesystem could not be mounted by NTFS-3g in/media/Musica___ because the MFT indicates that it was not cleanly unmounted...>") would not help even if it was sung...
Yeah, fuck Ford. We at Toyota should make our cars with squared tires and triangular wheels. And Motor? WTF that's for n00bs, people should move their cars by using their feet.
Oh and no radio too, well yeah, lets put radio but not AM or FM, lets use OFDM.
And how well do you think your girlfriend would go on a vanilla windows install with no flash installed, MSN account not setup, etc?
Quite fine, there is the Windows Messenger that comes by default in Windows Xp.
And about Flash? the first time you go to a flash-based site, it tells you you must install Flash and asks you if you want to install it, after there, just clicking YES YES NEXT NEXT ACCEPT YES will take you to a fully working Flash IE.
If the article's author had setup flash / pidgin / explained the difference between GIMP & Open Office draw, his girlfriend would have had few problems.
Yeah, but that is the main idea with this Usuability testing/QA issues. You do not want having to explain to everyone about such things. By the time you are telling them "GIMP... which stants for GNU Image Manipulation Program.. GNU is for GNU is not Unix" they lost all interest and just tell you to please resintall Windows.
Oh, and by the way, I think as the first comment on the original article suggested, the secret lies on doing the initial setup (flash, quicktime, etc etc).
But I also think that it is a good idea to install wine. I think it is mature enough to run the random program that the users find on the internet. And, if by any chance it does not run and they call you about it, you can always then direct them to the Open Source alternative (GuitarPro --> TuxGuitar, Metrhonome XP -->any good methronome? VirtualDub-->Cinepaint[a bit overkill but I have not found anything better], etc tec)
Note, the problem with 5) burning music was not the actual burning, but finding the mp3s on a windows partition.
Oh, I would like another issue relevant to this. If you have a Windows NTFS partition (the "standard" right now) and you turn of windows via hibernate, you won't be able to mount the hard disk on Ubuntu. Instead, when clicking on the disk icon you will get a F-ugly message telling you that the disk could not be mounted and a text box with a shitload of text presumably output from the mount command.
It thens tells you that you can either go to the console and mount it with read only (for which there is no "graphical" option, you've got to do it via mount/dev/sda1/media/whatever or modifying fstab or mtab [none of which have the actual/dev/sda1 listing, I think Ubuntu uses other files... but have never been able to guess where does it hide them...]) or go to windows and turn it off without hibernation.
IMHO if it is *really impossible to mount an NTFS partition when Windows is hibernated ( I can mount my FAT32 partitions without problem) they should ask the user if they want it to mount it read-only, with a nice simple yes/no message.
"The Windows Disk(partition) you tried to access can not be mounted because Windows was not properly shutted off.\n" "Would you like to mount it as read-only?" [yes/no]
BTW... write Windows disk/partition and not NTFS. Yeah, I know windows disk/partition is not "extrictly" correct but standard users are not as pedantic as us geeks, and they won't know what NTFS is.
Overall, I agree with the majority of comments so far. THIS kind of tests is what Ubuntu devs should do. IMHO, This is the kind of QA/Usability that Canonical should pay for. This specific article should be used as a "template" for other people.
There should be a "usuability"-bug tracker (similar but separated from launchpad) in which people could add these kind of stuff.
Forgive my naivness, as I do not know too much about the subject but after reading several of the comments on this tread, I got a question. First of all, thanks for explaining the problem on this simple sentence:
..but what they do need is an Outlook type app that can get to whatever email system they want. The big problem is and always has been that most third party hardware won't sync with much else besides outlook. Take a look at Blackberries which most every small business owner is using. You can sync to Outlook, Yahoo, Groupwise or Notes. So, my question is, wouldn't it be simple to make a filter in, say Thunderbird which acts as an "outlook client" and can be used with all those backends that are able to sync with the real outlook. I mean, for the back end servers it would seem they are syncing with outlook but it would be whatever open platform.
I think even google calendar has only made available the option to sync with Outlook...
Is this not done for patents or copyright reasons?
Slashdot Mirror
(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we
were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process
went smoothly.
Yeah, and my company was going to use Windows Vista Ultimate network server sql, but it did not supported WWMCCS and the RSTS file system.
What an utter crap is this Windows Vista...
No, it is lead over contamination.
No.
Sounds like the studies by the Tobacco industries trying to show that smoking does not kills you.
Now Taser manufacturers can join the M.O.D squad
Because Slackware does not come with a bunch of highly modified packages, Bah you whippersnappers kids who want everything spoon fed. If you *really* want to know Liux you should get LFS . And not that "Slackware" kiddie distributions. Where is the fun on that?
STFU, we are trying to someway blame Microsoft through this slashdot story.
What if Google or Yahoo profit from services provided to Cuba? (i.e., advertising, I could pay Cuban kids 1 peso for each ad they clicked in my page).
Shure, USA Gov. does not have any trouble with Yahoo/Google bending to China, but what about Cuba?
Not only that, but education in Cuba is really really good. You would be amazed.
sucks because people use the system even when they don't need it so the whole thing is one big congested nightmare.
You must be from the UK, (thinking that your NHS sucks and whatnot). Actually, the UK's NHS system is really good.
To think that you can go to a Gastroenterologist, then get a Sigmuidoscopy, some time later get a radioscopy, some blood tests and several visits to your GP between all those. COMPLETELY FREE.
Zilch cost nothing to worry about (no need to hide X or Y to anyone for fear that your "health insurance" might not pay for the bills).
The system is incredible. And I say that from personal experience. All those things would have costed an arm and leg in the USA or in Mexico (or wait one year to use the IMSS).
And, what better thing to hear from your GP saying "we will continue doing whatever tests you need until YOU are completely satisfied and sure it is IBS (although the doctor already told you it is IBS but you want to be 200% sure)". And of course, not having to pay for any of the test (even if it is a complete colonoscopy, or an x-ray or whatever else).
Yeah, I sometimes think Taco should rename "Anonymous Coward" to "John Doe" or "Joe Sixpack".
Oh, and selectively rename one or two of specific slashdot account names to "Comic Book Guy".
That would make a good April fools joke...
However, I certainly do feel bad for any kids out there who end up with an OLPC running XP.
Letting Windows XP run in the OLPC computers is shit. Do you know who will end paying for the WinXP Licenses?, not the poor kids in PerÃ, but you and me, and the other people that donates money to the NGOs that develop programs and buy such computers.
I do not know why people are so paranoid of Adobe. Shure, their PDF reader sucks really bad but IMO they do not seem to be "open source" unfriendly (for a company which business is to /sell/ software).
They provided the PDF specification for free (unlike other DOCument formaxls). They have released a [free] version of their reader for Unix like (linux/bsd/etc...) systems since a long time ago. Now they are doing the same with a technology that certainly *is* a defacto standard and which some other company would have chosen to guard so closed and milk all they could from it (shit... even the GIF guys tried to sue teh internetz).
And on top of that they have pretty much one or two of the best software in their respective markets (Photoshop, ilustrator, etc).
I do not see anything inherently bad in what they have done. And I deffinitely would not compare them to Microsoft.
IMHO it was a good language for its time. It was my "second" programming language (after Logo... if you consider it a PL). And I remember getting into "hacking" or "cracking" programs for the first time trying to get the listing from a Poker program written in basic (there where two options to prevent that [BASICA or GWBASIC], one was only an instruction which could be easily bypassed, the other IIRC encrypted the actual code). aaah the memories.
I wrote some games for myself, including a pong clone where the "padles" where circles with small shoes, "eyes" and a racket... all via DRAW "U10l10...." haha... I found very cool that when some of my friends came to my house and spent some time before going out, they prefered to play that game (featured multiplayer AND simple multilevel AI) to any of the other available games (I think there was Wolf3d, dangerous dave, price of persia and the others...)
On the second game I made, I learnt about bitmaps =oP
aaah the memories. BTW that was all around 1990 or something so I do not consider myself an old fart... I just started programming pretty young.
However, until someone comes up with a way to store the, apparently, unlimited fuel necessary to power a suit such as Iron Mans, and have it weigh, again, apparently, next to nothing, we will never see flying suits of armor.
That is why I have always thought that in order to create a real/usable flying mechanism for things like rocket belts and the like, we would have to find something (in nature) that is "normally" suspended in the air. This is, something which natural state is to be floating.
We kind got it with Zepellins (gases) but of course we need something which does not require that much volume.
After we get that, then it would just be a matter of "modulating" the efficacy of such thing to get higher or lower in the sky.
Until them, we are bound by Newtons law, "Everything that goes up, must come down"
Oh, and anyone who throws in a "but my grandma has been using Linux since 1965 for $fooTinyUseCase" gets a kick in the backside.
Translation:
And anyone who dares to disagree with me gets a kick in the backside...
Threatening posts that you disagree with is also censorship
Plasma aims to change that, incorporating semantic application elements, and bringing cooperating technologies to the user's fingertips in a way that is visually appealing while easing work flow.
:).
Howdy, it seems some of the Apple and Microsoft marketing guys are contributing to KDE!. BTW, you forgot to add the word synegry. It always sounds more buzzworthy
Forks are not always bad. IIRC there was even a gcc fork which was just recently combined with the GNU gcc.
IMHO someone should "invent" an Open Source developing process called something like "user oriented development process" where everything done to the program is a direct result of the user's requests.
Of course such thing won't be popular because no kiddo hacking their open source project ever wants to do the boring things. And if they did not think it, it must be wrong.
That is one of the differences between software made by a company and software made by Jode Coder. The company can spend money on UI designers and usability tests whereas the majority of open source projects are just (a) a bunch of buttons thrown together or (b) a rip-off of some commercial program.
The original Pidgin coders may get down of their pedestal when they see the majority of people migrating to the forked version. And maybe then it can be combined and integrated again. Or maybe the original pidgin can disappear.
Hey, and why not instead of doing a whole fork, the pissed developers offer a
"Do not resize input area" plugin?
hehe... just saying.
You made me actually do WORK ... what am I supposed to do during office hours if not reading slashdot?
Damn you!
Exactly what I thought.
For god's sake, it is Russia you are talking about. Just to yourself a favour and take a look at Russia in google maps. The place is *huge*. The woman could very well be in any small/medium town, living a great life and maybe (just maybe) reading the news of Hans literally LOL.
Not that I am anybody to judge her or him. Because she could very well be dead by this time. Although I do not know how -bad- is that he was found guilty (is it possible for him to get the deat penaly?) I certainly would consider, as other people said that, unless a body is found, he should not be punished with "all the weight of the law".
Too bad... If he get's life sentence, is it possible to take laptop's to the jail in the USA? hey, the guy is still a good programmer, and IMHO Open Source should not differentiate between "status".
All this to say that I'm by no means convinced that adding more balloons, wizards, and dialog boxes will magically make it easier for users to figure out what's going on.
/media/Musica___ because the MFT indicates that it was not cleanly unmounted...>") would not help even if it was sung ...
Spot on. Back around 1994 when I was just starting to do serious programming, my dad told me it would be a really good idea to make a program that "read" the instructions of what to do next in the computer. Because a lot of his students (he is a Biologist and used to do teaching at a Unversity) just stared at the screen but never did *read* the info (much of that because we speak Spanish natively, but from my experience even happens with native speakers).
I think it would be an interesting usuability test to do something like that. Make a voice equivalent message for each message of the operating system and see if people pay more attention.
Of course, with some of the current messages appearing on Ubuntu and other linux distros (like "Attention, your NTFS filesystem could not be mounted by NTFS-3g in
Yeah, fuck Ford. We at Toyota should make our cars with squared tires and triangular wheels. And Motor? WTF that's for n00bs, people should move their cars by using their feet.
Oh and no radio too, well yeah, lets put radio but not AM or FM, lets use OFDM.
And how well do you think your girlfriend would go on a vanilla windows install with no flash installed, MSN account not setup, etc?
Quite fine, there is the Windows Messenger that comes by default in Windows Xp.
And about Flash? the first time you go to a flash-based site, it tells you you must install Flash and asks you if you want to install it, after there, just clicking YES YES NEXT NEXT ACCEPT YES will take you to a fully working Flash IE.
If the article's author had setup flash / pidgin / explained the difference between GIMP & Open Office draw, his girlfriend would have had few problems.
Yeah, but that is the main idea with this Usuability testing/QA issues. You do not want having to explain to everyone about such things. By the time you are telling them "GIMP... which stants for GNU Image Manipulation Program.. GNU is for GNU is not Unix" they lost all interest and just tell you to please resintall Windows.
Oh, and by the way, I think as the first comment on the original article suggested, the secret lies on doing the initial setup (flash, quicktime, etc etc).
But I also think that it is a good idea to install wine. I think it is mature enough to run the random program that the users find on the internet. And, if by any chance it does not run and they call you about it, you can always then direct them to the Open Source alternative (GuitarPro --> TuxGuitar, Metrhonome XP -->any good methronome? VirtualDub-->Cinepaint[a bit overkill but I have not found anything better], etc tec)
Note, the problem with 5) burning music was not the actual burning, but finding the mp3s on a windows partition.
/dev/sda1 /media/whatever or modifying fstab or mtab [none of which have the actual /dev/sda1 listing, I think Ubuntu uses other files... but have never been able to guess where does it hide them...]) or go to windows and turn it off without hibernation.
Oh, I would like another issue relevant to this. If you have a Windows NTFS partition (the "standard" right now) and you turn of windows via hibernate, you won't be able to mount the hard disk on Ubuntu. Instead, when clicking on the disk icon you will get a F-ugly message telling you that the disk could not be mounted and a text box with a shitload of text presumably output from the mount command.
It thens tells you that you can either go to the console and mount it with read only (for which there is no "graphical" option, you've got to do it via mount
IMHO if it is *really impossible to mount an NTFS partition when Windows is hibernated ( I can mount my FAT32 partitions without problem) they should ask the user if they want it to mount it read-only, with a nice simple yes/no message.
"The Windows Disk(partition) you tried to access can not be mounted because Windows was not properly shutted off.\n" "Would you like to mount it as read-only?" [yes/no]
BTW... write Windows disk/partition and not NTFS. Yeah, I know windows disk/partition is not "extrictly" correct but standard users are not as pedantic as us geeks, and they won't know what NTFS is.
Overall, I agree with the majority of comments so far. THIS kind of tests is what Ubuntu devs should do. IMHO, This is the kind of QA/Usability that Canonical should pay for. This specific article should be used as a "template" for other people.
There should be a "usuability"-bug tracker (similar but separated from launchpad) in which people could add these kind of stuff.
I think even google calendar has only made available the option to sync with Outlook...
Is this not done for patents or copyright reasons?