Come to think of it, I have no idea what they do with Americans who drive on the 407. I suppose they can get the billing address from the DMV (I think that's what it's called in the U.S.), but I doubt they can enforce it.
I think they had to pass special legislation in Canada to make the bills legal, since you don't actually agree to/sign anything when you enter the highway.
Highway 407 north of Toronto has had this for years. They do it a little differently in that they sell transponders to frequent users and only take pictures of vehicles that don't have the transponders. Whether you have a transponder or not, you get a bill in the mail for using the highway.
The problem here isn't privacy, but rather the fact that a private company manages the highway. If they send you a bill and you disagree with the charges they can keep you from getting your license/vehicle permit renewed. I don't like it when private companies can get you by the balls like that.
But X or Linux aren't crashing. The application is going nuts and refusing to exit. The only way to combat this (and what the original poster was suggesting) is to use some sort of heuristic to notice what's going on, and that heuristic is likely to be wrong fairly often. There could be many reasons for an application to become unresponsive - a common one is that it's blocked doing a DNS lookup (yeah, those apps are poorly designed, but that's another issue - the point is you can't just go around killing things that don't respond).
Now if I remember correctly, Windows deals with this by popping up a 'do you want to nuke this app.' dialog after a certain timeout period. Not a bad strategy, really, but given the fact that the only application I've seen this with is development versions of Mozilla, it seems like a solution to a problem we don't actually have. If others are experiencing similar problems with actual released applications, then I take back my objections.
[As an aside, there is some sort of crash report feature in Gnome - or maybe it's just Ximian Gnome, I'm not sure.]
If that's the case then I'm once again baffled by the patent process. Sure it might be a neat feature, but it's standard CS101 pattern matching used in everything from parsers to image processing.
Surely they can't patent pattern matching, nor can they patent filtering. So is the patent for 'using pattern matching to filter'?
And which part of the invention is non-obvious? If nobody else has this feature then it's just because nobody else thought it would be useful, not because it's difficult to do.
That's the thing. It's more about what you're comfortable with, not your (steriotypical) mother. The last version of Windows I used regularly was Win95, so there's no way I can support somebody using Win2k/XP.
So you set her up with whatever you think you can support and she won't notice the difference.
I am a power user, but I think I'm looking at it objectively. I wasn't trying to put down the points mentioned, but I think a good number of them have been addressed in a fashion that newbies would be happy with. A few others have been partially addressed and will be totally fixed in the next wave of distro upgrades.
There are certainly a few that need work. I agree with the font thing. I think fonts and a consistent print/print preview for all applications would be the top things on my list.
After that, he final piece of the puzzle is good games. We don't even need the office apps anymore, we've got those, but home users want games.
It works for resolutions you already have set up in you config. There's no easy way that I've seen to set up a new resolution (from an autodetected list of possible resolutions) and test it. You can do it from the text based configure thingy (forget what it's called), but not from inside the GUI.
That's for my redhat, though. I've heard that some of the other distros have a better setup tool.
Galean for sure. He even admits this in his write-up, but doesn't like the fact that it has no AA. I've actually seen some screen shots with AA/Gecko somewhere, so I don't imagine this will take long to be fixed.
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
I'm not sure I get the point here. Distros are starting to ship with journaling filesystems, so this really should be rare. He mentions not being able to recover the journal, but I've never had this happen to me. It might be a problem, but surely it doesn't deserve to be in the top 10.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
Mostly fixed, especially with distros that use CUPS. I think the configuration isn't so much the problem anymore, as the fact that there's no good interface for using the printer (at least under gnome). I'd like a quick way to itemize the configured printers and check the status of each and a standard 'print' dialog.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Good idea. You don't need any sort of special app. though. Just an additional menu labeled 'How do I' at the top level, nested as needed. Not a technology problem anyway, but a good configuration suggestion.
5. Cleaner redraws.
I haven't noticed this with Gnome 2. Fixed? Or maybe I just have Gnome 2 installed on better hardware - not sure.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Also pretty rare. The only process I ever had do this was Mozilla (and maybe the old Netscape - I can't remember) and the last time it happened was at least six months ago. Anyway, hardly seems worth it when you can just fix the particular offending applications.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
Sure. It wouldn't make my top 10 list, but why not.
8. Sound support.
Used to be a pain. Nowadays it 'just works' for me, so I've actually forgotten why it was so hard before. I think this is fixed for most people.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Just tried it in Gedit to make sure - no problems. Probably a config option in other editors.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
This one I agree with completely, although I've heard rumours that some of the 'easy-to-use' distributions have fixed this. Maybe close to being fixed generally?
He said he got turned back at the border once for having a B1 visa when he needed a B2, and now he can't go back. What's the deal here? Is he banned for life?
Re:Don't get your panties in a wad just yet...
on
W3C Ponders RAND Again
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
By posing it as an 'either/or' question (either work on the encumbered extension or let somebody else do it), you neatly avoid other alternatives:
challenge the patent and try to get it overturned,
develop an unencumbered alternative and standardize on that instead,
If the only existing solution (open or proprietary) for a given problem is patent encumbered then somebody needs to develop a non-encumbered alternative. Walking away from the issue and saying "there's a proprietary solution in this area, so we won't develop our own" is no solution at all. It pretty much defeats the purpose of having a standards body.
The point isn't necessarily to go back to traditional farming, but rather to explore other ways of maximizing yield without resorting to man-made chemicals. It seems that once pesticides and fertilizers become common, researchers gave up looking for other techniques.
This isn't my field and any info I have comes from researchers I've talked to (briefly) in India, but here are a few links gathered from google. These are mostly about intercropping (since that's the only technique I could remember the name of):
Ewww, must not feed the troll, must not feed the troll, must not... oh, what the hell...
Or things like the freedom to protect yourself with firearms,
A right nobody else in the world seems to care about. Indeed, I've never met a European who wishes he could carry a gun. I, on the other hand, would be really upset to give up my right to drink alchohol in public spaces. Don't you miss having a some wine when you go on a picnic? Don't you find it strange that 18-year-olds in the U.S. can vote, carry weapons, and fight for their country, but can't go into a bar?
the freedom from having lawyers sue on your behalf without your consent,
I think that's Germany you're talking about. Yeah, there are plenty of quirky laws out there. But even with that strange one, Germany doesn't come close to the level of litigation enjoyed by the U.S. I suppose you could say that Europeans enjoy the right not be sued by idiots who hurt themselves doing stupid things.
or any sembalance of abiding by the will of the people.
This one baffles me. Especially given your current government. Care to give an example of what you're talking about? The only Western European country with more surreal politics than the U.S. is Italy (but then, these are the same people who pick fights with bulls). The rest of Europe is pretty sane.
I don't know enough about the other aspects in this debate to participate, but I have to take issue with this statement:
Organics are for rich people. If the whole world used organics, the reduced yields would result either in mass starvation or the conversion of the rest of our land mass to farming. Modern farming is resulting in the reversion of much land mass in the US to forest.
In parts of the world where farmers can't afford pesticides and chemical fertilizers organic food is the norm and there's been a lot of research into alternative methods of agriculture.
It turns out that they can get excellent results through natural means. They avoid monocultures (ie. large fields of just one plant type), use proper crop rotation, and natural soil enhancers (like worms). The results are impressive and the yield is almost as good as industrial farming techniques.
When you take into account the cost of the chemical pesticides and fertalizers, it turns out that 'organic' farming results in better returns for the farmer.
And even if the land usage is higher, the varied crops and fewer chemicals result in a better 'ecosystem' on the fields. It doesn't compare fo a forest, perhaps, but there are more worms, good bugs, and birds on an organic field than on a mostly sterile conventional farm. Nearby streams and wildlife are also better off.
I don't know how well the economics would transfer to the west, where chemicals are relatively less expensive compared to land and labour, but in most of the world organic farming makes solid economic sense.
[Lest you think I'm an eco-nut, I assure you I'm not. I have no sympathy, for example, for people who are afraid of genetically modified foods. But assuming that chemicals are automatically good is just as knee-jerk as assuming they're automatically bad.]
I have no idea what the actual scene is supposed to be, but the article does say that stuntmen where there. Close-ups can be shot in a studio and cut in later.
Re:modules, and why Rusty is wrong:
on
Kernel Summit Wrapup
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The reality right now is that the vast majority of drivers do provide source, so everything works pretty well. Requiring backwards binary compatibility for the modules interface would hurt everybody (because it creates cruft and a maintenance headache) and benefit only a few short-sighted companies
Remember that the general attitude towards binary-only modules is "we'll tolerate it, but if it breaks you keep both pieces". Nobody is demanding source, they just want to minimize the damage of closed-source code in the kernel. There's no reason everybody should suffer because of a few companies.
Current primary linux distros (RH, Mandrake et. al.) provide a set of binaries and source for multiple target platforms.
Each of these "should" work, or will "probably" work on a given platform, and the free updates, or access to source from which you can upgrade your system will also probably work; none of these distros go through any heavy-duty regression testing or certifications for uptime guarantees or reliability.
I think this is a misconception. RedHat, and I think most major distributions, do extensive hardware testing. Whenever you hear about IBM/HP/etc. providing Linux on their servers, you know that they've made a deal to certify their hardware with the given distribution. So sure, if you buy a random server and load RedHat it may not work (although I've never had a problem on normal server hardware), but if you ask RedHat or your hardware vendor what's guaranteed to work, they'll have no problems telling you. In fact it's probably in the marketing material already. A few seconds of clicking on IBM's web site revealed this handy little chart.
The real story behind United Linux is the fact that the companies involved want to save development $$ and they had to come up with some sort of license that all the parties could agree to. More power to them - I hope they succeed. But they're not providing anything fundamentally different than what's already on the market.
Are you saying that under Qt you can change a text box into an oval or something like that? Is this at the application development level or at the theme level?
I don't think you have to wait for Gnome 3.0 for this stuff to be fixed. The improvements between 1.0 and 1.4.x were amazing and I would expect the same kind of thing here.
Also, it'll take a while for most applications to be ported over to Gnome 2.0. In that respect I think a lot of users might be disappointed since most of what people think of as "Gnome" is really applications. The release of Gnome 2.0 means the new API and a few basic tools are ready, but the real benefits won't be apparent until Gnumeric, Evolution, and other big apps are ported over.
I don't have any inside information, but if you look here you can see that they've added an unscheduled release candidate and they had planned two weeks between the last release candidate and going gold.
Assuming we don't get another release candidate (which I think is a good bet - I'm running the nightlies and they feel solid) that places 2.0 around July 7.
It depends on how you set it up and whether or not 'they' know you've got such a system.
Under Linux you'd presumably use Anacron to schedule the task, so if the computer is powered on intact the task will trigger.
If 'they' are anticipating a self destruct mechanism then, yeah, 'they' can get around it. But I think even the wariest NSA spook will probably at least try to turn the machine on before deciding to disassemble it. As soon as that happens you're safe.
Back in the BBS days you could enter [Control-H]'s into a message and they would become part of the actual text. That way the reader could actually see the words appear and be back-spaced over and re-written. It was a cool effect. Of course it worked better at 300-2400 baud, where you could actually see the characters being drawn.
Slashdot Mirror
Come to think of it, I have no idea what they do with Americans who drive on the 407. I suppose they can get the billing address from the DMV (I think that's what it's called in the U.S.), but I doubt they can enforce it.
I think they had to pass special legislation in Canada to make the bills legal, since you don't actually agree to/sign anything when you enter the highway.
Highway 407 north of Toronto has had this for years. They do it a little differently in that they sell transponders to frequent users and only take pictures of vehicles that don't have the transponders. Whether you have a transponder or not, you get a bill in the mail for using the highway.
The problem here isn't privacy, but rather the fact that a private company manages the highway. If they send you a bill and you disagree with the charges they can keep you from getting your license/vehicle permit renewed. I don't like it when private companies can get you by the balls like that.
Aside from that, it's not a bad system.
But X or Linux aren't crashing. The application is going nuts and refusing to exit. The only way to combat this (and what the original poster was suggesting) is to use some sort of heuristic to notice what's going on, and that heuristic is likely to be wrong fairly often. There could be many reasons for an application to become unresponsive - a common one is that it's blocked doing a DNS lookup (yeah, those apps are poorly designed, but that's another issue - the point is you can't just go around killing things that don't respond).
Now if I remember correctly, Windows deals with this by popping up a 'do you want to nuke this app.' dialog after a certain timeout period. Not a bad strategy, really, but given the fact that the only application I've seen this with is development versions of Mozilla, it seems like a solution to a problem we don't actually have. If others are experiencing similar problems with actual released applications, then I take back my objections.
[As an aside, there is some sort of crash report feature in Gnome - or maybe it's just Ximian Gnome, I'm not sure.]
If that's the case then I'm once again baffled by the patent process. Sure it might be a neat feature, but it's standard CS101 pattern matching used in everything from parsers to image processing.
Surely they can't patent pattern matching, nor can they patent filtering. So is the patent for 'using pattern matching to filter'?
And which part of the invention is non-obvious? If nobody else has this feature then it's just because nobody else thought it would be useful, not because it's difficult to do.
That's the thing. It's more about what you're comfortable with, not your (steriotypical) mother. The last version of Windows I used regularly was Win95, so there's no way I can support somebody using Win2k/XP.
So you set her up with whatever you think you can support and she won't notice the difference.
I am a power user, but I think I'm looking at it objectively. I wasn't trying to put down the points mentioned, but I think a good number of them have been addressed in a fashion that newbies would be happy with. A few others have been partially addressed and will be totally fixed in the next wave of distro upgrades.
There are certainly a few that need work. I agree with the font thing. I think fonts and a consistent print/print preview for all applications would be the top things on my list.
After that, he final piece of the puzzle is good games. We don't even need the office apps anymore, we've got those, but home users want games.
It works for resolutions you already have set up in you config. There's no easy way that I've seen to set up a new resolution (from an autodetected list of possible resolutions) and test it. You can do it from the text based configure thingy (forget what it's called), but not from inside the GUI.
That's for my redhat, though. I've heard that some of the other distros have a better setup tool.
1. No 'best' browser.
Galean for sure. He even admits this in his write-up, but doesn't like the fact that it has no AA. I've actually seen some screen shots with AA/Gecko somewhere, so I don't imagine this will take long to be fixed.
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan.
I'm not sure I get the point here. Distros are starting to ship with journaling filesystems, so this really should be rare. He mentions not being able to recover the journal, but I've never had this happen to me. It might be a problem, but surely it doesn't deserve to be in the top 10.
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure.
Mostly fixed, especially with distros that use CUPS. I think the configuration isn't so much the problem anymore, as the fact that there's no good interface for using the printer (at least under gnome). I'd like a quick way to itemize the configured printers and check the status of each and a standard 'print' dialog.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Good idea. You don't need any sort of special app. though. Just an additional menu labeled 'How do I' at the top level, nested as needed. Not a technology problem anyway, but a good configuration suggestion.
5. Cleaner redraws.
I haven't noticed this with Gnome 2. Fixed? Or maybe I just have Gnome 2 installed on better hardware - not sure.
6. Die stray processes, die!
Also pretty rare. The only process I ever had do this was Mozilla (and maybe the old Netscape - I can't remember) and the last time it happened was at least six months ago. Anyway, hardly seems worth it when you can just fix the particular offending applications.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
Sure. It wouldn't make my top 10 list, but why not.
8. Sound support.
Used to be a pain. Nowadays it 'just works' for me, so I've actually forgotten why it was so hard before. I think this is fixed for most people.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
Just tried it in Gedit to make sure - no problems. Probably a config option in other editors.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
This one I agree with completely, although I've heard rumours that some of the 'easy-to-use' distributions have fixed this. Maybe close to being fixed generally?
I'm looking at the bottom left corner of the top half, and I don't see what you mean. Can you elaborate?
He said he got turned back at the border once for having a B1 visa when he needed a B2, and now he can't go back. What's the deal here? Is he banned for life?
By posing it as an 'either/or' question (either work on the encumbered extension or let somebody else do it), you neatly avoid other alternatives:
If the only existing solution (open or proprietary) for a given problem is patent encumbered then somebody needs to develop a non-encumbered alternative. Walking away from the issue and saying "there's a proprietary solution in this area, so we won't develop our own" is no solution at all. It pretty much defeats the purpose of having a standards body.
Hmm. So you're saying they're mad on speed? I like that :-).
Whoops. Indeed. What a silly brain fart. So I guess the Italians have no excuse then :-).
The point isn't necessarily to go back to traditional farming, but rather to explore other ways of maximizing yield without resorting to man-made chemicals. It seems that once pesticides and fertilizers become common, researchers gave up looking for other techniques.
This isn't my field and any info I have comes from researchers I've talked to (briefly) in India, but here are a few links gathered from google. These are mostly about intercropping (since that's the only technique I could remember the name of):
www.actahort.org/books/380/380_29.htm
www.mindfully.org/GE/Rice-Diversity-Yield.htm
www.regional.org.au/au/asa/2001/2/a/bell.htm
www.attra.org/attra-pub/intercrop.html
Ewww, must not feed the troll, must not feed the troll, must not... oh, what the hell...
A right nobody else in the world seems to care about. Indeed, I've never met a European who wishes he could carry a gun. I, on the other hand, would be really upset to give up my right to drink alchohol in public spaces. Don't you miss having a some wine when you go on a picnic? Don't you find it strange that 18-year-olds in the U.S. can vote, carry weapons, and fight for their country, but can't go into a bar?
I think that's Germany you're talking about. Yeah, there are plenty of quirky laws out there. But even with that strange one, Germany doesn't come close to the level of litigation enjoyed by the U.S. I suppose you could say that Europeans enjoy the right not be sued by idiots who hurt themselves doing stupid things.
This one baffles me. Especially given your current government. Care to give an example of what you're talking about? The only Western European country with more surreal politics than the U.S. is Italy (but then, these are the same people who pick fights with bulls). The rest of Europe is pretty sane.
I don't know enough about the other aspects in this debate to participate, but I have to take issue with this statement:
In parts of the world where farmers can't afford pesticides and chemical fertilizers organic food is the norm and there's been a lot of research into alternative methods of agriculture.
It turns out that they can get excellent results through natural means. They avoid monocultures (ie. large fields of just one plant type), use proper crop rotation, and natural soil enhancers (like worms). The results are impressive and the yield is almost as good as industrial farming techniques.
When you take into account the cost of the chemical pesticides and fertalizers, it turns out that 'organic' farming results in better returns for the farmer.
And even if the land usage is higher, the varied crops and fewer chemicals result in a better 'ecosystem' on the fields. It doesn't compare fo a forest, perhaps, but there are more worms, good bugs, and birds on an organic field than on a mostly sterile conventional farm. Nearby streams and wildlife are also better off.
I don't know how well the economics would transfer to the west, where chemicals are relatively less expensive compared to land and labour, but in most of the world organic farming makes solid economic sense.
[Lest you think I'm an eco-nut, I assure you I'm not. I have no sympathy, for example, for people who are afraid of genetically modified foods. But assuming that chemicals are automatically good is just as knee-jerk as assuming they're automatically bad.]
I have no idea what the actual scene is supposed to be, but the article does say that stuntmen where there. Close-ups can be shot in a studio and cut in later.
The reality right now is that the vast majority of drivers do provide source, so everything works pretty well. Requiring backwards binary compatibility for the modules interface would hurt everybody (because it creates cruft and a maintenance headache) and benefit only a few short-sighted companies
Remember that the general attitude towards binary-only modules is "we'll tolerate it, but if it breaks you keep both pieces". Nobody is demanding source, they just want to minimize the damage of closed-source code in the kernel. There's no reason everybody should suffer because of a few companies.
Under the circumstances, I can't say I blame him. The man isn't allowed to touch a computer. Nowadays that means he can't even work at McDonalds.
Cashing in on his celebrity is the only carreer option the guy has.
I think this is a misconception. RedHat, and I think most major distributions, do extensive hardware testing. Whenever you hear about IBM/HP/etc. providing Linux on their servers, you know that they've made a deal to certify their hardware with the given distribution. So sure, if you buy a random server and load RedHat it may not work (although I've never had a problem on normal server hardware), but if you ask RedHat or your hardware vendor what's guaranteed to work, they'll have no problems telling you. In fact it's probably in the marketing material already. A few seconds of clicking on IBM's web site revealed this handy little chart.
The real story behind United Linux is the fact that the companies involved want to save development $$ and they had to come up with some sort of license that all the parties could agree to. More power to them - I hope they succeed. But they're not providing anything fundamentally different than what's already on the market.
Are you saying that under Qt you can change a text box into an oval or something like that? Is this at the application development level or at the theme level?
I don't think you have to wait for Gnome 3.0 for this stuff to be fixed. The improvements between 1.0 and 1.4.x were amazing and I would expect the same kind of thing here.
Also, it'll take a while for most applications to be ported over to Gnome 2.0. In that respect I think a lot of users might be disappointed since most of what people think of as "Gnome" is really applications. The release of Gnome 2.0 means the new API and a few basic tools are ready, but the real benefits won't be apparent until Gnumeric, Evolution, and other big apps are ported over.
I don't have any inside information, but if you look here you can see that they've added an unscheduled release candidate and they had planned two weeks between the last release candidate and going gold.
Assuming we don't get another release candidate (which I think is a good bet - I'm running the nightlies and they feel solid) that places 2.0 around July 7.
It depends on how you set it up and whether or not 'they' know you've got such a system.
Under Linux you'd presumably use Anacron to schedule the task, so if the computer is powered on intact the task will trigger.
If 'they' are anticipating a self destruct mechanism then, yeah, 'they' can get around it. But I think even the wariest NSA spook will probably at least try to turn the machine on before deciding to disassemble it. As soon as that happens you're safe.
Back in the BBS days you could enter [Control-H]'s into a message and they would become part of the actual text. That way the reader could actually see the words appear and be back-spaced over and re-written. It was a cool effect. Of course it worked better at 300-2400 baud, where you could actually see the characters being drawn.