Here's something novel: how about letting a (gasp!) computer do it - as in divide the geopolitical space into the appropriate number of areas, each of which has a minimum outline or area. The idea is to eliminate gerrymandering, biases (political, ethnic, social, etc), and so on.
It isn't just ONE thing, or even mostly one. It's varying permutations of varying degrees of all of the above, depending on the user, OS, risk(s), and solutions available.
The closest thing to a "Fedora manual" that I have seen is a 900+ page book
True. But A) the user doesn't need to read the whole book to use the index to find references to X, and B) that doesn't apply to a half-dozen people working on SuperHandyUtility in their spare time.
If only that were still feasible; I would love such a solution, but the volume has grown too large in recent years.
Again, much of what you write is most appropriate for large projects, like an entire OS. My comments are directed toward those that are simply writing a single application. As for users reporting bugs, anything of the "my mouse stopped" without amplifying information goes to the bitbucket. Be nice and tell them that without more info (application, what they were doing, the usual suspects), nothing you can do. But don't make them register with Bugzilla and go through all the rigmarole to report (for example) that a dialog button is mostly covered by the label next to it.
We almost always do,
Again, true enough for a distro. But I recently had some questions about an active application; when I emailed the author, what I got back was "Oh, somebody else has taken that over; I don't have anything to do with it any more", with no mention of who had picked it up or how they could be reached. Website was as old as the negligible documentation (i.e. about 3 major revs behind, which is ANOTHER peeve...).
Why restrict this to Linux? The problem of different toolkits that do not integrate well with the OS is pretty universal.
I'm sorry to say that I was a Windows user from 2.0 until shortly after XP released, and while there were indeed some butt-ugly apps written with other toolkits, they still ran. I've had several cases where source code wouldn't compile because of hard-coded dependencies on a specific (obscure!) Gnome library (I use KDE). The author? "Oh, well, I don't use KDE, so I didn't bother testing it. Maybe someone else has ported it over...".
It doesn't take but one or two of the above experiences with an application for someone to say it isn't worth the bother, or that open source isn't any good.
One of the reasons I avoid all this open source stuff is that most of it is badly documented
THIS
IRC channels, wikis, blogs, mailing lists (and their archives), a set of web pages... none of these is a valid substitute for actual documentation that a user can actually find an answer in. Fine, if you feel the need to be high-tech, edgy, l33t, or whatever, make it a pdf or downloadable html pages. Do not force users to have to jump through any 'extra' hoops to try and get help with a problem they may be having. I'd also add:
If you get some variation of the same question over and over again, you need to (better) explain it in the docs.
If a user finds an actual bug, don't make them have to sign up for some service or other that they'll (hopefully) only need once (i.e. Bugzilla) to report it. Maybe have a bugs@myproject.org to triage.
CLEARLY provide SOME way to contact SOMEBODY actively involved with the project. Keep this updated if you don't want to be getting annoyed emails five years from now.
If it's a Linux app, it would be kinda nice if it worked/looked good under ANY desktop, not just your personal favorite.
from when I was down there (USN) in 1976 -- folks were pretty much left to act like adults and be responsible for themselves. Now the whole country seems more farked up than the U.S., or even Britain!
Maybe they should start referring to him as Kim Jong Conroy?
So much for the concepts of "Freedom" and "Democracy" for Oz...
I've been running Linux for over 5 years, and have never had to do anything like that to get a USB drive to work.
Sure, there's some hardware that won't work under Linux because of drivers -- usually cheap-ass crap that people shouldn't be buying in the first place. Then again, my Linux system does recognise the vast majority of hardware, and doesn't need separate drivers for any of it. Hell, the first thing I do when I buy hardware for my system is throw away the Windows drivers disk(s) that came with it, along with whatever suck-ass "free" program they had to toss in to try and convince me to buy it. On top of that, I don't have to reboot eleventy-seven times while installing said drivers.
Using Linux, you're expected to take responsibility for your computer and how it's configured. If it's borked, that's because you probably didn't research/learn as you should have and almost certainly changed something without knowing what it does or is for.
When a Windows box is borked, it's generally because MS screwed it up FOR you, before you got it, and without telling you -- if you had any interest in it working correctly in the first place (which most Windows users are willing to assume it does).
Better than fussing at the U.S. that these students are choosing to stay here, better you should be asking why they don't want to go back. Caste system? Social stratification? Old-boy network? Nepotism? What does the U.S. do/have that India doesn't?
The thing that concerns me is that "but for now" part.
If the U.S. doesn't get its collective head out of its ass and start not only teaching math and science again, but actually respecting (and even honoring) the fields, then we're going to be the world's foremost service people. We've got too many kids going to college just for the "piece of paper" that valuable resources are being wasted. It's well past time for parents to accept that a college degree isn't an automatic job guarantee, and start directing their kids into some trade schools. A journeyman plumber takes more money home than a Liberal Arts grad flipping burgers.
This isn't just a Perl problem; there are several packages that I know of that different distros have problems with.
I think it's more the nature of F/OSS: anybody that can repackage things, will -- just like anyone that wants to, can cobble together their own distro.
I don't see the problem going away for Perl, or any other package -- or even for the various distributions. As long as there are True Believers in.deb vs.rpm vs. git,/usr vs/opt, Gnome vs KDE, and so on, I see it continuing to be a problem. Nobody wants to give up a little bit of their "freedom" to do-as-they-damn-well-please in order to establish some consistency and minimum standards so as to make life easier for mere users. I've previously suggested that the fragmentation of Linux (of which this particular situation is just an example) is what's REALLY keeping Linux off more desktops.
But, hey, what do I know? I'm just one of those folks that only wants to get actual productive work done, and remembers what it was like for me when I made the switch from Windows(tm) to Linux.
It's one of those cumulative cases though, I would assume (whether they are being excessively pernickety or not), that while working on 1 computer coved in tar residue is not so bad, working on 500 might be. Just like visiting a smoke-filled bar just once might not be, but working there every day is...
Say, here's an idea: if they're getting so many smoker-owned laptops that it's a bother (for whatever reason), how about setting up a "decontamination" station (charge extra for it, of course), then process as usual? I've done my fair share of commercial computer service, and alcohol does a fine job of removing 99+% of cigarette residue, won't damage the hardware like water or solvents could, and is fairly inexpensive.
Yeah, us smokers are used to the smell of it -- just like other folks are used to the stench of their body wash, knock-off perfume, hairspray, etc.
Information, yes; a newly-created something-or-other (script, novel, song, etc) not so much. Sure, all the words and everything were already there, but the act of creativity needed to put them together in a new and different way... that's something worth being compensated for if/when someone(s) find it worthwhile. Yes, technology is changing everything -- by making it far too easy for people to simply copy the efforts of someone else without compensating that person.
To use your lawn analogy, it's as if you put a lot of time and effort into growing a nice flower garden, and everyone that passes by takes one of the flowers. Of course, in this example, we're dealing with a physical object (the flowers), versus the intangible of a created work, but the underlying principle still applies: person A putting time and effort into the act of creation, and persons B thru n+1 taking it without paying. It is that particular configuration of 1's and 0's that represent the end result of that creativity.
P.T. Barnum was very much the optimist when he observed "There's a sucker born every minute." -- it has to be a couple dozen of them, at least. Until/unless Facebook and MySpace are held accountable for their lack of ethics and accountability for what they allow on their sites, users are going to get hosed -- which is just ONE of the reasons I refuse to join either of those over-hyped operations.
Terrorising banks: Sure, no biggie -- right up until it happens for the eleventy-seventh time this year at YOUR bank, and you can't use your ATM/debit card/credit card...
Disrupting transit: Similar to above, but add in the perceived risk of actual physical harm.
Deliberately wrecking transit: "Highly unlikely"... like, say, crunching an airplane into a building on purpose?
Publishing false stories: Good thing bogus stories don't get spread by word of mouth as rumors...
Disrupting news sources: Unless, of course, one (or more) of them happens to be one you've come to use.
Penetrating Govt systems: Maybe not DoD, but how about something less "critical", like all the HEW records going into the bitbucket? Or hurricane predictions at the start of the season?
Actually GETTING secret govt data: Trusting soul, aren't you? What if Tim McVeigh and buddies had known where to steal some radioactive trash to add to their ANFO bomb?
Health services, et al: a hospital in England had to shut down for a while just from getting the Conficker worm; how much worse if somebody started screwing with meds? On a wide-spread basis? Or even just Operating Room scheduling, or billing? Hell, just patient admissions records?
Power grid: Hell with taking it down -- how about just borking it with unscheduled rolling brownouts, overvoltages, intermittently tripping random control relays, and so forth? Or just pushing supplies to borderline with a DDoS against the CoOps and the like?
Telecom systems: How happy would YOU be with a phone system that intermittently connected you to someone OTHER than the person you called? Or cell towers that randomly went out of service for varying periods of time? And if neither the phone company NOR the government or law enforcement could do anything about it?
TFA said that cyberterrorism isn't a credible threat yet -- which implies that it IS some threat, now. Me, I'm hoping they're not just whistling in the dark...
Re:Just to get it out of the way ...
on
Caves of the Moon
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Negative. It's an unguarded, exposed vent to the central reactor.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's something novel: how about letting a (gasp!) computer do it - as in divide the geopolitical space into the appropriate number of areas, each of which has a minimum outline or area. The idea is to eliminate gerrymandering, biases (political, ethnic, social, etc), and so on.
Which administration gets the blame for that?
Roger that. Stereotypes happen precisely because of averaged observations. And before I get flamed, note that "averaged" bit.
It isn't just ONE thing, or even mostly one. It's varying permutations of varying degrees of all of the above, depending on the user, OS, risk(s), and solutions available.
The closest thing to a "Fedora manual" that I have seen is a 900+ page book
True. But A) the user doesn't need to read the whole book to use the index to find references to X, and B) that doesn't apply to a half-dozen people working on SuperHandyUtility in their spare time.
If only that were still feasible; I would love such a solution, but the volume has grown too large in recent years.
Again, much of what you write is most appropriate for large projects, like an entire OS. My comments are directed toward those that are simply writing a single application. As for users reporting bugs, anything of the "my mouse stopped" without amplifying information goes to the bitbucket. Be nice and tell them that without more info (application, what they were doing, the usual suspects), nothing you can do. But don't make them register with Bugzilla and go through all the rigmarole to report (for example) that a dialog button is mostly covered by the label next to it.
We almost always do,
Again, true enough for a distro. But I recently had some questions about an active application; when I emailed the author, what I got back was "Oh, somebody else has taken that over; I don't have anything to do with it any more", with no mention of who had picked it up or how they could be reached. Website was as old as the negligible documentation (i.e. about 3 major revs behind, which is ANOTHER peeve...).
Why restrict this to Linux? The problem of different toolkits that do not integrate well with the OS is pretty universal.
I'm sorry to say that I was a Windows user from 2.0 until shortly after XP released, and while there were indeed some butt-ugly apps written with other toolkits, they still ran. I've had several cases where source code wouldn't compile because of hard-coded dependencies on a specific (obscure!) Gnome library (I use KDE). The author? "Oh, well, I don't use KDE, so I didn't bother testing it. Maybe someone else has ported it over...".
It doesn't take but one or two of the above experiences with an application for someone to say it isn't worth the bother, or that open source isn't any good.
One of the reasons I avoid all this open source stuff is that most of it is badly documented
THIS
IRC channels, wikis, blogs, mailing lists (and their archives), a set of web pages... none of these is a valid substitute for actual documentation that a user can actually find an answer in. Fine, if you feel the need to be high-tech, edgy, l33t, or whatever, make it a pdf or downloadable html pages. Do not force users to have to jump through any 'extra' hoops to try and get help with a problem they may be having. I'd also add:
from when I was down there (USN) in 1976 -- folks were pretty much left to act like adults and be responsible for themselves. Now the whole country seems more farked up than the U.S., or even Britain!
Maybe they should start referring to him as Kim Jong Conroy?
So much for the concepts of "Freedom" and "Democracy" for Oz...
I've been running Linux for over 5 years, and have never had to do anything like that to get a USB drive to work.
Sure, there's some hardware that won't work under Linux because of drivers -- usually cheap-ass crap that people shouldn't be buying in the first place. Then again, my Linux system does recognise the vast majority of hardware, and doesn't need separate drivers for any of it. Hell, the first thing I do when I buy hardware for my system is throw away the Windows drivers disk(s) that came with it, along with whatever suck-ass "free" program they had to toss in to try and convince me to buy it. On top of that, I don't have to reboot eleventy-seven times while installing said drivers.
No, not hypocrisy.
Using Linux, you're expected to take responsibility for your computer and how it's configured. If it's borked, that's because you probably didn't research/learn as you should have and almost certainly changed something without knowing what it does or is for.
When a Windows box is borked, it's generally because MS screwed it up FOR you, before you got it, and without telling you -- if you had any interest in it working correctly in the first place (which most Windows users are willing to assume it does).
What the hell did he THINK he was going to get for his money? In a freakin' BAR?
to step on the ol' weenie with track shoes...
[Carnac] "What is 'people staying away in droves?' [/Carnac]
Why is PayPal freezing the account? What happened the first time, and what agreement was reached to thaw the account?
that Tokyo has a slimy rail system?
For however much good it'll do, here's the link to CBS online feedback/complaint form
Better than fussing at the U.S. that these students are choosing to stay here, better you should be asking why they don't want to go back. Caste system? Social stratification? Old-boy network? Nepotism? What does the U.S. do/have that India doesn't?
The thing that concerns me is that "but for now" part.
If the U.S. doesn't get its collective head out of its ass and start not only teaching math and science again, but actually respecting (and even honoring) the fields, then we're going to be the world's foremost service people. We've got too many kids going to college just for the "piece of paper" that valuable resources are being wasted. It's well past time for parents to accept that a college degree isn't an automatic job guarantee, and start directing their kids into some trade schools. A journeyman plumber takes more money home than a Liberal Arts grad flipping burgers.
Talk about getting a cold look....
This isn't just a Perl problem; there are several packages that I know of that different distros have problems with.
I think it's more the nature of F/OSS: anybody that can repackage things, will -- just like anyone that wants to, can cobble together their own distro.
I don't see the problem going away for Perl, or any other package -- or even for the various distributions. As long as there are True Believers in .deb vs .rpm vs. git, /usr vs /opt, Gnome vs KDE, and so on, I see it continuing to be a problem. Nobody wants to give up a little bit of their "freedom" to do-as-they-damn-well-please in order to establish some consistency and minimum standards so as to make life easier for mere users. I've previously suggested that the fragmentation of Linux (of which this particular situation is just an example) is what's REALLY keeping Linux off more desktops.
But, hey, what do I know? I'm just one of those folks that only wants to get actual productive work done, and remembers what it was like for me when I made the switch from Windows(tm) to Linux.
when developing for a different market like China, it makes sense to use local knowledge of language and mindset of the people.
Considering the number of pirated copies of Windows reportedly in use in China, I think that's exactly what happened.
Say, here's an idea: if they're getting so many smoker-owned laptops that it's a bother (for whatever reason), how about setting up a "decontamination" station (charge extra for it, of course), then process as usual? I've done my fair share of commercial computer service, and alcohol does a fine job of removing 99+% of cigarette residue, won't damage the hardware like water or solvents could, and is fairly inexpensive.
Yeah, us smokers are used to the smell of it -- just like other folks are used to the stench of their body wash, knock-off perfume, hairspray, etc.
Information, yes; a newly-created something-or-other (script, novel, song, etc) not so much. Sure, all the words and everything were already there, but the act of creativity needed to put them together in a new and different way... that's something worth being compensated for if/when someone(s) find it worthwhile. Yes, technology is changing everything -- by making it far too easy for people to simply copy the efforts of someone else without compensating that person.
To use your lawn analogy, it's as if you put a lot of time and effort into growing a nice flower garden, and everyone that passes by takes one of the flowers. Of course, in this example, we're dealing with a physical object (the flowers), versus the intangible of a created work, but the underlying principle still applies: person A putting time and effort into the act of creation, and persons B thru n+1 taking it without paying. It is that particular configuration of 1's and 0's that represent the end result of that creativity.
TANSTAAFL
P.T. Barnum was very much the optimist when he observed "There's a sucker born every minute." -- it has to be a couple dozen of them, at least. Until/unless Facebook and MySpace are held accountable for their lack of ethics and accountability for what they allow on their sites, users are going to get hosed -- which is just ONE of the reasons I refuse to join either of those over-hyped operations.
Terrorising banks: Sure, no biggie -- right up until it happens for the eleventy-seventh time this year at YOUR bank, and you can't use your ATM/debit card/credit card...
Disrupting transit: Similar to above, but add in the perceived risk of actual physical harm.
Deliberately wrecking transit: "Highly unlikely"... like, say, crunching an airplane into a building on purpose?
Publishing false stories: Good thing bogus stories don't get spread by word of mouth as rumors...
Disrupting news sources: Unless, of course, one (or more) of them happens to be one you've come to use.
Penetrating Govt systems: Maybe not DoD, but how about something less "critical", like all the HEW records going into the bitbucket? Or hurricane predictions at the start of the season?
Actually GETTING secret govt data: Trusting soul, aren't you? What if Tim McVeigh and buddies had known where to steal some radioactive trash to add to their ANFO bomb?
Health services, et al: a hospital in England had to shut down for a while just from getting the Conficker worm; how much worse if somebody started screwing with meds? On a wide-spread basis? Or even just Operating Room scheduling, or billing? Hell, just patient admissions records?
Power grid: Hell with taking it down -- how about just borking it with unscheduled rolling brownouts, overvoltages, intermittently tripping random control relays, and so forth? Or just pushing supplies to borderline with a DDoS against the CoOps and the like?
Telecom systems: How happy would YOU be with a phone system that intermittently connected you to someone OTHER than the person you called? Or cell towers that randomly went out of service for varying periods of time? And if neither the phone company NOR the government or law enforcement could do anything about it?
TFA said that cyberterrorism isn't a credible threat yet -- which implies that it IS some threat, now. Me, I'm hoping they're not just whistling in the dark...
Negative. It's an unguarded, exposed vent to the central reactor.
Why complicate it that much? Just have a bunch of lightweight balls of sealant that get sucked into any cracks, burst, and plug the leak.