I know we're seeing a lot of Linux and Linux companies in the trade press, and there's the odd opinion piece in the mainstream press, but you better believe that Linux isn't as far up the list of stuff you buy automatically (like, "Want a big router? buy a Cisco." type of kneejerk response) as you think.
In many shops, it's still "Want UNIX? that'll be Tru64/SCO/HP-UX/Solaris/Irix." depending on your preferred hardware vendor. That's assuming your CEO hasn't fallen in love with Outlook and decided that Microsoft is The Way, and you techs had better Make It Work, because Microsoft says it will.
No, Linux as a product is fantastic. As a value proposition to the suits, it still needs work. --
Love 'em or hate 'em, SCO are a "name" to the Men With Big Chequebooks. And being a "name" is far, far more important than having a decent product or any trifling considerations like that.
However, SCO UNIX isn't actually all that bad and has a half-decent, tried and true support infrastructure behind it. SCO also have quite a lot of money.
I would be very interested to try out SCO Linux, just to see what a commercial UNIX vendor makes of this weird now-it's-SysV-now-it's-BSD-now-it's-POSIX-omigod-i t's-all-three thing we call Linux... --
1. A monkey with a big axe and a black hood 2. A monkey in an electric chair 3. A firing squad of monkeys 4. A monkey swinging from a gallows (That'd be Hartlepool Nautilus, then:) 5. A monkey on a guillotine --
Granted, it's very, very pretty. In fact, it's possibly one of the least threatening and/or intimidating interfaces ever.
But there are several problems with it.
1. It's not going to be a lot of fun for colourblind people, or people on monochrome displays (yes, they do still exist).
2. Just using colour for the window gadgets isn't intuitive - there are *no* visual cues to tell you what gadget does what.
3. It's very busy to look at - that slightly grooved appearance that the window background makes the overall thing look fussy, and therefore it's harder to pick out what it is you're actually supposed to be looking for.
That said, it's definitely a step forward. I'd be interested to see what J. Random User thinks of it once it gets out there into the land of The Public. --
It wasn't the G's I was thinking of
on
Macs In Space!
·
· Score: 1
It was the six or seven minutes of extreme vibration at launch - what would that do to the actuators and the head itself? --
Windows doesn't antialias fonts; never has, never will. It only smooths them. And then only at point sizes where it doesn't need to do it anyway. You don't need to smooth 18 point text.
Antialiasing = the removing of aliasing artifacts; i.e. fooling the eye into thinking there's more resolution available than there really is.
Antialiasing, done correctly, is required at *small* point sizes - i.e. 10 and below. Also you have to do something substantially more clever than the edge smoothing that Windows does.
The only reason font smoothing is in Windows is to make PowerPoint presentations look pretty.
The only OS that has ever had proper, complete font antialiasing was RISCOS on the Acorn platform. And it did it with only 8 shades of grey.
That did real-deal, subpixel antialiasing at *all* sizes. And the results were way better than anything Windows has ever offered.
That said, I know BeOS does something like this but IANABU.
And never mind what Nautilus *looks* like. Have you checked a copy out of CVS and built it? Used it?
But then I'm using an Abit BE6-II motherboard. The neat thing about this board is that you can disable the first IDE controller (hda and hdb) and enable the HPT366, which means that the ata66 stuff is now hda and hdb.
Abit have also set it up so that you can choose to boot from the HPT366, much like you'd do with a SCSI card.
Works well for me with a Seagate Barracuda 10.2GB drive and kernel 2.3.99pre6.
What I Did:
1. Build kernel with hpt366 support, set up lilo. 2. Reboot and go straight into BIOS. 3. Enable the HPT366. 4. Disable the first IDE33 controller altogether - this preserves the hda-ness of hda. 5. Ensure that the the first boot device (after the floppy) is the HPT366. 6. Reboot and watch things work a bit faster than before.
I should also point out that my CDROM is on hdc - i.e. on the IDE33 controller that *isn't* disabled.
"How important are the following packages: bind, gimp, emacs, lsof, apmd, pump/dhcpcd?"
Well, to you and I, very. These packages are probably not at all important to someone who is installing Linux for the first time, likely at home, for a bit of word processing and dialup internet access.
I think it's impossible to make an installer that pleases everyone, but at least Mandrake are trying.
Personally, I think this system (let the system throw away packages it deems to be less important) is a little dangerous - unless there's a baseline below which you cannot go in order to always provide a functional system.
A *really* cool way of doing this would be to have minimum, typical and full installs of packages - for example, KDE. The minimum install would be really quite bare - no themes, no sounds, no wallpaper, no games, few apps. A typical install would included a moderate amount of all those things. And a full would hit you with everything.
This could be one way of reducing unnecessary disk space usage, I suppose. --
Sure, if you're a Master CNE or a MVP or a CSIE then you're highly qualified, but you have no degree and you don't state what your actual qualifications are.
I work in a software house, doing *big* projects. You are in for a massive surprise if you think (a) you're very talented and (b) you're highly qualified.
My advice? Get a degree. Any old how. Doesn't matter what it's in (although CS/IT/SE would help:). Show employers that you have the capacity to learn.
Does the USA have anything like the Open University in the UK, where you do a degree (or Masters. Or PhD) via distance learning, and pay on a per-semester basis? --
"I see a multitude of different help systems, button layouts, open/save dialog boxes, etc."
AFAIK, both GNOME and KDE offer common file open/save dialogues. It's just that they suck. The GNOME one has a confusing layout, while the KDE one is too big and has too many buttons.
As for help... there are too many help files for both KDE and GNOME apps that say simply "under construction".
As for Mozilla... Ack. Great browser. Terminally sucky interface. --
Bear in mind that *very little of this has changed at all in the past five years*.
KDE isn't perfect. In fact I don't use it - I've been using E since DR0.13. But it's only a couple of years old - and it's getting better all the time.
Eazel should do good stuff - and I too hope that they do it in a "what do people actually want to *do*?"-oriented manner, rather than the "check out the cool pixmap themes"-oriented manner I think we see t0o much of.
("Under Windows, any video card is supported"? Doubt it. Try getting decent 3D on Windows 2000 - which is the *current* version. Or working with a very old card. Hell, even XF86 4.0 is better at the moment.) --
Sure, if you try and do an NFS install of Slack 3.5, you're gonna come away with the impression that it's all a bit hackish.
But we're past that now.
Let's assume, for a moment, that you have a PC which has supported hardware.
Let's drop a Mandrake 7 CD in the drive and boot off it.
Let's install using the nice graphical installer which will pick sensible defaults when we don't know the answer to the question. (But then, most of the questions are of the "Where do you live?" variety)
Let's watch as the installer copies the files.
We hit a bummer. Linux has no support for PnP monitors yet and so we have to know what kind of monitor we have.
X setup runs just dandy. Because our hardware is *supported*, right?
We reboot and we are away.
And we log in and we see the KDE desktop and we are happy people.
We use kppp to get on the internet (cunningly hidden behind an "Internet" icon on the desktop) and we use Netscape.
We haven't seen a command-line yet, either.
Please, valid criticism is welcome. Your article is sheer mythology.
Let's get some facts straight.
(X cut and paste : highlight marks, middle button pastes. End of discussion)
Fer chrissakes, there's a SHUT DOWN button on the KDM chooser. You don't need to be root. That's by default.
"Twiddling with XWindows settings"? WTF? Just set it up (with the nice graphical XF86Setup tool, if your installer didn't do it for you) and use it. And it's X, or The X Window System. Not XWindows. Ever.
Either you're trolling or times have changed since you last checked Linux out. --
True, most everything you'd want to configure on a Windows box is collected together into the Control Panel.
The applets themselves are hard to use. The display control panel is a particularly bad thing - unless you've got proprietary vendor-specific extensions. You can't resize the picture. The refresh rate (which can be very important for those people who are sensitive to it) is buried in the Adapter section of the Advanced Settings. That's wrong. Refresh rate is a Monitor thing. Even better would be for the system to *automatically* use the best possible refresh rate for a given resolution. Of course this would need a monitor that can report such information to the PC.
I'm not saying that at the moment Linux is any better. What I am saying is that Windows is a bad example to follow because it's a case of ticklist features being shoehorned into the product by the marketing department and the engineering and UI teams having to pick up the bits afterwards.
The Mac is better, but someone at Apple needs to sign a Control Panel Non-Proliferation Treaty. There's millions of the buggers and it's confusing for a user.
Maybe things need to be grouped together by task - "Getting On The Internet", "Changing Screen Size". --
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'll find that Nifty Doorways has this feature.
--
Here.
--
Cuz I'm pulling a massive 158 bytes/sec over my 256K link...
Is there a mirror anywhere? (Not that the answer's likely to be "yes" or anything).
--
I know we're seeing a lot of Linux and Linux companies in the trade press, and there's the odd opinion piece in the mainstream press, but you better believe that Linux isn't as far up the list of stuff you buy automatically (like, "Want a big router? buy a Cisco." type of kneejerk response) as you think.
In many shops, it's still "Want UNIX? that'll be Tru64/SCO/HP-UX/Solaris/Irix." depending on your preferred hardware vendor. That's assuming your CEO hasn't fallen in love with Outlook and decided that Microsoft is The Way, and you techs had better Make It Work, because Microsoft says it will.
No, Linux as a product is fantastic. As a value proposition to the suits, it still needs work.
--
Which is make Linux attractive to the suits.
i t's-all-three thing we call Linux...
Love 'em or hate 'em, SCO are a "name" to the Men With Big Chequebooks. And being a "name" is far, far more important than having a decent product or any trifling considerations like that.
However, SCO UNIX isn't actually all that bad and has a half-decent, tried and true support infrastructure behind it. SCO also have quite a lot of money.
I would be very interested to try out SCO Linux, just to see what a commercial UNIX vendor makes of this weird now-it's-SysV-now-it's-BSD-now-it's-POSIX-omigod-
--
1. A monkey with a big axe and a black hood :)
2. A monkey in an electric chair
3. A firing squad of monkeys
4. A monkey swinging from a gallows (That'd be Hartlepool Nautilus, then
5. A monkey on a guillotine
--
Granted, it's very, very pretty. In fact, it's possibly one of the least threatening and/or intimidating interfaces ever.
But there are several problems with it.
1. It's not going to be a lot of fun for colourblind people, or people on monochrome displays (yes, they do still exist).
2. Just using colour for the window gadgets isn't intuitive - there are *no* visual cues to tell you what gadget does what.
3. It's very busy to look at - that slightly grooved appearance that the window background makes the overall thing look fussy, and therefore it's harder to pick out what it is you're actually supposed to be looking for.
That said, it's definitely a step forward. I'd be interested to see what J. Random User thinks of it once it gets out there into the land of The Public.
--
It was the six or seven minutes of extreme vibration at launch - what would that do to the actuators and the head itself?
--
This is such a total myth.
Windows doesn't antialias fonts; never has, never will. It only smooths them. And then only at point sizes where it doesn't need to do it anyway. You don't need to smooth 18 point text.
Antialiasing = the removing of aliasing artifacts; i.e. fooling the eye into thinking there's more resolution available than there really is.
Antialiasing, done correctly, is required at *small* point sizes - i.e. 10 and below. Also you have to do something substantially more clever than the edge smoothing that Windows does.
The only reason font smoothing is in Windows is to make PowerPoint presentations look pretty.
The only OS that has ever had proper, complete font antialiasing was RISCOS on the Acorn platform. And it did it with only 8 shades of grey.
That did real-deal, subpixel antialiasing at *all* sizes. And the results were way better than anything Windows has ever offered.
That said, I know BeOS does something like this but IANABU.
And never mind what Nautilus *looks* like. Have you checked a copy out of CVS and built it? Used it?
Nah, didn't think so.
--
How the hell is a modern hard disk supposed to withstand a launch without inscribing a delicate tracery across the platter with the head?
Or have they got some decent solid state stuff instead?
--
But then I'm using an Abit BE6-II motherboard. The neat thing about this board is that you can disable the first IDE controller (hda and hdb) and enable the HPT366, which means that the ata66 stuff is now hda and hdb.
Abit have also set it up so that you can choose to boot from the HPT366, much like you'd do with a SCSI card.
Works well for me with a Seagate Barracuda 10.2GB drive and kernel 2.3.99pre6.
What I Did:
1. Build kernel with hpt366 support, set up lilo.
2. Reboot and go straight into BIOS.
3. Enable the HPT366.
4. Disable the first IDE33 controller altogether - this preserves the hda-ness of hda.
5. Ensure that the the first boot device (after the floppy) is the HPT366.
6. Reboot and watch things work a bit faster than before.
I should also point out that my CDROM is on hdc - i.e. on the IDE33 controller that *isn't* disabled.
--
"How important are the following packages: bind, gimp, emacs, lsof, apmd, pump/dhcpcd?"
Well, to you and I, very. These packages are probably not at all important to someone who is installing Linux for the first time, likely at home, for a bit of word processing and dialup internet access.
I think it's impossible to make an installer that pleases everyone, but at least Mandrake are trying.
Personally, I think this system (let the system throw away packages it deems to be less important) is a little dangerous - unless there's a baseline below which you cannot go in order to always provide a functional system.
A *really* cool way of doing this would be to have minimum, typical and full installs of packages - for example, KDE. The minimum install would be really quite bare - no themes, no sounds, no wallpaper, no games, few apps. A typical install would included a moderate amount of all those things. And a full would hit you with everything.
This could be one way of reducing unnecessary disk space usage, I suppose.
--
Sure, if you're a Master CNE or a MVP or a CSIE then you're highly qualified, but you have no degree and you don't state what your actual qualifications are.
:). Show employers that you have the capacity to learn.
I work in a software house, doing *big* projects. You are in for a massive surprise if you think (a) you're very talented and (b) you're highly qualified.
My advice? Get a degree. Any old how. Doesn't matter what it's in (although CS/IT/SE would help
Does the USA have anything like the Open University in the UK, where you do a degree (or Masters. Or PhD) via distance learning, and pay on a per-semester basis?
--
soon loses its appeal when you have a house, and bills, and a car, and kids, and a social life - all things which suck up money at an alarming rate.
You can enjoy coding and even code for fun but #1 priority has to be the support and care of yourself and those around you.
--
Is the $6.00 component a 64Mbit device or a 64Mbyte device?
I think it's the former, but I'm not sure.
--
And Sturgeon's Law is:
"90% Of Everything Is Crap".
With a bonus 9% if it's a Hollywood movie.
But then I'm an old fart who still thinks the greatest think George Lucas has ever done is THX-1138.
--
I got my A3000 at its launch, running RISC OS 2, in 1988.
It had the task bar and disk controls.
--
Administrative Assistant - a comatose, gun-chewing zombie
--
"C is a great, if complicated language. It's simple, yet can get complicated very easily..."
It's complicated.
It's simple.
It's complicated again.
The article gets worse from there.
--
"I see a multitude of different help systems, button layouts, open/save dialog boxes, etc."
AFAIK, both GNOME and KDE offer common file open/save dialogues. It's just that they suck. The GNOME one has a confusing layout, while the KDE one is too big and has too many buttons.
As for help... there are too many help files for both KDE and GNOME apps that say simply "under construction".
As for Mozilla... Ack. Great browser. Terminally sucky interface.
--
Perhaps you need to look here:
http://www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm
Bear in mind that *very little of this has changed at all in the past five years*.
KDE isn't perfect. In fact I don't use it - I've been using E since DR0.13. But it's only a couple of years old - and it's getting better all the time.
Eazel should do good stuff - and I too hope that they do it in a "what do people actually want to *do*?"-oriented manner, rather than the "check out the cool pixmap themes"-oriented manner I think we see t0o much of.
("Under Windows, any video card is supported"? Doubt it. Try getting decent 3D on Windows 2000 - which is the *current* version. Or working with a very old card. Hell, even XF86 4.0 is better at the moment.)
--
Sure, if you try and do an NFS install of Slack 3.5, you're gonna come away with the impression that it's all a bit hackish.
But we're past that now.
Let's assume, for a moment, that you have a PC which has supported hardware.
Let's drop a Mandrake 7 CD in the drive and boot off it.
Let's install using the nice graphical installer which will pick sensible defaults when we don't know the answer to the question. (But then, most of the questions are of the "Where do you live?" variety)
Let's watch as the installer copies the files.
We hit a bummer. Linux has no support for PnP monitors yet and so we have to know what kind of monitor we have.
X setup runs just dandy. Because our hardware is *supported*, right?
We reboot and we are away.
And we log in and we see the KDE desktop and we are happy people.
We use kppp to get on the internet (cunningly hidden behind an "Internet" icon on the desktop) and we use Netscape.
We haven't seen a command-line yet, either.
Please, valid criticism is welcome. Your article is sheer mythology.
Let's get some facts straight.
(X cut and paste : highlight marks, middle button pastes. End of discussion)
Fer chrissakes, there's a SHUT DOWN button on the KDM chooser. You don't need to be root. That's by default.
"Twiddling with XWindows settings"? WTF? Just set it up (with the nice graphical XF86Setup tool, if your installer didn't do it for you) and use it. And it's X, or The X Window System. Not XWindows. Ever.
Either you're trolling or times have changed since you last checked Linux out.
--
True, most everything you'd want to configure on a Windows box is collected together into the Control Panel.
The applets themselves are hard to use. The display control panel is a particularly bad thing - unless you've got proprietary vendor-specific extensions. You can't resize the picture. The refresh rate (which can be very important for those people who are sensitive to it) is buried in the Adapter section of the Advanced Settings. That's wrong. Refresh rate is a Monitor thing. Even better would be for the system to *automatically* use the best possible refresh rate for a given resolution. Of course this would need a monitor that can report such information to the PC.
I'm not saying that at the moment Linux is any better. What I am saying is that Windows is a bad example to follow because it's a case of ticklist features being shoehorned into the product by the marketing department and the engineering and UI teams having to pick up the bits afterwards.
The Mac is better, but someone at Apple needs to sign a Control Panel Non-Proliferation Treaty. There's millions of the buggers and it's confusing for a user.
Maybe things need to be grouped together by task - "Getting On The Internet", "Changing Screen Size".
--
"...a velocity of nearly 100 kilometers per second..."
:)
It's all very well reaching Saturn in six months but it's a bit of a bummer if you can't stop when you get there
--
Fast.
Cheap.
Good.
Pick any two.
The US government has been trying to pick all three and instead has only been picking the first two...
Example. The Galileo spaceprobe is an example of "old" NASA - cost $1.5B, still working now - and doing good science.
The MPL cost what, $150M (i.e. 10% of what Galileo did). And it didn't work.
--