So you didn't read the review of *this* book then?
Of course I did. But perhaps I was insufficiently clear in my question: to my mind, the term "installation" encompasses all the initial setup and configuration required to get a fully functioning system. From the review:
... a good illustrated explanation of the steps needed to boot Ubuntu using the latest version of Ubuntu... and install the OS on the hard disk... a chapter which explains how to set up the network and log on to the internet, another for setting up your printer and scanner, still another explaining different ways of downloading and installing software... how to make the fonts on the Ubuntu machine look prettier and the steps needed to install different kinds of additional fonts such as Microsoft true type fonts... next three chapters deal exclusively in setting up and configuring audio and video in Ubuntu...
From this, and the table of contents here, it seems that over half the book is devoted to installation and configuration. Well and good if that's what you're after, but if someone's already installed and configured Ubuntu for you then it's superfluous. Since a lot of Linux newbies have the installation done by a techie friend, I'm surprised that there seems to be no book which just assumed the system is up and running and devotes more space to some of the real newbie stuff, like how scrollbars work and what the different mouse buttons do.
The book that I need, and I haven't yet found, is a beginner's Ubuntu guide which doesn't focus on installation, and instead devotes most or all of its space to basic use of the desktop and common applications (Nautilus, Firefox, OOo Writer, etc.).
I suspect my situation is not unique: I install Ubuntu for parents and other non-techies; no matter how good the book, they're not going to be able to install it themselves. Then I bugger off and leave them with it. What they need is a straightforward and thorough user guide for basic use of the system. (And I mean basic: things like "you can move windows by dragging the title bar", and "if your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can use it to scroll through a window").
Any recommendations?
Re:Someday OSS developers will learn
on
WxPython in Action
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Please provide a link to the well-documented free toolkit from a big company that runs on Linux.
>> How much does it cost you if I steal one of your chairs or desks? >> How much does it cost you if I copy one of your CDs? >> See the difference?
> This is hairsplitting.
Holy moley. The difference between physical objects and bits of data is hairsplitting? Regardless of your views on piracy, that's a pretty extreme worldview. Though I can certainly see the benefits to the typical slashdotter:
"Look, I have a really hot girlfriend!" "Um. That's not a girl, it's a pornographic JPEG." "Now you're just hairsplitting."
So this new telescope is no big deal, especially since it will only about half of the sky visible to PAN-STARRS since this new thingy will be in the very southern hemisphere, rather than Hawaii.
Gosh, sounds like someone's got a case of gigapixel envy! As a matter of fact, this telescope will be at a latitude of thirty degrees south, (cf. Hawaii's twenty degrees north) -- hardly the "very southern hemisphere".
Take it easy; as you point out, the Hawaii telescope will be online sooner, but the Chile one will have much higher resolution, so I'm sure there's room for them both in the world of astronomy. And since (as you also point out) PAN-STARR already has funding, it's not as if they're in competition for funds.
I don't believe that any reasonable person considers the spellchecker of any text editor to be bloat.
Bloat is in the eye of the beholder. With every new, bigger release of an application, someone is likely to quote the factoid that "most people only use 20% of the features", so why can't we strip it down to one-fifth the size? The adage disregards the fact that not everyone uses the same 20%. To me, a spellchecker is bloat, because I never need to use one; to someone else, Xemacs' rectangular selection feature might be bloat, whereas I find myself using it quite frequently.
Yes, it's hideous. He's used OpenOffice.org as a typesetting tool. The quotes aren't even sexed . A great shame that he decided to use a word processing package for typesetting, when there are excellent open source typesetting packages out there (TeX, Groff, and Basser Lout, for example). This kind of approach really isn't going to make many inroads into the publishing industry: the results look godawful.
By way of comparison, I have before me a copy of sed & awk (Dougherty & Robbins, O'Reilly Press, 2nd ed., 1997). It tells me that "Text was prepared in SGML using the DocBook 2.1 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at ORA by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output."
And that was NINE YEARS ago (though the first edition was in 1990, and I'm guessing it was typeset similarly). If nine years' progress in publishing with free software consists of replacing that stack (and its beautiful output) with OOo, something is very wrong.
Seriously, have you tried finding a phone that is stylish, small, has good battery life, and yet doesn't cost an arm and a leg because all it does is voice/text?
Yes. It's called the Nokia 1100. OK, it doesn't *quite* meet all your specifications---the case is plastic, and the screen is monochrome. But it's robust and splash/dust/sand-proof, the buttons are big, the aerial is integrated, and the battery life is huge. Dirt cheap, and very reliable from what I've seen. If my ancient Nokia 3310 ever dies, this is what I'll be getting.
No, it's not entirely subjective. There are lots of firms that get paid to research this shit.
Indeed; I was merely pointing out that *your* opinion that "Ogg Vorbis doesn't sound cool" is no more objectively useful than my opinion that it does.
There are names that work, and names that don't, and you can test for it.
I'm not contesting that. I'm contesting your claim that Ubuntu is a name that "doesn't work". I have no doubt that Canonical *did* do some market research before going with that name.
C'mon. Mark Shuttleworth was a self-made billionaire by the age of 26. I'm sure he's heard of "marketing". And I'm sure he takes his marketing advice from professionals rather than the likes of you and me.
By the way GIMP is not a popular image editor, not even close.
I alluded to it as "the world's most popular open source graphics application". I stand by this assessment.
Using Ubutnu as an example is a bad idea because you are talking about OSS people
Well then, show me a counterexample. Name me a Linux distribution which (1) has a "sensible" (by your criteria) name and (2) has achieved success comparable to Ubuntu. SUSE, Mandriva, Knoppix, Mepis, Debian, and Fedora are hardly descriptive names for an operating system either.
However I am talking about mass-market stuff here. For normal users, style matters a LOT. Look at the iPod.
We were talking about names; I don't really want to get into an argument about "style", and I don't contest your astonishing claims that the iPod's success was largely down to slick styling and marketing.
If you wish to stay on the topic of descriptive naming as a success factor in the computing industry, you might wish to consider the wisdom of naming a computer the "Apple Macintosh". The whattle whatintosh? That doesn't sound like a computer, it sounds like a raincoat for fruit! It'll never take off. Oh, hang on...
OGG Vorbis is a good example. It just sounds... Odd. It's not descriptive of function and doesn't have a cool ring to it.
A "cool ring" is something of a subjective matter, don't you think? Personally I think that Ogg Vorbis sounds far cooler than MP3.
Same thing with shit like GIMP. Ok so the full name, GNU Image Manipulation Program isn't horrible, but calling it GIMP is fucking stupid
Yes, if they'd called it something else---why, it might have become the world's most popular open source graphics application by now! Oh, wait, hang on...
So I'm not at all suppirsed to see Ubutnu (which is odd to Western ears at any rate) doing stuff like this.
Yeah, if they hadn't called it Ubuntu---why, it could be one of the world's most popular Linux distros by now! Oh, hang on...
seriously, you're using shooting in antartica as a reason to shoot 35mm?
No, that's why I said "Antarctica (or anywhere below freezing, really)".
shooting at the south pole seems to be a bit of an edge case, dont you think? how realistic is it that the driving factor in buying a camera is going to be whether or not you can take pictures in -40c ?
I'm sorry, I must have been unclear. I was talking about the performance of batteries in cold temperatures in general, rather than Antarctica specifically. I've seen lithium batteries die in temperatures as mild as -10 degrees Celsius, which *are* conditions my equipment is likely to face occasionally.
oh christ, isnt this a bit of a stretch to find an excuse to hate on digital?
No, I don't "hate on digital". I accept that for very many people it's an excellent choice. I'm explaining the factors which make it unsuitable for me personally.
That's what I thought, too. I'm not much of a Nikon geek, but as I understood it, that FM10 is considered to be a relatively shoddy (by Nikon standards) piece of work, whereas everyone bowed down and worshipped the FM3a the minute it appeared (and if it's anything like the FM2 I had the privilege of using once, I can see why).
And if you're in the cold of Antarctica (or anywhere below freezing, really), your Li-Ion/Alkaline/NiMH batteries are pretty useless anyway: they die very quickly in cold conditions. A manual camera will usually only need a couple of silver oxide watch cells for the light meter; these are far more cold-tolerant, and in a pinch you can get by without the meter and guesstimate the exposure instead.
The only concise I have to hand is Collins, which does list them. I suspect age is more of a factor: I doubt whether any mainstream English dictionary included swear words fifty years ago (I have a 1968 Cassells English-German dictionary here which doesn't).
Or, if your Webster's is a recent edition, maybe they're just thinking about their market share: presumably there's a significant proportion of prudes, fundamentalists and the like who refuse to buy dictionaries containing taboo words.
'wikki-fiddler' is a pretty juvenile and unprofessional term to use.
Indeed. I (along with probably a few million others) have also noticed the Register's irrational loathing for Wikipedia. Who knows why? Who cares?
The irony is that The Register's catch-all defence against any criticism of their journalism is, if anything, more pathetic than Wikipedia's "go and fix it yourself": it's a kind of jokey, self-deprecating "hey, yeah, we're The Register, we know our journalism's shit, that's who we are, deal with it". At least WP aspires to be something other than a steaming heap of dung, and is slowly becoming less of one; El Reg seems positively proud of being godawful.
Mine (1998-2001) covered, to varying extents, Haskell, Oberon, CAML, Prolog, C++, Java, MIPS assembler, and CSP. So I at least came away with a feeling of "if I ever need to use <language>, I'll just pick it up".
AFAIK my current university doesn't teach any non-imperative languages (unless you count SQL), though I'm using Lisp for a postgrad project.
I think Scheme still gets taught quite a lot, though I don't really know to what extent. I have a horrible feeling that a lot of CS courses these days are more or less vocational training.
How would you feel if Microsoft released the source code to MS Excel in, say, Brainf*ck?... Haskell is completely opaque to me...
Then it wouldn't be free software: they didn't write it in brainfuck, so a brainfuck release is not a source code release. You could never develop an Excel-sized application in brainfuck.
I think I addressed your point in my post when I wrote:
I think the only time I'd care about the language of a program I'm using would be if it were written in something particularly horrible -- "urgh, if I ever want to modify this I'll have to learn befunge!" But perhaps that's the way some people view Haskell;-).
So yes, some people might be put off by that. But comparing Haskell to befunge, brainfuck or a some hypothetical, deliberately obfuscated language is hardly fair. Roundy chose Haskell for ease of development (after a bad experience with C++) which should indicate something about its expressive power.
In summary: I don't know (and neither do you;-). It's more to do with people's perceptions of Haskell than its actual merits, so you'd have to do some kind of a survey to find out. But darcs' success (so far) suggests to me that there's a sufficient talent pool for at least a few OSS projects in Haskell.
Slashdot Mirror
Try Beginning Ubuntu Linux
Thank you, I'll check it out.
Of course I did. But perhaps I was insufficiently clear in my question: to my mind, the term "installation" encompasses all the initial setup and configuration required to get a fully functioning system. From the review:
From this, and the table of contents here, it seems that over half the book is devoted to installation and configuration. Well and good if that's what you're after, but if someone's already installed and configured Ubuntu for you then it's superfluous. Since a lot of Linux newbies have the installation done by a techie friend, I'm surprised that there seems to be no book which just assumed the system is up and running and devotes more space to some of the real newbie stuff, like how scrollbars work and what the different mouse buttons do.
The book that I need, and I haven't yet found, is a beginner's Ubuntu guide which doesn't focus on installation, and instead devotes most or all of its space to basic use of the desktop and common applications (Nautilus, Firefox, OOo Writer, etc.).
I suspect my situation is not unique: I install Ubuntu for parents and other non-techies; no matter how good the book, they're not going to be able to install it themselves. Then I bugger off and leave them with it. What they need is a straightforward and thorough user guide for basic use of the system. (And I mean basic: things like "you can move windows by dragging the title bar", and "if your mouse has a scroll wheel, you can use it to scroll through a window").
Any recommendations?
Please provide a link to the well-documented free toolkit from a big company that runs on Linux.
Qt from Trolltech is Free, extremely well-documented, and runs on Linux and several Unix flavours as well as Mac OS X and Windows.
>> How much does it cost you if I steal one of your chairs or desks?
>> How much does it cost you if I copy one of your CDs?
>> See the difference?
> This is hairsplitting.
Holy moley. The difference between physical objects and bits of data is hairsplitting? Regardless of your views on piracy, that's a pretty extreme worldview. Though I can certainly see the benefits to the typical slashdotter:
"Look, I have a really hot girlfriend!"
"Um. That's not a girl, it's a pornographic JPEG."
"Now you're just hairsplitting."
So this new telescope is no big deal, especially since it will only about half of the sky visible to PAN-STARRS since this new thingy will be in the very southern hemisphere, rather than Hawaii.
Gosh, sounds like someone's got a case of gigapixel envy! As a matter of fact, this telescope will be at a latitude of thirty degrees south, (cf. Hawaii's twenty degrees north) -- hardly the "very southern hemisphere".
Take it easy; as you point out, the Hawaii telescope will be online sooner, but the Chile one will have much higher resolution, so I'm sure there's room for them both in the world of astronomy. And since (as you also point out) PAN-STARR already has funding, it's not as if they're in competition for funds.
I don't believe that any reasonable person considers the spellchecker of any text editor to be bloat.
Bloat is in the eye of the beholder. With every new, bigger release of an application, someone is likely to quote the factoid that "most people only use 20% of the features", so why can't we strip it down to one-fifth the size? The adage disregards the fact that not everyone uses the same 20%. To me, a spellchecker is bloat, because I never need to use one; to someone else, Xemacs' rectangular selection feature might be bloat, whereas I find myself using it quite frequently.
Yes, it's hideous. He's used OpenOffice.org as a typesetting tool. The quotes aren't even sexed . A great shame that he decided to use a word processing package for typesetting, when there are excellent open source typesetting packages out there (TeX, Groff, and Basser Lout, for example). This kind of approach really isn't going to make many inroads into the publishing industry: the results look godawful.
By way of comparison, I have before me a copy of sed & awk (Dougherty & Robbins, O'Reilly Press, 2nd ed., 1997). It tells me that "Text was prepared in SGML using the DocBook 2.1 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at ORA by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output."
And that was NINE YEARS ago (though the first edition was in 1990, and I'm guessing it was typeset similarly). If nine years' progress in publishing with free software consists of replacing that stack (and its beautiful output) with OOo, something is very wrong.
Seriously, have you tried finding a phone that is stylish, small, has good battery life, and yet doesn't cost an arm and a leg because all it does is voice/text?
Yes. It's called the Nokia 1100. OK, it doesn't *quite* meet all your specifications---the case is plastic, and the screen is monochrome. But it's robust and splash/dust/sand-proof, the buttons are big, the aerial is integrated, and the battery life is huge. Dirt cheap, and very reliable from what I've seen. If my ancient Nokia 3310 ever dies, this is what I'll be getting.
No, it's not entirely subjective. There are lots of firms that get paid to research this shit.
Indeed; I was merely pointing out that *your* opinion that "Ogg Vorbis doesn't sound cool" is no more objectively useful than my opinion that it does.
There are names that work, and names that don't, and you can test for it.
I'm not contesting that. I'm contesting your claim that Ubuntu is a name that "doesn't work". I have no doubt that Canonical *did* do some market research before going with that name.
C'mon. Mark Shuttleworth was a self-made billionaire by the age of 26. I'm sure he's heard of "marketing". And I'm sure he takes his marketing advice from professionals rather than the likes of you and me.
By the way GIMP is not a popular image editor, not even close.
I alluded to it as "the world's most popular open source graphics application". I stand by this assessment.
Using Ubutnu as an example is a bad idea because you are talking about OSS people
Well then, show me a counterexample. Name me a Linux distribution which (1) has a "sensible" (by your criteria) name and (2) has achieved success comparable to Ubuntu. SUSE, Mandriva, Knoppix, Mepis, Debian, and Fedora are hardly descriptive names for an operating system either.
However I am talking about mass-market stuff here. For normal users, style matters a LOT. Look at the iPod.
We were talking about names; I don't really want to get into an argument about "style", and I don't contest your astonishing claims that the iPod's success was largely down to slick styling and marketing.
If you wish to stay on the topic of descriptive naming as a success factor in the computing industry, you might wish to consider the wisdom of naming a computer the "Apple Macintosh". The whattle whatintosh? That doesn't sound like a computer, it sounds like a raincoat for fruit! It'll never take off. Oh, hang on...
OGG Vorbis is a good example. It just sounds... Odd. It's not descriptive of function and doesn't have a cool ring to it.
A "cool ring" is something of a subjective matter, don't you think? Personally I think that Ogg Vorbis sounds far cooler than MP3.
Same thing with shit like GIMP. Ok so the full name, GNU Image Manipulation Program isn't horrible, but calling it GIMP is fucking stupid
Yes, if they'd called it something else---why, it might have become the world's most popular open source graphics application by now! Oh, wait, hang on...
So I'm not at all suppirsed to see Ubutnu (which is odd to Western ears at any rate) doing stuff like this.
Yeah, if they hadn't called it Ubuntu---why, it could be one of the world's most popular Linux distros by now! Oh, hang on...
... on when and when not to use PHP: Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites (Aaron Crane, UKUUG Linux Conference 2002).
I don't get the logic behind the politically-correct Intel bashing.
I don't get the logic behind describing Intel-bashing as "politically correct".
Sounds like you need to track the length of your sleep cycle, and make sure your sleep period is a multiple of that
I like the idea, but is there a straightforward way to track the length of my sleep cycle? Something not involving scalp electrodes, preferably...
seriously, you're using shooting in antartica as a reason to shoot 35mm?
No, that's why I said "Antarctica (or anywhere below freezing, really)".
shooting at the south pole seems to be a bit of an edge case, dont you think? how realistic is it that the driving factor in buying a camera is going to be whether or not you can take pictures in -40c ?
I'm sorry, I must have been unclear. I was talking about the performance of batteries in cold temperatures in general, rather than Antarctica specifically. I've seen lithium batteries die in temperatures as mild as -10 degrees Celsius, which *are* conditions my equipment is likely to face occasionally.
oh christ, isnt this a bit of a stretch to find an excuse to hate on digital?
No, I don't "hate on digital". I accept that for very many people it's an excellent choice. I'm explaining the factors which make it unsuitable for me personally.
If you were really serious about photography, you wouldn't be using 35mm in the first place.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, evidently, was not "serious about photography".
That's what I thought, too. I'm not much of a Nikon geek, but as I understood it, that FM10 is considered to be a relatively shoddy (by Nikon standards) piece of work, whereas everyone bowed down and worshipped the FM3a the minute it appeared (and if it's anything like the FM2 I had the privilege of using once, I can see why).
And if you're in the cold of Antarctica (or anywhere below freezing, really), your Li-Ion/Alkaline/NiMH batteries are pretty useless anyway: they die very quickly in cold conditions. A manual camera will usually only need a couple of silver oxide watch cells for the light meter; these are far more cold-tolerant, and in a pinch you can get by without the meter and guesstimate the exposure instead.
The only concise I have to hand is Collins, which does list them. I suspect age is more of a factor: I doubt whether any mainstream English dictionary included swear words fifty years ago (I have a 1968 Cassells English-German dictionary here which doesn't).
Or, if your Webster's is a recent edition, maybe they're just thinking about their market share: presumably there's a significant proportion of prudes, fundamentalists and the like who refuse to buy dictionaries containing taboo words.
What the hell? Are there really serious, modern dictionaries out there which *don't* have definitions for `fuck' and `shit'?
'wikki-fiddler' is a pretty juvenile and unprofessional term to use.
Indeed. I (along with probably a few million others) have also noticed the Register's irrational loathing for Wikipedia. Who knows why? Who cares?
The irony is that The Register's catch-all defence against any criticism of their journalism is, if anything, more pathetic than Wikipedia's "go and fix it yourself": it's a kind of jokey, self-deprecating "hey, yeah, we're The Register, we know our journalism's shit, that's who we are, deal with it". At least WP aspires to be something other than a steaming heap of dung, and is slowly becoming less of one; El Reg seems positively proud of being godawful.
Only a handful of countries use 60Hz, even though it is the most effective for delivery of AC over long distances.
Interesting. Do you know why this is? Can you provide any references? I can't turn anything up on Google for it.
Do CS programs no longer at least touch on LISP?
Mine (1998-2001) covered, to varying extents, Haskell, Oberon, CAML, Prolog, C++, Java, MIPS assembler, and CSP. So I at least came away with a feeling of "if I ever need to use <language>, I'll just pick it up".
AFAIK my current university doesn't teach any non-imperative languages (unless you count SQL), though I'm using Lisp for a postgrad project.
I think Scheme still gets taught quite a lot, though I don't really know to what extent. I have a horrible feeling that a lot of CS courses these days are more or less vocational training.
How would you feel if Microsoft released the source code to MS Excel in, say, Brainf*ck? ... Haskell is completely opaque to me...
;-).
;-). It's more to do with people's perceptions of Haskell than its actual merits, so you'd have to do some kind of a survey to find out. But darcs' success (so far) suggests to me that there's a sufficient talent pool for at least a few OSS projects in Haskell.
Then it wouldn't be free software: they didn't write it in brainfuck, so a brainfuck release is not a source code release. You could never develop an Excel-sized application in brainfuck.
I think I addressed your point in my post when I wrote:
I think the only time I'd care about the language of a program I'm using would be if it were written in something particularly horrible -- "urgh, if I ever want to modify this I'll have to learn befunge!" But perhaps that's the way some people view Haskell
So yes, some people might be put off by that. But comparing Haskell to befunge, brainfuck or a some hypothetical, deliberately obfuscated language is hardly fair. Roundy chose Haskell for ease of development (after a bad experience with C++) which should indicate something about its expressive power.
In summary: I don't know (and neither do you
I wrote: I'd be ''more'' inclined...
Ugh. I meant: I'd be more inclined...
Sorry. Too much time on Wikipedia.