Given two choices, in some cases, one option is good and the other bad.
In other cases, both options are bad.
In other cases, both options are good.
But in none of these cases is there necessarily a reason for the option to exist. Things as basic as "how application foo stores its default configuration" should not be something that varies from distribution to distribution, for example. (just an example)
Different distributions only make sense when the choices they've made make sense. If it doesn't make sense for there to even/be/ a choice, then there's no reason for multiple distributions.
I think a lot of the "little things" which fit into that category are what annoys people about switching from one distribution to another. First step: those things should be eliminated.
As for "niche distributions", I think a lot of those could also be combined in some way. For desktop use, it's clear that not everyone needs every package, so they have easy ways of choosing what is relevant, and how it fits together, and making sure that all the shared parts are secure and bug-free. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't make sense for any other niche, even if it's something horribly meta like "a distribution for building distributions".
What is really so incredibly niche that it can't pull from the same server as everything else? Don't throw your weight behind one distribution, if the one you'd support doesn't exist yet.
How can something be FUD when it's right fucking there in front of you? I'll admit that the anti-aliasing thing has improved with time, but there are still projects which have this cancer of ugly.
As for your lame "Brand X" straw-man: I solved for X. It's "good", isn't it?
Exactly what brand do you think I'm promoting? Do you think OpenOffice is somehow, by a truly fair and objective metric, not utter crap?
Java people always say Java is fast, but if Java is fast, why does EVERYTHING written in Java seem so slow? Do Java people just look at benchmarks and not ever look at real-world uses? This is a serious question. I'm constantly hearing that java is fast, and consistently seeing only (OpenOffice, Eclipse, ANY Java "applet" online) java being hideously slow?
When I was in America, I saw complaints that Slashdot was too America-centric, never any nerd news for the English. The response was always something along the lines of "Fuck off, we don't care about your stupid British TV shows coming back or being canceled."
Okay, I live in England now, and I still don't care. Why am I suddenly seeing articles about things that involve countries I live in?
Tried OpenOffice writer just now, to see if it's improved...
And it hasn't. Still ugly as sin, even ignoring the icons: defaulting to a visible margin? Wtf? And still suffers from the Open-Source mental disorder where "Anti-aliasing means everything is bold and blurry all the time, even straight lines!"
Originally I had started this with "And it's much faster than when I've previously tried it!", but now after five minutes of using it, everything's slowed down to its normal "press a key, wait, something happens" routine.. okay, this experiment is over, rolling back to the previous checkpoint now. It still blows.
Why can't anyone agree one what's "right to use"? It seems everyone and their dog has a bug tracker, and I've yet to see one that seemed to do its job "well". Is this something that has a secret really elegant solution that Linus can pull out of his ass in an afternoon and save us all?
I wouldn't expect it, since he uses/mailing lists/ of all things, to track things. I suppose it's sortof a decentralized model of bug tracking: everyone has to figure shit out for themselves.
If I don't see an easy way to note:
- A list of known issues
- Whether they're being worked on by anyone
- What I can do to help
- What the plans are for the future
I'm much less likely to like a project. Having to send an e-mail requesting these things on a case-by-case basis seems just plain stupid.
Perhaps some elegant solution is there somewhere, begging for someone to bring it to light. Just as git accepted that e-mailed patches would always be essential to any project which used version control, maybe something can be built which rests on top of a simple mailing list, and takes care of the history and classification which is the true purpose of issue tracking.
The best system of any sort is one which not everyone needs to actively use for anyone to get benefit from.
While I agree that "GNU" is not an operating system in any sense of the word (unless you include poorly-designed experimental attempts like HURD), it should be said that a compiler is an absolutely essential component to any operating system.
That popular operating systems ship without a compiler is only a sign of those systems being broken. If you aren't provided with a tool that lets you tell the system how to operate, you haven't got an operating system.
I expect to be paid exactly the same as everyone else: A compromise between how much I want and how much my employer is willing to spend, called "how much I'm willing to be paid"
There is no policy which says "foreign workers can be paid less", it's a simple fact that foreign workers are willing to accept lower pay, and that's okay.
-- a foreign worker who low-balled to get his current job, and is really hoping for a raise about now.
So people bundle a bunch of laws together now, and the flaw is that the system wasn't designed to handle that? Sounds more like the flaw is "bundling a bunch of things together and calling them the same bill".
Nonsense like "He voted against SHOES FOR ORPHANS! Elect Barnaby instead!" could be a thing of the past if "make shoes for orphans" wasn't allowed to be in the same bill as "convert Oklahoma into a landfill"
three companies who normally charge thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for partial data recovery turned down $500 to recover an arbitrary short string of data that normally nobody cares about? They must not be able to do it.
"w" was an example. I do realize there are other keys, but the point of "I need to think about where I'm going and what comes before where I'm going before I go there, and that takes not only time but my mind off whatever I'm using the editor for". "w" and "W" are the ones which require the least thought/typing, and it's still a horrible and inefficient alternative to what it is intended to be a more-efficient alternative for: "arrow keys" [yeah, not actually arrow keys, but their equivalent]
And VIM's documentation is the worst I have ever seen*, Yet I have read much of it. "You don't know me, MAN!" and linking to such things is, in general, rude, ineffective, and stupid.
*Keeping in mind that often "poorly documented" things simply don't have enough documentation to compare against
if something is "good" in a second-hand store, that means it's of high enough quality that it survived the first owner intact, right? That's not nationalism, that's natural selection.
I must admit my "glowing" sounding Ubuntu-is-better-than-debian spewing was only as compared to Debian. When Ubuntu worked, that was after trying four different install methods. My favorite was the one where it didn't detect my onboard network adapter until after I'd put another network card in- which it didn't detect. After installation I removed the other card any everything worked fine... for ten minutes... I don't remember exactly why that install stopped working, but I do remember it was not the one I am running today.
The "zero configuration nvidia install" also dropped me into a console after the update, I think it had tried to restart the X Server. It left me with no indication of what to do next, which was annoying because I was trying to go through the whole process "as if I were my mom", and that was the first thing I had trouble with.
I think my current outlook is "Linux will not do what I want regarding security, general configuration, package management, window management, etc... So it may as well look pretty". I just don't want to be bothered using console commands for everything when the "extra power" I get is marginal and still far removed from what I actually want to be able to do.
macros, "normal mode",:commands, etc, are essential for any text editor to be decent.
That doesn't mean the mouse is bad, that just means that:s/// is often your friend. (Once the new perl version is "mainstream", I wonder if regex syntax in text editors will adapt too..)
I use vim exclusively, but counting out how many words I want to move, followed by typing [ESC(which is the "capslock" key)] 17w, or even just hitting "w" or "W" repeatedly while tracking with my eyes wherever the cursor has ended up/this/ time based on whatever is considered a "word boundary"...
has _ALWAYS_ been slower than moving my hand to the mouse and clicking. and USUALLY been slower than just holding down an arrow key, especially if using an editor which sanely handles the use of arrow keys to move between lines on the screen.
Yeah, I realize that if I think for 20 seconds, I can come up with a sequence of commands which will do the specific task I require, and will require I know which "physical" line of the file I'm on.. but I really don't give a shit if I could otherwise do what I want in under two seconds.
I'd be an emacs user if it didn't blow so much. (still waiting for it to act as advertised...)
we need another.com bubble, that'd get these "well it would work, but we never found the initial funds to lower the cost with bulk orders!" projects off the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
You put source code into a PDF file?
Stop the patent filing process immediately.
Stop the development process immediately.
Stop working in any computer-related field immediately.
And stay out of Second Life!
Most people sip things to test the temperature until it's cooled to the desired level before dumping it on themselves.
And the gp post made no reference to any of the points you dispute.
or, you know, to have alternatives that aren't horrible. Or to stop pretending that the alternatives are non-horrible.
Given two choices, in some cases, one option is good and the other bad.
In other cases, both options are bad.
In other cases, both options are good.
But in none of these cases is there necessarily a reason for the option to exist. Things as basic as "how application foo stores its default configuration" should not be something that varies from distribution to distribution, for example. (just an example)
Different distributions only make sense when the choices they've made make sense. If it doesn't make sense for there to even /be/ a choice, then there's no reason for multiple distributions.
I think a lot of the "little things" which fit into that category are what annoys people about switching from one distribution to another. First step: those things should be eliminated.
As for "niche distributions", I think a lot of those could also be combined in some way. For desktop use, it's clear that not everyone needs every package, so they have easy ways of choosing what is relevant, and how it fits together, and making sure that all the shared parts are secure and bug-free. I don't see any reason why this wouldn't make sense for any other niche, even if it's something horribly meta like "a distribution for building distributions".
What is really so incredibly niche that it can't pull from the same server as everything else? Don't throw your weight behind one distribution, if the one you'd support doesn't exist yet.
How can something be FUD when it's right fucking there in front of you?
I'll admit that the anti-aliasing thing has improved with time, but there are still projects which have this cancer of ugly.
As for your lame "Brand X" straw-man: I solved for X. It's "good", isn't it?
Exactly what brand do you think I'm promoting? Do you think OpenOffice is somehow, by a truly fair and objective metric, not utter crap?
... This is how Java is fast.
Java people always say Java is fast, but if Java is fast, why does EVERYTHING written in Java seem so slow? Do Java people just look at benchmarks and not ever look at real-world uses? This is a serious question. I'm constantly hearing that java is fast, and consistently seeing only (OpenOffice, Eclipse, ANY Java "applet" online) java being hideously slow?
"If it walks like a very very slow duck..", etc.
When I was in America, I saw complaints that Slashdot was too America-centric, never any nerd news for the English. The response was always something along the lines of "Fuck off, we don't care about your stupid British TV shows coming back or being canceled."
Okay, I live in England now, and I still don't care. Why am I suddenly seeing articles about things that involve countries I live in?
Tried OpenOffice writer just now, to see if it's improved...
And it hasn't. Still ugly as sin, even ignoring the icons: defaulting to a visible margin? Wtf? And still suffers from the Open-Source mental disorder where "Anti-aliasing means everything is bold and blurry all the time, even straight lines!"
Originally I had started this with "And it's much faster than when I've previously tried it!", but now after five minutes of using it, everything's slowed down to its normal "press a key, wait, something happens" routine.. okay, this experiment is over, rolling back to the previous checkpoint now. It still blows.
according to TFB, only her last-name was withheld. Maybe he decided to further obfuscate things, but if that's the case then he also lied about it.
does it false-positive on simple compressed files, too?
Why can't anyone agree one what's "right to use"? It seems everyone and their dog has a bug tracker, and I've yet to see one that seemed to do its job "well". Is this something that has a secret really elegant solution that Linus can pull out of his ass in an afternoon and save us all?
I wouldn't expect it, since he uses /mailing lists/ of all things, to track things. I suppose it's sortof a decentralized model of bug tracking: everyone has to figure shit out for themselves.
If I don't see an easy way to note:
- A list of known issues
- Whether they're being worked on by anyone
- What I can do to help
- What the plans are for the future
I'm much less likely to like a project. Having to send an e-mail requesting these things on a case-by-case basis seems just plain stupid.
Perhaps some elegant solution is there somewhere, begging for someone to bring it to light. Just as git accepted that e-mailed patches would always be essential to any project which used version control, maybe something can be built which rests on top of a simple mailing list, and takes care of the history and classification which is the true purpose of issue tracking.
The best system of any sort is one which not everyone needs to actively use for anyone to get benefit from.
While I agree that "GNU" is not an operating system in any sense of the word (unless you include poorly-designed experimental attempts like HURD), it should be said that a compiler is an absolutely essential component to any operating system.
That popular operating systems ship without a compiler is only a sign of those systems being broken. If you aren't provided with a tool that lets you tell the system how to operate, you haven't got an operating system.
I expect to be paid exactly the same as everyone else: A compromise between how much I want and how much my employer is willing to spend, called "how much I'm willing to be paid"
There is no policy which says "foreign workers can be paid less", it's a simple fact that foreign workers are willing to accept lower pay, and that's okay.
-- a foreign worker who low-balled to get his current job, and is really hoping for a raise about now.
So people bundle a bunch of laws together now, and the flaw is that the system wasn't designed to handle that? Sounds more like the flaw is "bundling a bunch of things together and calling them the same bill".
Nonsense like "He voted against SHOES FOR ORPHANS! Elect Barnaby instead!" could be a thing of the past if "make shoes for orphans" wasn't allowed to be in the same bill as "convert Oklahoma into a landfill"
three companies who normally charge thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for partial data recovery turned down $500 to recover an arbitrary short string of data that normally nobody cares about? They must not be able to do it.
Is it somehow uncommon for pirated software to contain a trojan?
"w" was an example. I do realize there are other keys, but the point of "I need to think about where I'm going and what comes before where I'm going before I go there, and that takes not only time but my mind off whatever I'm using the editor for". "w" and "W" are the ones which require the least thought/typing, and it's still a horrible and inefficient alternative to what it is intended to be a more-efficient alternative for: "arrow keys" [yeah, not actually arrow keys, but their equivalent]
And VIM's documentation is the worst I have ever seen*, Yet I have read much of it. "You don't know me, MAN!" and linking to such things is, in general, rude, ineffective, and stupid.
*Keeping in mind that often "poorly documented" things simply don't have enough documentation to compare against
if something is "good" in a second-hand store, that means it's of high enough quality that it survived the first owner intact, right? That's not nationalism, that's natural selection.
I must admit my "glowing" sounding Ubuntu-is-better-than-debian spewing was only as compared to Debian. When Ubuntu worked, that was after trying four different install methods. My favorite was the one where it didn't detect my onboard network adapter until after I'd put another network card in- which it didn't detect. After installation I removed the other card any everything worked fine... for ten minutes...
I don't remember exactly why that install stopped working, but I do remember it was not the one I am running today.
The "zero configuration nvidia install" also dropped me into a console after the update, I think it had tried to restart the X Server. It left me with no indication of what to do next, which was annoying because I was trying to go through the whole process "as if I were my mom", and that was the first thing I had trouble with.
I think my current outlook is "Linux will not do what I want regarding security, general configuration, package management, window management, etc... So it may as well look pretty". I just don't want to be bothered using console commands for everything when the "extra power" I get is marginal and still far removed from what I actually want to be able to do.
So if I said that the life expectancy was "over four seconds, which is reasonable for a hard disk", that would be okay too?
If you're using the word "over", the lower-bound doesn't suddenly become meaningless. There's a serious implication of what your expectations are.
if your preferred editor thinks anything+delete means anything other than "some type of deletion", you've got a broken editor
macros, "normal mode", :commands, etc, are essential for any text editor to be decent.
That doesn't mean the mouse is bad, that just means that :s/// is often your friend. (Once the new perl version is "mainstream", I wonder if regex syntax in text editors will adapt too..)
I use vim exclusively, but counting out how many words I want to move, followed by typing [ESC(which is the "capslock" key)] 17w, or even just hitting "w" or "W" repeatedly while tracking with my eyes wherever the cursor has ended up /this/ time based on whatever is considered a "word boundary"...
has _ALWAYS_ been slower than moving my hand to the mouse and clicking. and USUALLY been slower than just holding down an arrow key, especially if using an editor which sanely handles the use of arrow keys to move between lines on the screen.
Yeah, I realize that if I think for 20 seconds, I can come up with a sequence of commands which will do the specific task I require, and will require I know which "physical" line of the file I'm on.. but I really don't give a shit if I could otherwise do what I want in under two seconds.
I'd be an emacs user if it didn't blow so much. (still waiting for it to act as advertised...)
I just went from a fresh install of SP1 to "completely up-to-date" in about an hour, two days ago.
we need another .com bubble, that'd get these "well it would work, but we never found the initial funds to lower the cost with bulk orders!" projects off the ground.