universities were still teaching Pascal as a first language (an excellent choice)
I'm sorry this is a little of-topic, but one of these days, someone is going to have to explain to me why Pascal is such a great first language. In my experience, it's far too strict (strongly typed, rigid structures, etc) for beginners. On top of that, it's not nearly powerful enough for experts. Why it caught on, at all, is completely beyond me.
Personally, I think BASIC was a far better beginner's language. You only had to worry about two data types - numeric and string - you didn't need to structure your code, and you could use GOTO. Yes, I know those things are generally bad programming practice, but you shouldn't have to worry about all that stuff, when you're just learning.
Yeah, my wife has been using OpenOffice every day, now, for about six years, and she's convinced anyone who pays money for office software is crazy. She's a grant writer for non-profit organizations, so she has to exchange documents with people all the time, and she has no issues at all. OpenOffice does everything she needs.
The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.
I'll agree with you on "The Inner Light" (and I'd add "Tapestry"), but I'll never understand why everyone likes "City on the Edge of Forever" so much. Personally, I think that's one of the worst episodes of TOS.
If you want to show people TOS, I'd go with "The Doomsday Machine" or "Balance of Terror".
My 9-year-old son has a password that's at least 15 characters long, composed of several made-up words, mixed case, with numbers and an exclamation point. Personally, I don't know how he remembers it. Of course, I'm the security guy, at work, so I've had quite a few discussions with my wife about choosing secure passwords for things like bank accounts, etc., in front of the kids. I guess they've learned through osmosis, at this point.
By the standards of the article, I'm a geezer, and I've always tried to choose strong passwords, even when I was younger. It really annoys me when I go to a site, even today, and they only accept 8 characters. Do they really care about the security of their users?
That's a pretty good idea, if you only want to detect corrupted files (and yes, I know that's what the OP said he wanted), but I can't believe no one's suggested par2, yet. It will not only detect corrupted files, but repair them, too. If he had used par2, he wouldn't have to delete them.
Yes. The latest version (4?) has certainly made significant improvements (and it could still use some work), but it would have had to be where it is now ten years ago, to have had enough adoption for a viable Linux desktop, today. It's not like VS is standing still, either. I guess we'll have to see what happens over the next 5 years, or so.
KDE, Gnome, XFCE etc are DEs, they are not frameworks - not APIs
Don't be pedantic. I'm pretty sure you know what I meant.
If what you say about running Qt under Gnome is true, that's an improvement, since the last time I played with it. I'll have to check it out.
I think you're overstating the importance of Office. My wife uses Ubuntu as her main desktop, and exchanges documents with people who use office every day. She claims she has very little trouble.
2) Games
I'll agree with you, that the PC games market isn't going anywhere soon. Linux could get into that market, if they were more programmer-friendly, which I'll go into in a minute.
3) Poor UI choices
Yeah, I think Unity's terrible, but my wife likes it.
4) Package installation/management
I honestly don't have a clue what you're talking about, here. If you want to install some software on Linux, you bring up the package manager, select the software you want, and it installs automatically. It doesn't even ask you for any money. What could be simpler than that? The only distribution that had problems with its package sources (that I'm aware of) was SuSE. The user could solve that by switching distributions. The computer manufacturer could fix that by selling units with Linux pre-installed.
5) Lack of standardization in configuration
Again, I think you're overstating this problem.
In my opinion, the biggest reason we don't have desktop Linux, is its programmer-friendliness when writing GUI programs. The first thing we need is a proper IDE. Linux and Windows programmers alike tell me nothing on Linux even comes close to Visual Studio.
The second thing we need is a single user-interface API. If you're going to write a native Linux application, do you write it in KDE, Gnome, XFCE, or something else, entirely? Yes, I know you can run KDE programs on Gnome, but you have to go to the trouble to make sure the KDE libraries are installed. Some KDE programs also require some services that Gnome doesn't run, and vice-versa. Having them both go to D-bus was a step in the right direction, but they need to go further. Desktop environment should be a user choice, not a programmer choice.
I find it kind of pathetic that in this day and age companies are rolling out laptops to their employees with something which is only modestly better than 1024x768, which I was running in '91.
The 16:9 aspect ratio doesn't thrill me, but it would be a big improvement if operating systems and more software worked better with the controls on the sides of the screen. Instead, the default is to have the controls at the top and/or bottom - shortening a display that's already too short. Granted, OSes seem to allow you to put controls on the side of the screen, but they don't always handle it well, and most applications don't do it at all. What's wrong with allowing the drop-down menus (for "File", "Edit", etc) to go on the side of an application's window, instead of on the top? How about, in your browser, having the address bar on the side and only visible when you hover over it? You could put the control buttons there, too.
All that would be awesome, especially if they could make it something like a mail portal, where you can create your own folders for articles you want to save.
I'd also add to that: have a "brief listing" mode for articles, where there is just a single line with the article name, but there are many (hundreds?) of articles listed on each page. I sometimes can't read Slashdot every single day (like when I go on a business trip, or vacation) and something like that would make it much easier to catch up.
I've been on the Internet a long time and, when I named my first Internet-connected computers, I thought it would be cool to name them after Star Trek characters. (The guys a floor up from me decided to name their after planets.) It wasn't long before I discovered that, at that time, half the machines on the Internet were named after Star Trek characters, and the other half were named after planets. I decided that, in the future, I would choose the most original naming scheme I could think of. I've been naming my computers after onomatopoeic words for years - screech, kablamm, whirr, etc. There are plenty of words, so the chances of running out are small.
The only time I got into trouble is when I was putting together a server for a customer, and I called it "crash".
I'd be careful, if that's true. They may be trying to make use of that new law, where they can re-copyright books that are currently in the public domain.
Possibly the best advice I've ever heard about passwords. The problem is that people are so concerned about following the rules you discussed, they're actually making their networks less secure.
The 2000 results have been the most studied in US history, and guess what the studies have shown Bush really did win.
I'm just some guy on the Internet, so I don't really expect you to believe me, but here's an interesting data point for you. Not long after the 2000 election, my parents went on a cruise. For dinner, they were seated with a Republican couple from Florida who, as it turns out, were two of the vote counters for the election. During dinner, they bragged about how they had saved the country from President Gore, and thank God the judge didn't make them count the votes again, that last time. If he had, they would have had to admit that Gore won.
Generally true, especially when it comes to mail sent over SMTP. However, I work for a health insurance company and any email that contains private information must be encrypted. To make that happen, we have a special "secure email" server, accessed via web browser, much like Gmail.
But what Unixes are still around? Tru64 is effectively dead, since HP bought Compaq; Solaris' future is questionable, since Oracle bought Sun; I've only even seen one HP/UX machine in the last decade, and we're only keeping that around for legal reasons. I'd like to say AIX is still going strong, but we just decommissioned our last AIX server a month ago, and we probably won't be going back to IBM.
Pretty much all of our Unix servers have been replaced with Linux, and the main reason is that it runs on commodity hardware. All the other Unixes, pretty much require vendor lock-in - one of the best ways to increase the cost of running your data center.
Slightly off topic, but I read a book, a long time ago, about a space station in low earth orbit. In the book, there were a few paragraphs that discussed what might happen to a fire in micro-gravity. When a teacher lit a match, it burned with a spherical flame, and put it self out quickly, because there was no place for the CO2 to go. If you wanted the match to continue burning, you had to keep it moving.
The book was science fiction, but it would be interesting to find out if they were correct.
It was meant as a joke. Though I hope you'll share what you use more than 256 GB of RAM for.
I don't know what he uses it for, but we have a (HP) server with 384GB, and we use it to run a terminal-based application for about 250 users. The application does a lot of disk access, and having that much cache has really made a difference. Jobs that used to take 12 to 16 hours can now be done in about 1.
Also, Coal, oil, and nuclear also ALL require government involvement and subsidies.
I have to admit: it would be interesting if the government ended all energy subsidies for a few years, just so we could see the true cost of the various forms of energy.
Do you mean, higher because taxes have been added to the prices?
Let me just add one thing to what I said, above. We went to Iraq primarily to secure a source of oil for the US and, as a result, our national debt is around $2 trillion higher than it should be. In what way does it not make sense to tax oil products to repay that part of the debt?
Wind turbines? Solar power? Neither are cost effective
Solar is not cost-effective now. (I'll need a citation for wind turbines.) If we'd actually put some effort into researching alternative power, that would change.
Do you mean, higher because taxes have been added to the prices?
That, and ending oil subsidies.
That has everything to do with taxing productivity, be definition.
Umm, because someone has a gun to your head, forcing you to buy gas, right? See, this is why we can't have nice things. Like it or not, the fossil fuels are going to run out, someday. Why not change things now, when it's easy, rather than waiting until it's all gone, and society has collapsed.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry this is a little of-topic, but one of these days, someone is going to have to explain to me why Pascal is such a great first language. In my experience, it's far too strict (strongly typed, rigid structures, etc) for beginners. On top of that, it's not nearly powerful enough for experts. Why it caught on, at all, is completely beyond me.
Personally, I think BASIC was a far better beginner's language. You only had to worry about two data types - numeric and string - you didn't need to structure your code, and you could use GOTO. Yes, I know those things are generally bad programming practice, but you shouldn't have to worry about all that stuff, when you're just learning.
Yeah, my wife has been using OpenOffice every day, now, for about six years, and she's convinced anyone who pays money for office software is crazy. She's a grant writer for non-profit organizations, so she has to exchange documents with people all the time, and she has no issues at all. OpenOffice does everything she needs.
The thing that really amazes her is that OpenOffice is actually better at reading old Microsoft Office formats than more recent versions of Microsoft Office.
I'll agree with you on "The Inner Light" (and I'd add "Tapestry"), but I'll never understand why everyone likes "City on the Edge of Forever" so much. Personally, I think that's one of the worst episodes of TOS.
If you want to show people TOS, I'd go with "The Doomsday Machine" or "Balance of Terror".
My 9-year-old son has a password that's at least 15 characters long, composed of several made-up words, mixed case, with numbers and an exclamation point. Personally, I don't know how he remembers it. Of course, I'm the security guy, at work, so I've had quite a few discussions with my wife about choosing secure passwords for things like bank accounts, etc., in front of the kids. I guess they've learned through osmosis, at this point.
By the standards of the article, I'm a geezer, and I've always tried to choose strong passwords, even when I was younger. It really annoys me when I go to a site, even today, and they only accept 8 characters. Do they really care about the security of their users?
That's a pretty good idea, if you only want to detect corrupted files (and yes, I know that's what the OP said he wanted), but I can't believe no one's suggested par2, yet. It will not only detect corrupted files, but repair them, too. If he had used par2, he wouldn't have to delete them.
Yes. The latest version (4?) has certainly made significant improvements (and it could still use some work), but it would have had to be where it is now ten years ago, to have had enough adoption for a viable Linux desktop, today. It's not like VS is standing still, either. I guess we'll have to see what happens over the next 5 years, or so.
Don't be pedantic. I'm pretty sure you know what I meant.
If what you say about running Qt under Gnome is true, that's an improvement, since the last time I played with it. I'll have to check it out.
I think you're overstating the importance of Office. My wife uses Ubuntu as her main desktop, and exchanges documents with people who use office every day. She claims she has very little trouble.
I'll agree with you, that the PC games market isn't going anywhere soon. Linux could get into that market, if they were more programmer-friendly, which I'll go into in a minute.
Yeah, I think Unity's terrible, but my wife likes it.
I honestly don't have a clue what you're talking about, here. If you want to install some software on Linux, you bring up the package manager, select the software you want, and it installs automatically. It doesn't even ask you for any money. What could be simpler than that? The only distribution that had problems with its package sources (that I'm aware of) was SuSE. The user could solve that by switching distributions. The computer manufacturer could fix that by selling units with Linux pre-installed.
Again, I think you're overstating this problem.
In my opinion, the biggest reason we don't have desktop Linux, is its programmer-friendliness when writing GUI programs. The first thing we need is a proper IDE. Linux and Windows programmers alike tell me nothing on Linux even comes close to Visual Studio.
The second thing we need is a single user-interface API. If you're going to write a native Linux application, do you write it in KDE, Gnome, XFCE, or something else, entirely? Yes, I know you can run KDE programs on Gnome, but you have to go to the trouble to make sure the KDE libraries are installed. Some KDE programs also require some services that Gnome doesn't run, and vice-versa. Having them both go to D-bus was a step in the right direction, but they need to go further. Desktop environment should be a user choice, not a programmer choice.
The 16:9 aspect ratio doesn't thrill me, but it would be a big improvement if operating systems and more software worked better with the controls on the sides of the screen. Instead, the default is to have the controls at the top and/or bottom - shortening a display that's already too short. Granted, OSes seem to allow you to put controls on the side of the screen, but they don't always handle it well, and most applications don't do it at all. What's wrong with allowing the drop-down menus (for "File", "Edit", etc) to go on the side of an application's window, instead of on the top? How about, in your browser, having the address bar on the side and only visible when you hover over it? You could put the control buttons there, too.
On a laptop? How?
All that would be awesome, especially if they could make it something like a mail portal, where you can create your own folders for articles you want to save.
I'd also add to that: have a "brief listing" mode for articles, where there is just a single line with the article name, but there are many (hundreds?) of articles listed on each page. I sometimes can't read Slashdot every single day (like when I go on a business trip, or vacation) and something like that would make it much easier to catch up.
I've been on the Internet a long time and, when I named my first Internet-connected computers, I thought it would be cool to name them after Star Trek characters. (The guys a floor up from me decided to name their after planets.) It wasn't long before I discovered that, at that time, half the machines on the Internet were named after Star Trek characters, and the other half were named after planets. I decided that, in the future, I would choose the most original naming scheme I could think of. I've been naming my computers after onomatopoeic words for years - screech, kablamm, whirr, etc. There are plenty of words, so the chances of running out are small.
The only time I got into trouble is when I was putting together a server for a customer, and I called it "crash".
I'd be careful, if that's true. They may be trying to make use of that new law, where they can re-copyright books that are currently in the public domain.
As usual, XKCD to the rescue:
http://www.xkcd.com/936/
Possibly the best advice I've ever heard about passwords. The problem is that people are so concerned about following the rules you discussed, they're actually making their networks less secure.
You'll have to give us a reference for that, since my sources say otherwise:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/slideshow?id=9281281
I'm just some guy on the Internet, so I don't really expect you to believe me, but here's an interesting data point for you. Not long after the 2000 election, my parents went on a cruise. For dinner, they were seated with a Republican couple from Florida who, as it turns out, were two of the vote counters for the election. During dinner, they bragged about how they had saved the country from President Gore, and thank God the judge didn't make them count the votes again, that last time. If he had, they would have had to admit that Gore won.
Generally true, especially when it comes to mail sent over SMTP. However, I work for a health insurance company and any email that contains private information must be encrypted. To make that happen, we have a special "secure email" server, accessed via web browser, much like Gmail.
But what Unixes are still around? Tru64 is effectively dead, since HP bought Compaq; Solaris' future is questionable, since Oracle bought Sun; I've only even seen one HP/UX machine in the last decade, and we're only keeping that around for legal reasons. I'd like to say AIX is still going strong, but we just decommissioned our last AIX server a month ago, and we probably won't be going back to IBM.
Pretty much all of our Unix servers have been replaced with Linux, and the main reason is that it runs on commodity hardware. All the other Unixes, pretty much require vendor lock-in - one of the best ways to increase the cost of running your data center.
Slightly off topic, but I read a book, a long time ago, about a space station in low earth orbit. In the book, there were a few paragraphs that discussed what might happen to a fire in micro-gravity. When a teacher lit a match, it burned with a spherical flame, and put it self out quickly, because there was no place for the CO2 to go. If you wanted the match to continue burning, you had to keep it moving.
The book was science fiction, but it would be interesting to find out if they were correct.
I don't know what he uses it for, but we have a (HP) server with 384GB, and we use it to run a terminal-based application for about 250 users. The application does a lot of disk access, and having that much cache has really made a difference. Jobs that used to take 12 to 16 hours can now be done in about 1.
I'm responding to agree with you on #1 and #2. Maybe if you get enough replies, they'll listen.
C'mon, seriously? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin
I certainly wouldn't argue that, but most global warming deniers would.
I have to admit: it would be interesting if the government ended all energy subsidies for a few years, just so we could see the true cost of the various forms of energy.
Wrong war.
Let me just add one thing to what I said, above. We went to Iraq primarily to secure a source of oil for the US and, as a result, our national debt is around $2 trillion higher than it should be. In what way does it not make sense to tax oil products to repay that part of the debt?
Solar is not cost-effective now. (I'll need a citation for wind turbines.) If we'd actually put some effort into researching alternative power, that would change.
That, and ending oil subsidies.
Umm, because someone has a gun to your head, forcing you to buy gas, right? See, this is why we can't have nice things. Like it or not, the fossil fuels are going to run out, someday. Why not change things now, when it's easy, rather than waiting until it's all gone, and society has collapsed.