There's absolutely no harm in packaging as much stuff as possible on the CD. You just have to make the installs easier to manage for the newby user.
That goes beyond nice pointy-clicky interfaces. RedHat (as far as I remember) has the choice between Workstation, Server and Custom install. A good first step. But what you really need is a bunch of tasks, not arbitrary classifications that nobody understands, and not a huge list of applications to choose from.
The install should ask you what tasks you need to perform with your computer:
[ ] Create Documents
[ ] Surf the Net
[ ] Manage my accounts
[ ] Write 'C' applications
...etc.
And should should then install a nice set of applications based on those choices. On top of that, maybe a little guided tour/tutorial that explains what the applications are.
Has anybody else noticed that the moderation lately has been more bizarre than usual. It seems like _everything_ is being marked "offtopic".
The post above, for example, might be a little off-base, but it's definately on-topic.
I've noticed other threads that were really offtopic, but instead of just the top message being modded down, every reply (some quite interesting) was modded down as well. What's the point in that?
Anyway, just my observation. I'm going to start meta-moderating a lot more and see if I can do my bit to fix this.
I can already see the "why bother" people starting to come out of the woodwork. We've got Linux and the BSDs, why do we need anything else?
I don't think we really do at the moment, but it's healthy to have some people doing something completely different and seeing where it will take them. It's called "research" and it's the precursor to the "innovation" that everybody thinks free software is incapable of.
So there's a good chance that The Hurd will never make it past the "what a neat idea" stage. But it's also possible that, just when Linux starts hitting the scalability wall (it'll be a few years yet), a system like Hurd will be waiting to take over.
Ok, I know I should let this silly thread die, but I'm a sucker for trolls...
it doesn't matter whether Windows is easy to use, only that it is easier than any other OS. (It is)
That's very much a matter of opionion. Linux is easier for me, I have lots of friends who find MacOS easier. In any case, you haven't established that "ease-of-use" == "success". If that were true then Windows 3.0 would never have made it against MacOS.
why haven't the infinite number of eyes that is Open Source been able to pull it off yet?
Two reasons: 1)for most hackers ease of use for the end user has absolutely nothing to do with success; 2)the folks who do care about ease-of-use haven't been at it very long. Considering how young the products are, they're doing extremely well.
The stock market, their accountants, blah blah.
And what do the stock market valuations of Linux "dot-coms" have to do with anything? Most of them had no possible hope of making money to begin with. A few (RedHat & VA for example) do have real business plans and will become profitable companies. But this does nothing to change the fact that well established, profitable companies see value in supporting Linux.
The well is running dry. Don't expect IBM to stay in the game much longer.
Actually IBM is going full-steam ahead. Linux is a great way for them to compete with Sun. Then there's Dell, Compaq, Intel, and a small herd of embedded companies that I'm not very familiar with. Add to that thousands of much smaller companies with niche products or services that you'll never hear about: ISPs, system integraters, consultants for small offices, vertical market developers. They make money in their markets and contribute a little back to the community as a whole, even if it's just the odd patch or a small network administration tool.
but rather that there are analagous symptoms of failure
I don't see any evidence of failure. Open Source is getting more popular all the time.
there are no signs that Linux will *ever* be as easy as Windows,
Windows isn't really all that easy to use (ask your mother), and beating it on the useability scale shouldn't be that hard. The current incarnations of GNOME and KDE come pretty close, and they haven't been working at it for nearly as long as MS. On the other hand, how did ease of use come to be the same thing as success anyway?
and without money it cannot innovate
1) They've done pretty well so far, 2) who says they don't have money? I dispute the claim that innovation requires a lot of money - most of the interesting stuff originates in Universities. The money just helps to "commercialize" an idea. However, if money is needed, companies like IBM have lots and they're investing it in Linux.
There are lots of false statements in this troll, but the communism analogy is interesting because it looks correct at first glance (most of the others are obviously wrong and don't really need to be addressed).
Looking a little deeper you see the flaw: Communism and Capitalism are about allocating scarce resources. There's only so much "stuff" (T.V.s, houses, whatever). Under Capitalism the people who own the capital get the stuff, under communism everybody gets a little bit of the stuff.
1) Intellectual property is fundamentally different. There's no limit on how many people can possess or use intellectual property, and my use of certain information doesn't hinder anybody else's use of the same information.
2) Certain types of IP are actually _more_ valuable if more people use it. If I can get you to use my wordprocessor, for example, then my copy of the wordprocessor is actually more valuable to me because I can exchange documents with you more easily.
The people who thought up Capitalism and Communism lived in an era where "hard-goods" were the only commodity worth thinking about. Neither of these theories is going to get very far in explaining the economics of software.
I don't think anybody is complaining about lack of support from Sun, just stating it as one reason Java on Linux hasn't taken off. I personally don't really care if Java is supported "well" on Linux, as long as the odd Java app I need to run works.
The Oracle 8i installation, for example, is in Java. It runs like crap, but it runs. Since I don't run the install all that often it's good enough for me.
As for being hypocritical, I hate Netscape as much as I hate Java, but I use Netscape because I need it. I don't need Java. It offers no compelling advantages for me, since I con't really need to write software that runs under Windows. My stuff (written in C and Perl) runs seamlessly on any Linux/Unix. It's fast. I've got all the libs I need.
What does Java offer me? Well, I give up performance and most of the APIs that I like in order to gain cross-platform support that I don't need. Not likely.
I'm likely to stay with Linux, but I think it would be great if BSD took over a significant market share.
A lot depends on the Apple API and whether or not a desktop application written for MacOSX can be easily supported under the various BSDs. If yes, then BSD could easily take on Windows in the desktop market. Apple could position themselves as the vendor of "premium" BSD desktops specializing in publishing and media.
Unfortunately, I don't think Apple is far-sighted enough to allow this. They'll keep their API's private and try to grow their little piece of the market without giving up control. By the time they realize how foolish this is it'll be too late.
Nobody said good stories had to be tasteful. But I guess I should have figured out that it was plaguarized (sp?). It seems unlikely that somebody would take the time to write something like that just to post it anonymously to Slashdot. Oh well, time to look up alt.tasteless and see if there's anything else interesting there.
I didn't mean to imply that student labs aren't important, but the failure of a single machine isn't going to cost millions of dollars.
Put another way, would the students rather have 100 PCs that performed OK and had a 5% per year failure rate, or a 120 PCs that were somewhat faster but had a 10% per year failure rate? I bet the students would prefer the latter. They would have more PCs available on average and they would be faster too.
Ask a stock-broker on a trading floor the same question and he'd definately go with the more reliable, less performant setup. In his case a failure is really very expensive
I don't think this is the first closed-source software company that will fail on Linux. The fact is that mass-market proprietary software (with the possible exception of games) will never make it under Linux.
If there are enough users to support an Applix, Corel, or Microsoft Office style suite, then there are enough Open Source developers who will build one. Even without StarOffice, KDE and Gnome both have efforts that, although a few years away from matching the big boys feature for feature, are "good-enough" for most users today.
That doesn't mean there's no hope at all for proprietary stuff under Linux, but stick to vertical market applications (where you're not going to find an active developer community) or applications were you can sell support. Office apps just won't cut it.
I'm not sure I understand the question. You're a College/University with severl hundred PCs? That's hardly a mission-critical environment. In fact, I would think it's the sort of environment where you owe it to the institution to look for the best bang for the buck.
But even in production environments, I haven't had any problems with AMD and would certainly trust them at least as much as Intel. If the environment is really that critical I probably wouldn't use either.
Sun and IBM both make rock-solid hardware (Sparc and RS/6000, not x86) and IBM at least has _incredible_ service contracts (Sun probably does too, but I have no personal experience with their service dept.). You pay _way_ to much money for that support, but in a truly mission-critical environment it's worth it.
But again, for a university environment, Athlon is definately the way to go.
I remember hearing representatives from Canada's Natural Law party speak a few years ago and thinking what nuts they were. (Entertaining, but definately crazy.)
It says something about the state of politics in the U.S. that the Natural Law candidate actually comes accross as an intelligent, rational human being next to the Republican candidate. It would be funny, except for the fact that Bush might actually win.
Larry Wall's keynote at the 1999 Linux World. It's an old saying, though, and I'm not sure where it originates. I'm pretty sure it's not really Larry's or I would have attributed it.
Gartner's clients are CTOs and managers who quote Gartner reports in order to justify pet projects. It works like this:
1. Techies play with cool stuff.
2. The techies start whispering into the ears of their managers about the cool stuff they're playing with. The techies know not to challenge the status-quo too much or they'll be ignored, so the managers only really hear about moderately cool stuff.
3. Managers (many of whom are has-been techies) start to daydream about the cool stuff the techies have mentioned. Some if it sounds like it might be useful, but of course the big boss (CEO, CFO, etc.) will never go for it, oh well.
4. Gartners asks the managers and CTOs what they've been thinking about.
5. Gartner produces a report that reflects what the managers _would_like_to_do, but don't really have the guts for.
6. Managers buy Gartner reports and use them to justify their pet projects.
The conclusion: Gartner is really reporting techie opinions, filtered through a powerful "you can't handle the truth" lens and contaminated with strange manager ideas.
What will happen now is that all the managers who were dreaming of Windows installations will keep doing what they were doing. All the managers who were dreaming of Linux will have some ammo to justify jumping in with both feet.
If the techies in the organization like Linux, the Windows projects will fall strangely behind schedule while the Linux projects will go surprisingly well (it's amazing how happy techies make a project go better). In two years, shortly after the managers have noticed that their Windows projects are going nowhere, Gartner will report that Linux is suddenly the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Whether the "x nude" queries will result in tweaks to our scoring, I can't say,
but we'll certainly be adding them to the test cases we look at.
Yeah, I bet you will!
Ok, let me this straight. Google is going to employ people to 1)look for porn on the Internet, 2)decide which is the best porn, and then 3)improve their search engine to rank it properly.
I'm sure I can find quite a few volunteers in my workplace who are already doing 1 & 2. I bet they'd love to have this job.
That's why I suggested modifying bind, or more accurately, the default bind configuration.
I don't think most system administrators would be opposed to an additional set of root servers and would leave them in the default config. The next wave of bind updates would magically introduce new TLDs.
I don't really know who maintains BIND nowadays, but whoever it has has the power to fix all this.
Just start an alternative domain name system and incorporate it into new versions of BIND. Most admins will leave the alternative in their install (why not?) and voila - instant acceptance.
1. You're assuming that giving information about suicide is the same as promotion. This is clearly false. I've read the alt.suicide FAQ - it's actually quite fascinating. It didn't make me want to kill myself. (Listening to right-wing politicians, however, has made me contemplate murder. Maybe we should censor them?)
2. Censorship is bad. It goes against our rights to free speech and free thought. Now there may be situations where the harm from certain kinds of free speech outweighs the harm of censorship, but unless you can show that this is such a case (with solid evidance, not just conjecture) you shouldn't even think about suppressing the material.
Re:Actually, I think it's Canadian...
on
The Rise Of QNX
·
· Score: 2
Whoops. I just checked www.qnx.com. Looks like they're in Kanata Ontario and they're called QNX Software Systems Ltd.
Actually, I think it's Canadian...
on
The Rise Of QNX
·
· Score: 3
I used QNX about twelve years ago. It used to power an educational computer called the Icon. It was actually a decent Unix-like system.
Anyway, it's definately not developed by 3COM. I think the real developer was Quantum Systems in Waterloo Ontario Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
There's absolutely no harm in packaging as much stuff as possible on the CD. You just have to make the installs easier to manage for the newby user.
That goes beyond nice pointy-clicky interfaces. RedHat (as far as I remember) has the choice between Workstation, Server and Custom install. A good first step. But what you really need is a bunch of tasks, not arbitrary classifications that nobody understands, and not a huge list of applications to choose from.
The install should ask you what tasks you need to perform with your computer:
And should should then install a nice set of applications based on those choices. On top of that, maybe a little guided tour/tutorial that explains what the applications are.
Has anybody else noticed that the moderation lately has been more bizarre than usual. It seems like _everything_ is being marked "offtopic".
The post above, for example, might be a little off-base, but it's definately on-topic.
I've noticed other threads that were really offtopic, but instead of just the top message being modded down, every reply (some quite interesting) was modded down as well. What's the point in that?
Anyway, just my observation. I'm going to start meta-moderating a lot more and see if I can do my bit to fix this.
Research on filesystems and UI's taking place under Linux (and others) and can be ported to other systems (like, for example Hurd).
Hurd is looking at different ways of implementing the kernel.
I can already see the "why bother" people starting to come out of the woodwork. We've got Linux and the BSDs, why do we need anything else?
I don't think we really do at the moment, but it's healthy to have some people doing something completely different and seeing where it will take them. It's called "research" and it's the precursor to the "innovation" that everybody thinks free software is incapable of.
So there's a good chance that The Hurd will never make it past the "what a neat idea" stage. But it's also possible that, just when Linux starts hitting the scalability wall (it'll be a few years yet), a system like Hurd will be waiting to take over.
Ok, I know I should let this silly thread die, but I'm a sucker for trolls...
That's very much a matter of opionion. Linux is easier for me, I have lots of friends who find MacOS easier. In any case, you haven't established that "ease-of-use" == "success". If that were true then Windows 3.0 would never have made it against MacOS.
Two reasons: 1)for most hackers ease of use for the end user has absolutely nothing to do with success; 2)the folks who do care about ease-of-use haven't been at it very long. Considering how young the products are, they're doing extremely well.
And what do the stock market valuations of Linux "dot-coms" have to do with anything? Most of them had no possible hope of making money to begin with. A few (RedHat & VA for example) do have real business plans and will become profitable companies. But this does nothing to change the fact that well established, profitable companies see value in supporting Linux.
Actually IBM is going full-steam ahead. Linux is a great way for them to compete with Sun. Then there's Dell, Compaq, Intel, and a small herd of embedded companies that I'm not very familiar with. Add to that thousands of much smaller companies with niche products or services that you'll never hear about: ISPs, system integraters, consultants for small offices, vertical market developers. They make money in their markets and contribute a little back to the community as a whole, even if it's just the odd patch or a small network administration tool.
I don't see any evidence of failure. Open Source is getting more popular all the time.
Windows isn't really all that easy to use (ask your mother), and beating it on the useability scale shouldn't be that hard. The current incarnations of GNOME and KDE come pretty close, and they haven't been working at it for nearly as long as MS. On the other hand, how did ease of use come to be the same thing as success anyway?
1) They've done pretty well so far, 2) who says they don't have money? I dispute the claim that innovation requires a lot of money - most of the interesting stuff originates in Universities. The money just helps to "commercialize" an idea. However, if money is needed, companies like IBM have lots and they're investing it in Linux.
There are lots of false statements in this troll, but the communism analogy is interesting because it looks correct at first glance (most of the others are obviously wrong and don't really need to be addressed).
Looking a little deeper you see the flaw: Communism and Capitalism are about allocating scarce resources. There's only so much "stuff" (T.V.s, houses, whatever). Under Capitalism the people who own the capital get the stuff, under communism everybody gets a little bit of the stuff.
1) Intellectual property is fundamentally different. There's no limit on how many people can possess or use intellectual property, and my use of certain information doesn't hinder anybody else's use of the same information.
2) Certain types of IP are actually _more_ valuable if more people use it. If I can get you to use my wordprocessor, for example, then my copy of the wordprocessor is actually more valuable to me because I can exchange documents with you more easily.
The people who thought up Capitalism and Communism lived in an era where "hard-goods" were the only commodity worth thinking about. Neither of these theories is going to get very far in explaining the economics of software.
I don't think anybody is complaining about lack of support from Sun, just stating it as one reason Java on Linux hasn't taken off. I personally don't really care if Java is supported "well" on Linux, as long as the odd Java app I need to run works.
The Oracle 8i installation, for example, is in Java. It runs like crap, but it runs. Since I don't run the install all that often it's good enough for me.
As for being hypocritical, I hate Netscape as much as I hate Java, but I use Netscape because I need it. I don't need Java. It offers no compelling advantages for me, since I con't really need to write software that runs under Windows. My stuff (written in C and Perl) runs seamlessly on any Linux/Unix. It's fast. I've got all the libs I need.
What does Java offer me? Well, I give up performance and most of the APIs that I like in order to gain cross-platform support that I don't need. Not likely.
I'm likely to stay with Linux, but I think it would be great if BSD took over a significant market share.
A lot depends on the Apple API and whether or not a desktop application written for MacOSX can be easily supported under the various BSDs. If yes, then BSD could easily take on Windows in the desktop market. Apple could position themselves as the vendor of "premium" BSD desktops specializing in publishing and media.
Unfortunately, I don't think Apple is far-sighted enough to allow this. They'll keep their API's private and try to grow their little piece of the market without giving up control. By the time they realize how foolish this is it'll be too late.
Nobody said good stories had to be tasteful. But I guess I should have figured out that it was plaguarized (sp?). It seems unlikely that somebody would take the time to write something like that just to post it anonymously to Slashdot. Oh well, time to look up alt.tasteless and see if there's anything else interesting there.
I didn't mean to imply that student labs aren't important, but the failure of a single machine isn't going to cost millions of dollars.
Put another way, would the students rather have 100 PCs that performed OK and had a 5% per year failure rate, or a 120 PCs that were somewhat faster but had a 10% per year failure rate? I bet the students would prefer the latter. They would have more PCs available on average and they would be faster too.
Ask a stock-broker on a trading floor the same question and he'd definately go with the more reliable, less performant setup. In his case a failure is really very expensive
I don't think this is the first closed-source software company that will fail on Linux. The fact is that mass-market proprietary software (with the possible exception of games) will never make it under Linux.
If there are enough users to support an Applix, Corel, or Microsoft Office style suite, then there are enough Open Source developers who will build one. Even without StarOffice, KDE and Gnome both have efforts that, although a few years away from matching the big boys feature for feature, are "good-enough" for most users today.
That doesn't mean there's no hope at all for proprietary stuff under Linux, but stick to vertical market applications (where you're not going to find an active developer community) or applications were you can sell support. Office apps just won't cut it.
I'm not sure I understand the question. You're a College/University with severl hundred PCs? That's hardly a mission-critical environment. In fact, I would think it's the sort of environment where you owe it to the institution to look for the best bang for the buck.
But even in production environments, I haven't had any problems with AMD and would certainly trust them at least as much as Intel. If the environment is really that critical I probably wouldn't use either.
Sun and IBM both make rock-solid hardware (Sparc and RS/6000, not x86) and IBM at least has _incredible_ service contracts (Sun probably does too, but I have no personal experience with their service dept.). You pay _way_ to much money for that support, but in a truly mission-critical environment it's worth it.
But again, for a university environment, Athlon is definately the way to go.
No, that was my impression too. It sure was fun watching their videos of Yogic Flying, though.
I remember hearing representatives from Canada's Natural Law party speak a few years ago and thinking what nuts they were. (Entertaining, but definately crazy.)
It says something about the state of politics in the U.S. that the Natural Law candidate actually comes accross as an intelligent, rational human being next to the Republican candidate. It would be funny, except for the fact that Bush might actually win.
Cool, thanks. Actually, with the help of your pointer, I was able to find what appears to be a more correct (and I think better) version:
I'll change my .sig accordingly.
Larry Wall's keynote at the 1999 Linux World. It's an old saying, though, and I'm not sure where it originates. I'm pretty sure it's not really Larry's or I would have attributed it.
Gartner's clients are CTOs and managers who quote Gartner reports in order to justify pet projects. It works like this:
1. Techies play with cool stuff.
2. The techies start whispering into the ears of their managers about the cool stuff they're playing with. The techies know not to challenge the status-quo too much or they'll be ignored, so the managers only really hear about moderately cool stuff.
3. Managers (many of whom are has-been techies) start to daydream about the cool stuff the techies have mentioned. Some if it sounds like it might be useful, but of course the big boss (CEO, CFO, etc.) will never go for it, oh well.
4. Gartners asks the managers and CTOs what they've been thinking about.
5. Gartner produces a report that reflects what the managers _would_like_to_do, but don't really have the guts for.
6. Managers buy Gartner reports and use them to justify their pet projects.
The conclusion: Gartner is really reporting techie opinions, filtered through a powerful "you can't handle the truth" lens and contaminated with strange manager ideas.
What will happen now is that all the managers who were dreaming of Windows installations will keep doing what they were doing. All the managers who were dreaming of Linux will have some ammo to justify jumping in with both feet.
If the techies in the organization like Linux, the Windows projects will fall strangely behind schedule while the Linux projects will go surprisingly well (it's amazing how happy techies make a project go better). In two years, shortly after the managers have noticed that their Windows projects are going nowhere, Gartner will report that Linux is suddenly the greatest thing since sliced bread.
According to that article the server market for this year in Japan is expected to be:
That leaves only 13% for all of Unix and Novell combined. Surely that can't be right.
Yeah, I bet you will!
Ok, let me this straight. Google is going to employ people to 1)look for porn on the Internet, 2)decide which is the best porn, and then 3)improve their search engine to rank it properly.
I'm sure I can find quite a few volunteers in my workplace who are already doing 1 & 2. I bet they'd love to have this job.
That's why I suggested modifying bind, or more accurately, the default bind configuration.
I don't think most system administrators would be opposed to an additional set of root servers and would leave them in the default config. The next wave of bind updates would magically introduce new TLDs.
I don't really know who maintains BIND nowadays, but whoever it has has the power to fix all this.
Just start an alternative domain name system and incorporate it into new versions of BIND. Most admins will leave the alternative in their install (why not?) and voila - instant acceptance.
1. You're assuming that giving information about suicide is the same as promotion. This is clearly false. I've read the alt.suicide FAQ - it's actually quite fascinating. It didn't make me want to kill myself. (Listening to right-wing politicians, however, has made me contemplate murder. Maybe we should censor them?)
2. Censorship is bad. It goes against our rights to free speech and free thought. Now there may be situations where the harm from certain kinds of free speech outweighs the harm of censorship, but unless you can show that this is such a case (with solid evidance, not just conjecture) you shouldn't even think about suppressing the material.
Whoops. I just checked www.qnx.com. Looks like they're in Kanata Ontario and they're called QNX Software Systems Ltd.
I used QNX about twelve years ago. It used to power an educational computer called the Icon. It was actually a decent Unix-like system.
Anyway, it's definately not developed by 3COM. I think the real developer was Quantum Systems in Waterloo Ontario Canada.