As a UK citizen I'm pretty disgusted that a lot of our landmarks and history, as well as worthwhile projects such as revived steam railway lines and 'sense' centres for severely disabled kids with people putting their own volunteer time in, are somehow getting turn down for National Lottery funding (there never is a solid reason given) and billions are being given to the waste of time and money that is the Olympics, largely because of corruption. Who's going to miss a few million going missing here and there? These are schemes and projects that only want a few tens or hundreds of thousands pounds as well.
This is exactly the sort of thing that the National Lottery was supposed to help, and exactly the sort of thing that has been let down.
I really hope you're right and the review is crap, but the trouble is that the review matches up to the trailer and what has happened surrounding the filming of the movie. ShogunMaster describes some convoluted bullshit plot regarding aliens and Roswell, and what do I see on the trailer? A container with Roswell on it. Shit.
In addition, they have also cancelled the release party at Cannes and John Hurt has basically come out and said that the film is a vehicle for George Lucas to make another billion in merchandise and expand his ego still further (no change there). This film is going to blow bricks made out of solid, constipated shit and as a someone who has enjoyed IJ films immensely from about eight years old, this is going to scar me for life.
It's pretty obvious you've got a strong dislike for Apple -- and I have to think it goes beyond a simple, logical comparison of system specs for the money.
I think that sentence says it all, and tells us instantly what we're dealing with here, but anyway.......
Unless things are different in other countries, Apple tech. support is WORLDS better than HP in the USA.
In my experience Apple Care and tech support isn't all that great, largely because they know they have you by the balls (if they say it's not supported you're back down to the Apple store forking out for another machine), but the point is that you need Apple tech support to get anything done - and they know it. In the PC world you have a lot of different options as to where you get your support and what you want to connect to your machine.
Apple is far more conscious of "design" than HP.
History has taught us that faster and cheaper wins every time, and this is an argument that is usually wheeled out when people know that is the case. Hell, why do you think Apple moved to Intel at all?
OS X, in my opinion, is a FAR less trouble-prone environment to use, day-to-day, than anything else offered for PCs.
Evidence for that is thin on the ground.
So essentially, even if Apple hardware costs me a premium, I understand that paying it helps support and subsidize further OS X development and improvement -- and to me, that's a good place for my money to go.
He might have, uh, I don't know, ummmmmmmmmm... gotten the opinion of the upstream developers first?
No he didn't. Read the thread and understand how he doesn't understand what he's changing here. He was even told about PURIFY, and there is no reason to be making any patch like this outside of upstream development regardless of who's opinion he sought.
This is a common myth, but Debian doesn't do any explicit testing, they pack things into unstable and then just let them go into testing/stable if no bug reports come in. There is no standard code audit or anything going on.
No they don't, yes they do and no there isn't. This is what has always made me very hesitant of Debian with their willingness to patch large numbers of packages, sometimes without any upstream involvement at all and certainly no upstream committing. Their reasons for doing so are sometimes exceptionally flaky to say the least (backporting whole security patches I can just about understand) and seem to be more based on a Debian developer's opinion of what is 'right'.
Given that the code is so shoddily written that neither of the functions has a comment to say what it's supposed to do, I think I can forgive him for that.
I can't. This is just fucking amateur hour. There is no reason whatsoever for that patch.
If he really needed to do it then why didn't he ask, and get the opinion of, uh, I don't know, ummmmmmmmm......the upstream developers first?! Making your own patches on someone else's software, in isolation, that few if any people will review is a seriously stupid idea. I don't care how shoddily the code is written, or if there is an entire novel written before it.
Seriously, I'm glad I don't put up with this shit from Debian. The place for code development is upstream. If you have a patch, get it upstream and get the approval of the people who actually develop the software so you can understand why Valgrind is complaining the way it is and why it has been left in. Backporting security fixes because of Debian's stupid development cycle I can just about understand (and even that's a problem as upstream moves on to new versions), but hacking on something downstream that few people will see is one reason why I just don't feel too much trust for Debian - and they do it far more than they should usually because of their own silly ideas about what is 'right'. There's just no reason for that patch at all.
I have quite a few OpenVPN keys generated for a wide variety of purposes, and if I'd been using Debian's OpenSSL then I'd be really pissed. There's just no reason for this, and no reason for anyone outside of upstream to commit a patch like that - and there it would have been caught pretty much instantly before a release was even made, or even better, dismissed as the crap that it is.
All that crap you hear from certain people about Debian being 'rock solid' and 'stable' is just that. Crap.
It matters little. The fact is that, despite a lot of hype from some people, without Mongrel Rails simply could not be deployed. mod_rails (mod_whatever) has been talked about for absolutely ages, and should have been around pretty much from the start.
You just can't afford to what for _insert cool new Rails thing here_ to come along.
Basically, RoR wishes that it was Zope. It's not. People here haven't even touched on the biggest clusterfuck in terms of wasted development time - deployment.
With douchebags like "Zed" (of "Zed is So Fucking Awesome" fame) working on RoR
He didn't work on RoR, and his blog was a rant against the people who are. He wrote code and produced the only feasible way of deploying Rails applications so they didn't need restarted ten times a day - Mongrel.
Are we supposed to take the technical opinions of someone who threatens to beat up people who disagree with them seriously? All I saw was a bunch of personal insults and no technical opinions.
Most of it was tongue in cheek, but there was some stuff that made you wonder. The semi-colon in URLs always made me seriously wonder about the Rails people. Even then though, he still thinks Ruby is a good language and Rails is a decent framework in the hands of the right people.
Yer, it was a bit of a rant, and I found parts of it quite funny, but the fact is that Zed Shaw has written solid code for Mongrel, which is pretty much the only way you can deploy a Rails application these days. When I first looked at Rails and saw the whole FastCGI deployment thing I shrieked in terror. For that reason, I have some respect for Zed and respect his point of view.
When you need to whip off a simple interface to a database EXTREMELY fast for a little Mom&Pop shop IMHO nothing beats VB6+either Access or MySQL(depending on what is handy and the size of the shop).
I agree with you. I don't know why on Earth people have a pop at VB, other than in the hands of a bad programmer it can be a joke (like everything really). I've seen people experienced with other languages, such as C++, Python, Ruby etc. get to grips with VB very quickly, produce some pretty impressive GUI applications and write some nice, neat and maintainable code with stuff separated into UI layers and business logic DLL layers and where they would never consider using anything else for creating user interfaces. Just because you can dump everything into one click event, it doesn't mean that everybody does.
He was specifically talking about GUI install tools, which is insane.
Same difference. GUI admin, install and package tools are expected in the vast majority of places that Ubuntu hopes to go - i.e. beyond the Unix/Linux worlds and into the Windows one. In reality, that's the only place where Ubuntu can hope to go, because they're just not going to be able to compete with Red Hat or even Suse.
A GUI has no place on a server unless there's a damn good reason for it to be there. It takes resources, which means less resources for your applications....
Well, there's terminal services or centralising your GUI applications, visualising the state of your software (which is why GUIs started being used in the first place) and appointing one GUI server to manage several headless ones so you can manage things on a constricted link while you're off site - preferably using NX or something. NX is a gem.
Good GUI tools along with the CLI stuff we've all come to appreciate are expected, and a pre-requisite, if people using Windows Server are ever to be attracted away. That's the deal.
IIS's nifty interface doesn't make it any better or easier to run than Apache for example.
While the level of expertise still needs to be high for either, I think anyone would rather look at the IIS interface than stare and scroll through httpd.conf. It doesn't make you any less skilled at what you need to know by looking at a fairly archaic and poorly laid out text file, or having to remember one esoteric switch in a command.
The forced inclusion of a GUI is one of the reasons why Windows should only be used on servers in a subset of circumstances
Can't disagree with that. A GUI should be a nice complement that can be detached from the systems and servers themselves.
Now what are nice are things like Oracles management console, which provides you with a GUI, but doesn't require the GUI to be running on the server. And of course web-based solutions.
That's the ticket.
I can think of a lot of things they aren't doing. They're a desktop distro, quite frankly they don't have the talent or R&D to offer the kind of support IBM, RedHat and Novell can.
I can't see any of them doing it. I wish those companies would look beyond the Linux and traditional Unix worlds, look at Windows Server, look at what's wrong with it (and there's plenty) and start creating something that makes Microsoft think "Shit......" The obvious place to look at doing that is with the daft stuff in Windows Servers like CALs and the ridiculous licensing for Terminal Services sessions (which we get for free in the X world).
There's plenty out there if people want to look for it.
Best gui install and package tools: 1) Ubuntu (synaptic) 2) RHEL (yumex) 3) SuSE (yast)
Hmmmmm. The top two you've listed there have woefully inadequate administration tools, particularly Ubuntu, and nothing really compares to the universal tools that is YaST. It has a GUI front-end, and a curses one for headless people(!) that looks pretty universal and works in the same way. No, aptitude isn't a replacement.
Mind you, the state of GUI tools on Linux is woefully inadequate when compared to Windows 2003 for a few reasons:
1. Many people in the Linux world believe that there is no place for GUI tools at all, and everything should be done from the command line. How wrong they are. There is a place for both options, as Microsoft is finding out and trying to improve on.
2. The GUI libraries that many distributions use are just terribly inadequate when trying to create any useful user interface beyond a few buttons and checkboxes.
3. Many distributors believe that they're not competing with Windows Server, but are competing in the low-hanging-fruit world of Unix migrations. Bad mistake.
Fewest unnecessary applications running and listening to open network ports (portmap, nfs, xfs,...): 1) Ubuntu 2) SuSE 3) RHEL
This isn't an easy job. Distributors have to balance getting rid of 'unneeded services' with providing a certain level of out-of-the-box functionality. Ubuntu, for example, tried to do that whole 'no ports on by default' thing and managed to totally foul up the default set up of CUPS at one time.
Never encountered anything that all of those distros didn't install on, and they're all pretty equal.
So there's a really big opportunity here, for the first company to do Linux support well. Ubuntu is currently the most promising candidate in this field, by a large margin
I can't see anything that Ubuntu is doing differently to warrant that assessment. Red Hat is the market leader, and there is barely enough room for Suse at the moment. Ubuntu isn't creating good quality graphical administration tools in order to go head-to-head with Windows Server, they're not looking at the needs of developers, and they're not doing anything at all in those departments period, that would really set them apart from everyone else. They seem to have reached a technological dead-end in their thinking, which is a pity really because there is a ton of stuff at their disposal in the open source world to do that really well.
Ubuntu is Yet Another Linux Distribution(tm), no matter how much some people, sometimes desperately, want to attach to it.
How many people ever used ReiserFS? By all reports (from the few people I've ever known who actually used it) it was a pretty risky move. When ReiserFS screwed your filesystem (as happened to these guys at some point), there weren't really any good tools to try and fix it...
I've been running it in a Suse system for years. It's still up, it's been repaired and I've successfully recovered deleted files.
The problem with Hans, and where his credibility fell, was that he assumed he could just move on and dump an existing filesystem that lots of people used and come up with something completely new and incompatible. That's not the way filesystems work. It's kind of like ZFS now really.
What this article shows is that usability is hard. You're not going to be able to work towards anything 'usable' by simply following HIG guidelines and talking endlessly about 'ordinary users'. Even some of the usability studies I've seen don't cover the right stuff. Mind you, what she did achieve just goes to show how much 'ordinary users' can get done, and that they're not stupid.
In reality, the stuff that is touched on in this article could be used to make things better and more straightforward for everyone, no matter how technical or non-technical they are. I mean, there have been times when I've used an e-mail client, some I've used before, and I'm thinking "How hard would it be just to have a setup wizard that asks me what the name of my mail server is, how I'm connecting and what the username and password is for both sending and receiving?". Outlook, Thunderbird, KMail and others seriously lack this, and lack the ability to roll other more advanced options in such as SSL and TLS transparently. It shouldn't be that much of a pain.
The other problems mainly go back to something I can remember talking about at length before. Things like Flash should be pre-installed, and if not, installing it should be a pretty easy process. Linux distributions have great package management systems, but they have no infrastructure for easily allowing people to package up third-party software and install it.
If you actually bother to read the thread, anyway, it's clear that the problem is indeed with applications that use queries like "SELECT * FROM Users WHERE Name LIKE '" + Request("User") + "%'".
Owww. However, to be fair to them;-), it doesn't help when your database server of choice will actively execute multiple commands in SQL statements.
I'm sure this is destined to be yet another rip-roaring success in the area of online music company purchases in the same manner as, errrrm, Napster, errrrr. Hang on a minute and I'll be able to think of one.
Every day that SAMBA doesn't know exactly how the Microsoft protocols work, is a day their application isn't quite fully compatible.
I'd dearly love to know what difference it has made.
It sucks that the Linux community has to cater to the Microsoft bobble heads that run most big business IT departments. But, that is the price for wide adoption.
It certainly didn't do any harm to Samba before. All that it's doing is conceding turf for no reason whatsoever.
Don't get arrested or do anything remotely questionable (in the UK you get swabbed even if you're just cautioned) and don't go to the US. Oh, and if you do go to the US, don't accidentally drop anything down the plane toilet on your way there.
That's rubbish. The article claiming OpenSolaris isn't really open source bases it on the lack of community and ideology.
OpenSolaris uses a license that deliberately creates licensing incompatibilities, muddying the waters for developers, and trying to make sure that any contributions you make find their way back to Sun. The (Linux) community has pretty much forced Sun into revamping Solaris completely into something modern, with a half decent package management system and where you actually have virtual consoles in X (and most of that code is GPL or LGPL anyway). The world isn't going to drop other licenses for the CDDL, and many open source licenses have been modified to be happily GPL compatible. IBM did the same thing with its own open source license, and it was totally ignored.
OpenSolaris is definitely open source, and Sun don't have a poor history of open sourcing things. Anybody who says otherwise has an axe to grind.
The statement is accurate. Sun has a decent track record of contributing to existing open source projects. It, however, has a poor track record of initiating new open source projects. Trust is based on ethics and actions, not on lines of code though.
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As a UK citizen I'm pretty disgusted that a lot of our landmarks and history, as well as worthwhile projects such as revived steam railway lines and 'sense' centres for severely disabled kids with people putting their own volunteer time in, are somehow getting turn down for National Lottery funding (there never is a solid reason given) and billions are being given to the waste of time and money that is the Olympics, largely because of corruption. Who's going to miss a few million going missing here and there? These are schemes and projects that only want a few tens or hundreds of thousands pounds as well.
This is exactly the sort of thing that the National Lottery was supposed to help, and exactly the sort of thing that has been let down.
I really hope you're right and the review is crap, but the trouble is that the review matches up to the trailer and what has happened surrounding the filming of the movie. ShogunMaster describes some convoluted bullshit plot regarding aliens and Roswell, and what do I see on the trailer? A container with Roswell on it. Shit.
In addition, they have also cancelled the release party at Cannes and John Hurt has basically come out and said that the film is a vehicle for George Lucas to make another billion in merchandise and expand his ego still further (no change there). This film is going to blow bricks made out of solid, constipated shit and as a someone who has enjoyed IJ films immensely from about eight years old, this is going to scar me for life.
If he really needed to do it then why didn't he ask, and get the opinion of, uh, I don't know, ummmmmmmmm......the upstream developers first?! Making your own patches on someone else's software, in isolation, that few if any people will review is a seriously stupid idea. I don't care how shoddily the code is written, or if there is an entire novel written before it.
Seriously, I'm glad I don't put up with this shit from Debian. The place for code development is upstream. If you have a patch, get it upstream and get the approval of the people who actually develop the software so you can understand why Valgrind is complaining the way it is and why it has been left in. Backporting security fixes because of Debian's stupid development cycle I can just about understand (and even that's a problem as upstream moves on to new versions), but hacking on something downstream that few people will see is one reason why I just don't feel too much trust for Debian - and they do it far more than they should usually because of their own silly ideas about what is 'right'. There's just no reason for that patch at all.
I have quite a few OpenVPN keys generated for a wide variety of purposes, and if I'd been using Debian's OpenSSL then I'd be really pissed. There's just no reason for this, and no reason for anyone outside of upstream to commit a patch like that - and there it would have been caught pretty much instantly before a release was even made, or even better, dismissed as the crap that it is.
All that crap you hear from certain people about Debian being 'rock solid' and 'stable' is just that. Crap.
You just can't afford to what for _insert cool new Rails thing here_ to come along.
Basically, RoR wishes that it was Zope. It's not. People here haven't even touched on the biggest clusterfuck in terms of wasted development time - deployment.
Yer, it was a bit of a rant, and I found parts of it quite funny, but the fact is that Zed Shaw has written solid code for Mongrel, which is pretty much the only way you can deploy a Rails application these days. When I first looked at Rails and saw the whole FastCGI deployment thing I shrieked in terror. For that reason, I have some respect for Zed and respect his point of view.
I don't know what it is, but Sun seem to want to be Apple for some strange reason.
Good GUI tools along with the CLI stuff we've all come to appreciate are expected, and a pre-requisite, if people using Windows Server are ever to be attracted away. That's the deal. While the level of expertise still needs to be high for either, I think anyone would rather look at the IIS interface than stare and scroll through httpd.conf. It doesn't make you any less skilled at what you need to know by looking at a fairly archaic and poorly laid out text file, or having to remember one esoteric switch in a command. Can't disagree with that. A GUI should be a nice complement that can be detached from the systems and servers themselves. That's the ticket. I can't see any of them doing it. I wish those companies would look beyond the Linux and traditional Unix worlds, look at Windows Server, look at what's wrong with it (and there's plenty) and start creating something that makes Microsoft think "Shit......" The obvious place to look at doing that is with the daft stuff in Windows Servers like CALs and the ridiculous licensing for Terminal Services sessions (which we get for free in the X world).
There's plenty out there if people want to look for it.
Mind you, the state of GUI tools on Linux is woefully inadequate when compared to Windows 2003 for a few reasons:
1. Many people in the Linux world believe that there is no place for GUI tools at all, and everything should be done from the command line. How wrong they are. There is a place for both options, as Microsoft is finding out and trying to improve on.
2. The GUI libraries that many distributions use are just terribly inadequate when trying to create any useful user interface beyond a few buttons and checkboxes.
3. Many distributors believe that they're not competing with Windows Server, but are competing in the low-hanging-fruit world of Unix migrations. Bad mistake. This isn't an easy job. Distributors have to balance getting rid of 'unneeded services' with providing a certain level of out-of-the-box functionality. Ubuntu, for example, tried to do that whole 'no ports on by default' thing and managed to totally foul up the default set up of CUPS at one time. Never encountered anything that all of those distros didn't install on, and they're all pretty equal. I can't see anything that Ubuntu is doing differently to warrant that assessment. Red Hat is the market leader, and there is barely enough room for Suse at the moment. Ubuntu isn't creating good quality graphical administration tools in order to go head-to-head with Windows Server, they're not looking at the needs of developers, and they're not doing anything at all in those departments period, that would really set them apart from everyone else. They seem to have reached a technological dead-end in their thinking, which is a pity really because there is a ton of stuff at their disposal in the open source world to do that really well.
Ubuntu is Yet Another Linux Distribution(tm), no matter how much some people, sometimes desperately, want to attach to it.
The problem with Hans, and where his credibility fell, was that he assumed he could just move on and dump an existing filesystem that lots of people used and come up with something completely new and incompatible. That's not the way filesystems work. It's kind of like ZFS now really.
What this article shows is that usability is hard. You're not going to be able to work towards anything 'usable' by simply following HIG guidelines and talking endlessly about 'ordinary users'. Even some of the usability studies I've seen don't cover the right stuff. Mind you, what she did achieve just goes to show how much 'ordinary users' can get done, and that they're not stupid.
In reality, the stuff that is touched on in this article could be used to make things better and more straightforward for everyone, no matter how technical or non-technical they are. I mean, there have been times when I've used an e-mail client, some I've used before, and I'm thinking "How hard would it be just to have a setup wizard that asks me what the name of my mail server is, how I'm connecting and what the username and password is for both sending and receiving?". Outlook, Thunderbird, KMail and others seriously lack this, and lack the ability to roll other more advanced options in such as SSL and TLS transparently. It shouldn't be that much of a pain.
The other problems mainly go back to something I can remember talking about at length before. Things like Flash should be pre-installed, and if not, installing it should be a pretty easy process. Linux distributions have great package management systems, but they have no infrastructure for easily allowing people to package up third-party software and install it.
I'm sure this is destined to be yet another rip-roaring success in the area of online music company purchases in the same manner as, errrrm, Napster, errrrr. Hang on a minute and I'll be able to think of one.
Don't get arrested or do anything remotely questionable (in the UK you get swabbed even if you're just cautioned) and don't go to the US. Oh, and if you do go to the US, don't accidentally drop anything down the plane toilet on your way there.