IMO, the only thing holding back total Linux desktop domination are lack of games
If I look at linux as a programmer and compare it to windows, I think in general it needsto have the interaction with hardware standardized on a higher level as the kernel currently does.
As a programmer I want to be able to talk to a modem, tell it to call some number. I do not want to have to find out what Desktop Env. I have, probe on which USB/serial ports modems might be present, and try to discover what command I have to give to put it into a certain baud, stopbits, parity, GSM network transperancy, compression , error correction, etc.
The same holds for other hardware like printers, scanners, etc.
I am no linux expert, I only have programmed several smaller projects on it, so I could have missed something, but if this is available on Linux please point it out to me.
I hope freedesktop and LSB will move into this direction, as I think it is necessary to have things like this standardized, to allow small software companies to develop for linux.
Massive acceptance of the internet was done with Mosaic and esp. Netscape IMHO. Or to put it differently WWW hypertext and thus Tim Berners-Lee made it acceptable by the masses. Using Gopher or FTP and telnet was a PITA compared to when Mosaic came. In the beginning Netscape was the Internet to most people. Internet was Trumpet Winsock + Win3.1 + Netscape 3 Gold.
On the top of my head the ICH5R harddisk controler chip in the 875 and 865 chips from Intel only supports RAID 0, NOT RAID 1! That's why I had to purchase a motherboard with an extra Promise chip to get SATA RAID 1. (MSI 865PE Neo2-FIS2R)
Exactly what I was thinking, but we can't have all players run around being bene geserit can we? Creating a balanced game when including a bene gesserit class could be chalenging.
100 degrees celcius = boiling water => way to hot to be save 100 degrees fahrenheit = temperature of human blood (37) => temperature that is save for anyone (I think) My own shower has a lock that will not allow me to mix water above 37 celcius, unless I push a button. The actual water temperature of the hot water is around 90 celcius, to prevent legionella. (how do the above hotels handle teh legionella problem?)
I was also confused at first because I normally think in Celcius, but in this case it's obvious what he means.
I think a very important aspect of OSS developement is that fact that the people who make the decisions are coders themselves. At my former job the manager didn't have the faintest idea who was a good coder and who wasn't. He's unable to ask the right questions at job interviews, and because he pays everyone the same, the good coders leave all the time, he doesn't care because he still has enough coders left (the bad ones). And he wonders why things keep going downhill...
If I had any money to spare and would like to be anoying, I could try to purchase a DVD of region 1-5 on the internet and go to e few stores to try out these DVD's to see if they work on their showroom models... IIRC most DVD-players will allow you to switch 4-5 times to a different region before locking into it. "hey can you help me, five minute ago this player played this DVD just fine, now it doesn't, or are the players you are selling irreliable?"
But mostly I only think of thinks like this, I'm to nice to actually do it.
There was this book for our signal analysis classes. The year before me it costed about $200, my year it costed about $250, the year after me it costed about $300. After that year the professor didn't dare to list it anymore and worked from copies of his notes and a $25 book. I do not think anyone has ever bought the book in those three years, we all copied it, virtually destroying the copy the library had in the end. I always wondered if the price increases were due to diminishing demand, generating loop.
If XP is so old, then you must have been running Longhorn for about 4-5 years now I suppose? I would not call something old, if it was the newest thing I could buy. MS has had the same amount of time as Apple, IBM, or Linus to create and release a secure OS. It's not like they didn't have any resources or did not know security was important before 2001. I liked the analogy somebody else made with shipbuilding. I think MS could be seen as a speedboat builder that finds again and again that a speedboat of half a mile long might still be faster as a super tanker, but is nowhere near as secure as it's compartimented double walled counterpart. It will probably crash more often too. I know this analogy flawed but I like the picture, oh and I know little about boat building...
I believe it's 'vindu' (sounds like windo) in Norwegian. I always thought that the difference Fenster-Vindu in swedish-norwegian gave some hints that norwegian is closer related to anglo-saxon. They also have words like 'lunsj' (sounds like lunch, means snack or lunch I think) Maybe a native norwegian can give more insight into this.
Yeah, and HTML/WWW was developed by Tim Brenners-Lee at CERN in Switserland IIRC. I don't know about all those other protocols, but the Internet and World Wide Web as they are today are a cummulation of an international effort with some roots in an USA DoD project. Finland does not own any rights to Linux, just because Linus was studying there, probably funded by finnish taxpayer money, when he started Linux.
It is a non-democratic organization comprised of unelected diplomatic representatives, a number of whom do the bidding of unfree regimes that want to block and censor the Internet
True, but it's the only thing we have, we should try to improve it, not ignore it, as we have no alternative.
I have neither elected my country's ambasador to the USA, but I still think he represents the voice of my country's elected government there.
The UN does represent over 99% of the world's governments, although some are not elected representations of their people. That gives you more legitimacy to decide supernational issues, than just having the most powerfull army on the planet.
At least the UN is in it's basis a democratic institute, where decisions are made by voting, except for the veto options some countries have off course.
IIRC Milocevic was arrested and handed over to te UN by the Serbian government, which is in no way kidnapping. And most people are imprisoned against their will. I think there were several of his friends who tried to stop this by going though the yugoslav government. I don't know what in the end the exact result of this was, but he was delivered to teh UN by a rightfully elected government of his own state.
United States of America: Population: 280,562,489 (July 2002 est.) Murders: 12,658 (1999) per capita: 4.5 per 100000 Murders with firearms: 8,259 (1999) per capita: 2.9 per 100000
United Kingdom Population: 59,778,002 (July 2002 est.) Murders: 850 (2000) per capita: 1.4 per 100000 Murders with firearms: 62 (1999) per capita: 0.1 per 100000
If you calculate the numbers per capita of murders without firearms (knifes, etc.) it's about 1.4-1.6, so pretty close. Seems to me these figures mean that, by addopting Brittish firearm laws about 8000 lives per year could be saved in the USA.
Re:Stuck with Windows?
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
Ehm, changing resolutions in X, like ctrl-alt-+ and ctrl-alt-- would do that in XFree at least as long as I use it (1998). I think you need to have configured XFree right and have some permissions. Win98 could also do change resolutions on the fly.
Re:Program Not Responding
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
Except in those cases where the title bar is empty
How many office suites were there before MS squashed the competition like a bug?
There was WordPerfect, (and maybe others)
For a while there, each was trying to out do the other in features, and the public benefitted from that competition.
Word has never done anything but trying to catch up to WordPerfect. See for example:WP vs. Word for a feature by feature comparison.
I could say a loy more , but the above site says it all.
WordPerfect was squashed not on features, but with (unfair ?) marketing tactics and monopoly misuse.
It's mainly been improving usability and interoperatebility in the last 8 years, oh and of course updates for new OS'es.
Let's try a real world analogy. Suppose I made a "Lost Pet Journal" of stray dogs and cats getting caught on the steet, to help them find back any owners, published this in every supermarket in the area every week. Now some local print shop offers to print it for me for free because they like the initiative. After some time I can not continue, and some friends take over. It still gets printed for free. Then the local print shop claims ownership of the "Lost Pet Journal" want to turn it into something else, but my friend don't like it and decide to have it printed somewhere else. Then the original shop also starts printing a "Lost Pet Journal" and claims the one my friends are making is a trademark infringement.
Anything wrong with this analogy? I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
about 5-6 layers of tinfoil or similar material should do it, maybe apply those before the next paintjob occurs? The disadvantage is that the cellphone that are still active will try to find the network at maximum power, so you'll have to make people aware it's no use.
Well as I mainly use the metric system, My D&D third edition player manual uses those. Maybe it just want's to sound 'antique' and I took the wrong conclusions. It uses those words without explaining so I assumed it's writers assumed that the reader knew what those units were. I didn't. Still leave the other units, and the fact that these do get taken in to account in US/metric conversion tables I find on the net. As another poster pointed out, a persons height is indeed expressed as 1.87 m. Even then you could easily understand that this is the same as 187 cm, 18.7 dm, 1870 mm, 0.00187 km In your counter example 67.5 inches is not the same as 6 feet 7.5 inches or 0.000675 miles, 0.00675 yards, etc. Now you say, o.k. we do not need all these conversions, because of context. Then I tell you, for metric you do not need to know the context, which in itself makes it simpler. Secondly you use 2 different units, feet and inches in your example even though the context is clear. And it's easy to add precision, no extra unit required. How long is this wall, for example? About 8 yards, 7 yards, 2 feet, 4.5 inch to be precise About 7 meter, 7.125 meter to be precise The reverse is also true, I automatically see that a wall of 7.125 m is about 7 meter, while with a wall of 7 yards, 2 feet, 4.5 inch I have to know the conversions. Using a decimal number, 2 feet seems "low" and I would expect it to get rounded down to 0 in an approximation. Personally I have the most experience with CSG units in electromagnetism. Just try calculating things given in statvolt, dyne, esu/cm2, feet/sec, erg. Working from memory: "A square loop of 5x5 inch is moving at a speed of 10 feet/sec perpendicular away from a wire with a cross section of 16 mm2, in which runs a current of 6 esu/sec." Then calculate something like the electric field in esu/cm2.
In technology we'd all be better off if we understood computer fundamentals better, but we can't all do that. Very few of my developers have any acquaintance with microcontroller programming, but studying that is a part of my understanding of how computers work. Most of them have never touched Unix, or any free tools either as far as they know, but knowing those makes me a better admin.
So very true. A good developer has to know not only to code, but also the technical details of the enviroment, and what alternative options he has, otherwise he can not make the right decisions. I think this si even true for so called hardware/environment independant languages like java.
Competent admin is largely invisible.
True, therefore only the incompetend get noticed.
I think on both sides there are cometend and incompetent individuals. The trick is to see who's competent and who's not at the other side of the fence, so you end up only having the competent dev's talking to the competent admins, and have the rest resolved within those groups. I think the part missing in the equation is management. All trough the article I was thinking why don't dev-boss and admin-boss sort it out and fix the incompetence or fire the incompetent. The reason he did not go there seemed to be that dev-boss and admin-boss were also clueless or incompetent, or altogether not technical enough to understand the issue.
In my experience if there is a cluefull manager on both sides things work out fine, but then I am not very experienced yet. I am on the developement side, and have a good boss, and the admin site is mostly clueless, but has a good boss. The issues go to the dev-boss, who takes them to admin-boss if they are valid.
Then some admin-grunt would do the change under supervision of the competent admin-boss. I just love our IT department, things always work, only a critical hardware breakdown kills productivity about once every 1-2 years.
Hmmm, ever tried compiling something, just what I do for a living. From experience: P4-1.7 vs. PIII-600, SAME harddisk 40 Gb 7200 rpm WD, 9 min vs. 30 min. Would I have liked a fast Athlon XP or P4 w/HT. YES.
All of SCO's "wealth" will vaporize as their stock plummets. At this point any award against SCO is worthless because they won't have any money to hand over to IBM. So, why exactly does that seem like a worthwhile pursuit from IBM's perspective? (Hint: it doesn't.)
Maybe SCO's IP, like these Unix copyrights? Would IBM like to have that?
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IMO, the only thing holding back total Linux desktop domination are lack of games
If I look at linux as a programmer and compare it to windows, I think in general it needsto have the interaction with hardware standardized on a higher level as the kernel currently does.
As a programmer I want to be able to talk to a modem, tell it to call some number. I do not want to have to find out what Desktop Env. I have, probe on which USB/serial ports modems might be present, and try to discover what command I have to give to put it into a certain baud, stopbits, parity, GSM network transperancy, compression , error correction, etc.
The same holds for other hardware like printers, scanners, etc.
I am no linux expert, I only have programmed several smaller projects on it, so I could have missed something, but if this is available on Linux please point it out to me.
I hope freedesktop and LSB will move into this direction, as I think it is necessary to have things like this standardized, to allow small software companies to develop for linux.
Massive acceptance of the internet was done with Mosaic and esp. Netscape IMHO. Or to put it differently WWW hypertext and thus Tim Berners-Lee made it acceptable by the masses.
Using Gopher or FTP and telnet was a PITA compared to when Mosaic came.
In the beginning Netscape was the Internet to most people.
Internet was Trumpet Winsock + Win3.1 + Netscape 3 Gold.
On the top of my head the ICH5R harddisk controler chip in the 875 and 865 chips from Intel only supports RAID 0, NOT RAID 1!
That's why I had to purchase a motherboard with an extra Promise chip to get SATA RAID 1. (MSI 865PE Neo2-FIS2R)
and bullet time Bene Gesserit combat.
Exactly what I was thinking, but we can't have all players run around being bene geserit can we? Creating a balanced game when including a bene gesserit class could be chalenging.
100 degrees celcius = boiling water => way to hot to be save
100 degrees fahrenheit = temperature of human blood (37)
=> temperature that is save for anyone (I think)
My own shower has a lock that will not allow me to mix water above 37 celcius, unless I push a button. The actual water temperature of the hot water is around 90 celcius, to prevent legionella.
(how do the above hotels handle teh legionella problem?)
I was also confused at first because I normally think in Celcius, but in this case it's obvious what he means.
I think a very important aspect of OSS developement is that fact that the people who make the decisions are coders themselves.
At my former job the manager didn't have the faintest idea who was a good coder and who wasn't. He's unable to ask the right questions at job interviews, and because he pays everyone the same, the good coders leave all the time, he doesn't care because he still has enough coders left (the bad ones).
And he wonders why things keep going downhill...
If I had any money to spare and would like to be anoying, I could try to purchase a DVD of region 1-5 on the internet and go to e few stores to try out these DVD's to see if they work on their showroom models...
IIRC most DVD-players will allow you to switch 4-5 times to a different region before locking into it.
"hey can you help me, five minute ago this player played this DVD just fine, now it doesn't, or are the players you are selling irreliable?"
But mostly I only think of thinks like this, I'm to nice to actually do it.
There was this book for our signal analysis classes. The year before me it costed about $200, my year it costed about $250, the year after me it costed about $300. After that year the professor didn't dare to list it anymore and worked from copies of his notes and a $25 book. I do not think anyone has ever bought the book in those three years, we all copied it, virtually destroying the copy the library had in the end.
I always wondered if the price increases were due to diminishing demand, generating loop.
If XP is so old, then you must have been running Longhorn for about 4-5 years now I suppose? I would not call something old, if it was the newest thing I could buy.
MS has had the same amount of time as Apple, IBM, or Linus to create and release a secure OS. It's not like they didn't have any resources or did not know security was important before 2001.
I liked the analogy somebody else made with shipbuilding. I think MS could be seen as a speedboat builder that finds again and again that a speedboat of half a mile long might still be faster as a super tanker, but is nowhere near as secure as it's compartimented double walled counterpart. It will probably crash more often too.
I know this analogy flawed but I like the picture, oh and I know little about boat building...
Hmmm, better memorize some Melv's Acid Arrow spells, maybe add a Fireball and a Flaming Sphere while we're at it.
I believe it's 'vindu' (sounds like windo) in Norwegian. I always thought that the difference Fenster-Vindu in swedish-norwegian gave some hints that norwegian is closer related to anglo-saxon.
They also have words like 'lunsj' (sounds like lunch, means snack or lunch I think)
Maybe a native norwegian can give more insight into this.
Yeah, and HTML/WWW was developed by Tim Brenners-Lee at CERN in Switserland IIRC. I don't know about all those other protocols, but the Internet and World Wide Web as they are today are a cummulation of an international effort with some roots in an USA DoD project.
Finland does not own any rights to Linux, just because Linus was studying there, probably funded by finnish taxpayer money, when he started Linux.
It is a non-democratic organization comprised of unelected diplomatic representatives, a number of whom do the bidding of unfree regimes that want to block and censor the Internet
True, but it's the only thing we have, we should try to improve it, not ignore it, as we have no alternative.
I have neither elected my country's ambasador to the USA, but I still think he represents the voice of my country's elected government there.
The UN does represent over 99% of the world's governments, although some are not elected representations of their people. That gives you more legitimacy to decide supernational issues, than just having the most powerfull army on the planet.
At least the UN is in it's basis a democratic institute, where decisions are made by voting, except for the veto options some countries have off course.
IIRC Milocevic was arrested and handed over to te UN by the Serbian government, which is in no way kidnapping. And most people are imprisoned against their will. I think there were several of his friends who tried to stop this by going though the yugoslav government. I don't know what in the end the exact result of this was, but he was delivered to teh UN by a rightfully elected government of his own state.
From www.nationmaster.com:
United States of America:
Population: 280,562,489 (July 2002 est.)
Murders: 12,658 (1999) per capita: 4.5 per 100000
Murders with firearms: 8,259 (1999) per capita: 2.9 per 100000
United Kingdom
Population: 59,778,002 (July 2002 est.)
Murders: 850 (2000) per capita: 1.4 per 100000
Murders with firearms: 62 (1999) per capita: 0.1 per 100000
If you calculate the numbers per capita of murders without firearms (knifes, etc.) it's about 1.4-1.6, so pretty close.
Seems to me these figures mean that, by addopting Brittish firearm laws about 8000 lives per year could be saved in the USA.
Ehm, changing resolutions in X, like ctrl-alt-+ and ctrl-alt-- would do that in XFree at least as long as I use it (1998). I think you need to have configured XFree right and have some permissions.
Win98 could also do change resolutions on the fly.
Except in those cases where the title bar is empty
How many office suites were there before MS squashed the competition like a bug?
:WP vs. Word for a feature by feature comparison.
There was WordPerfect, (and maybe others)
For a while there, each was trying to out do the other in features, and the public benefitted from that competition.
Word has never done anything but trying to catch up to WordPerfect. See for example
I could say a loy more , but the above site says it all.
WordPerfect was squashed not on features, but with (unfair ?) marketing tactics and monopoly misuse.
It's mainly been improving usability and interoperatebility in the last 8 years, oh and of course updates for new OS'es.
Let's try a real world analogy. Suppose I made a "Lost Pet Journal" of stray dogs and cats getting caught on the steet, to help them find back any owners, published this in every supermarket in the area every week.
Now some local print shop offers to print it for me for free because they like the initiative. After some time I can not continue, and some friends take over. It still gets printed for free.
Then the local print shop claims ownership of the "Lost Pet Journal" want to turn it into something else, but my friend don't like it and decide to have it printed somewhere else. Then the original shop also starts printing a "Lost Pet Journal" and claims the one my friends are making is a trademark infringement.
Anything wrong with this analogy? I leave you to draw your own conclusions.
about 5-6 layers of tinfoil or similar material should do it, maybe apply those before the next paintjob occurs?
The disadvantage is that the cellphone that are still active will try to find the network at maximum power, so you'll have to make people aware it's no use.
As long as credit cards exist, I'm not going to complain about the insecurity of ATM's.
Well as I mainly use the metric system, My D&D third edition player manual uses those. Maybe it just want's to sound 'antique' and I took the wrong conclusions. It uses those words without explaining so I assumed it's writers assumed that the reader knew what those units were. I didn't.
Still leave the other units, and the fact that these do get taken in to account in US/metric conversion tables I find on the net.
As another poster pointed out, a persons height is indeed expressed as 1.87 m. Even then you could easily understand that this is the same as 187 cm, 18.7 dm, 1870 mm, 0.00187 km
In your counter example 67.5 inches is not the same as 6 feet 7.5 inches or 0.000675 miles, 0.00675 yards, etc.
Now you say, o.k. we do not need all these conversions, because of context. Then I tell you, for metric you do not need to know the context, which in itself makes it simpler. Secondly you use 2 different units, feet and inches in your example even though the context is clear.
And it's easy to add precision, no extra unit required.
How long is this wall, for example?
About 8 yards, 7 yards, 2 feet, 4.5 inch to be precise
About 7 meter, 7.125 meter to be precise
The reverse is also true, I automatically see that a wall of 7.125 m is about 7 meter, while with a wall of 7 yards, 2 feet, 4.5 inch I have to know the conversions. Using a decimal number, 2 feet seems "low" and I would expect it to get rounded down to 0 in an approximation.
Personally I have the most experience with CSG units in electromagnetism. Just try calculating things given in statvolt, dyne, esu/cm2, feet/sec, erg.
Working from memory:
"A square loop of 5x5 inch is moving at a speed of 10 feet/sec perpendicular away from a wire with a cross section of 16 mm2, in which runs a current of 6 esu/sec." Then calculate something like the electric field in esu/cm2.
In technology we'd all be better off if we understood computer fundamentals better, but we can't all do that. Very few of my developers have any acquaintance with microcontroller programming, but studying that is a part of my understanding of how computers work. Most of them have never touched Unix, or any free tools either as far as they know, but knowing those makes me a better admin.
So very true. A good developer has to know not only to code, but also the technical details of the enviroment, and what alternative options he has, otherwise he can not make the right decisions. I think this si even true for so called hardware/environment independant languages like java.
Competent admin is largely invisible.
True, therefore only the incompetend get noticed.
I think on both sides there are cometend and incompetent individuals. The trick is to see who's competent and who's not at the other side of the fence, so you end up only having the competent dev's talking to the competent admins, and have the rest resolved within those groups. I think the part missing in the equation is management. All trough the article I was thinking why don't dev-boss and admin-boss sort it out and fix the incompetence or fire the incompetent. The reason he did not go there seemed to be that dev-boss and admin-boss were also clueless or incompetent, or altogether not technical enough to understand the issue.
In my experience if there is a cluefull manager on both sides things work out fine, but then I am not very experienced yet. I am on the developement side, and have a good boss, and the admin site is mostly clueless, but has a good boss. The issues go to the dev-boss, who takes them to admin-boss if they are valid.
Then some admin-grunt would do the change under supervision of the competent admin-boss. I just love our IT department, things always work, only a critical hardware breakdown kills productivity about once every 1-2 years.
Hmmm, ever tried compiling something, just what I do for a living.
From experience: P4-1.7 vs. PIII-600, SAME harddisk 40 Gb 7200 rpm WD,
9 min vs. 30 min. Would I have liked a fast Athlon XP or P4 w/HT.
YES.
All of SCO's "wealth" will vaporize as their stock plummets. At this point any award against SCO is worthless because they won't have any money to hand over to IBM. So, why exactly does that seem like a worthwhile pursuit from IBM's perspective? (Hint: it doesn't.) Maybe SCO's IP, like these Unix copyrights? Would IBM like to have that?