Oh goody, how illuminating. So I look in the man page and none of the error codes are explained. The command does not generate any logfile entries. Good so far, a promising start. Next stop, Google. Google finds a fair number of other users with the same problem, but no solution.
After some more attempts to figure it out (trawling mailings lists, pestering friends, sending out the bloodhounds) I give up and contact the developers. I get a reply, yay! The short story is the dev wanted to know what the logfile said. I'd already said there was nothing in the logfile. I tried it again and looked for other secret logfiles, and checked the syslogs. Still nothing. I wrote back explaining this and asking for more debugging advice or any other useful pointers. No reply yet.
I might file a bug report for the amusement of watching it grow cobwebs. But I'm not even sure where to file a bug report-- with the application's project site? The Linux distribution I am using? The upstream of my distro?
At this point I still have a few options: learn how to code and debug, and fix it myself. Keep badgering the developers. Try a different version. I went with C, using an older version of the application on a different Linux on a different PC. That worked. It took the best part of a day to get the settings where they needed to be, and to make a few changes to my documents and scripts to compensate for being on an older version, but at least I can get my work done. Provided I don't encounter any more showstopping errors.
Desktops, on the other hand, have to absorb everything from basic email and Web surfing to multimedia production, office productivity, accounting, games, science and educational apps, programming and script-writing, all kinds of networking tasks, you name it we want it.
So maybe the distro-does-all model is not the best one. Application developers wail about having to support multiple Linux versions, but in some ways that makes a lot more sense than building giant teams to manage thousands of packages for a single distro. When there is a problem we will know exactly who to talk to and have a single master bugtracker and information resource, instead of getting the "Not our problem, go bother upstream" shuffle. Applications will look and behave the same across distros instead of being plagued with bizarre distro customizations. One of the best features of the top Linux distributions is having trusted repositories and a single installation interface; is it so farfetched to imagine the original developers of applications integrated into this? They know the code better than anyone; who better to manage bugs and distro integration?
Continuing this rosy, idealized scenario it would then be possible for the application's developers to write and maintain a single authoritative manual. Oh I know, elite coders are savants who can only do one thing, and can't possibly be expected to be writers too. (Unlike the rest of humanity, who somehow manage to acquire multiple skill sets.) But at the very least I would like to see a complete command reference. That's right, a good old-fashioned man page with all commands, options, messages, files, and error codes. That is a great basis for other documentation writers to build on, and should be given equal importance to writing good code.
Supporting a gazillion distributions is not possible, but how about supporting the major ones? Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva. Most others are derivatives of those four. Make packages for the parents and let the children fend for themselves. Gentoo and Slackware optional, though once again they both have many derivatives so supporting those two means supporting a whole lot more with the same amount of effort.
But I digress. The .iso passed the checksum test, and the DVD passed the disk check. The first speedbump in the installation was setting up networking. Still no wi-fi configuration in the installer, even though I always use natively-supported wireless interfaces. No wi-fi. Really. Is this not 2009 of the 21st century, the glorious new millennium, the land awash in wi-fi?
But it's not a showstopper since I have the fat DVD with everything on it, so I can configure networking later. The installation progresses uneventfully to the next speedbump-- it stops dead with a big scary red screen partway through the "Select & Install Software" stage with a helpful "OMG the installation failed!" message, or something like that. But wait-- the installer is forgiving and allows skipping this step. So I skip to the next step, which is installing the bootloader. It fails here too. I skip this step and the installation completes. But without all the packages I selected and without a bootloader. Hrm.
It's on a multiboot system so I don't need a bootloader on Ubuntu Studio anyway. Boot into the Linux with the bootloader, make a menu entry for GRUB, and done.
Next step, do a bit of Web-searching. I find plenty, here are a few examples of other people reporting the same problem:
alternate installer: installation step failed
Judgement Day: Studio Dave Tests Ubuntu Studio 9.04
Installation woes
And several more, you get the idea. The bug report is from 2008, is unassigned, and links to a duplicate bug report also from 2008 and unassigned.
The release notes for Karmic Koala say to file bug reports in the debian-installer section of Launchpad. Um, OK. I visit debian-installer and think oh what the heck, file a bug report just for kicks. So when I click on the new bug report button I am greeted with this message:
"debian-installer (Unspecified) does not use Launchpad as its bug tracker. Are you sure this bug is in upstream debian-installer?"If you are using a package installed by your Linux distribution, the bug should be reported in that distribution, instead. Launchpad knows that debian-installer is present in the following distribution packages:
"* Ubuntu debian-installer
"You can report bugs by visiting the package's page.
"Bugs in upstream debian-installer should be reported in its official bug tracker, Debian Bug tracker"
Crom! What the heck, Ubuntu people? Do you take lessons in sowing confusion? But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I boldly visit the Launchpad debian-installer page. And there I find several more bug reports on this issue, 478754, 415812, 261025, 85942. Should I file yet another? It seems pointless, but perhaps I shall give it a go just for fun.
The Fedora Wiki tells the tale:
"Does Fedora still offer the choice of Ext3?Why? Because GRUB with Ext4 support was not ready in time. So you see there is a fun little Catch-22 with the live installer. A separate boot partition in Ext3, which I don't have on the Fedora PC, takes care of this. So I'll try some other tips and tricks and get me a Fedora 11 system, you see if I don't.
Yes. The regular CD/DVD install or network boot images still lets you choose either Ext4, Ext3 or XFS. The Live CD/DVD images however use Ext4 (except for /boot formatted as Ext3) and essentially transfer the entire image into the hard disk as part of the installation process and does not offer the ability to format the hard disk with any other filesystem. If you must choose a different filesystem, the regular DVD install or network boot images are the recommended alternatives."Can I install onto ext3 from the LiveCD?
No. If you install from the live image, you have to have an ext4 root filesystem because the installer just copies over the (ext4) filesystem image from the live image. To install onto ext3, you need to run the full installer. "
Oh well, that's life on the bleeding edge!]]>
The 3050 has a sheet-feed scanner. Yeah, el cheapo, it's what I could afford at the time. Here is where I get annoyed. My main workstation is Debian Lenny, and the darned thing does not set up scanners bloodlessly, you have to jump through mondo hoops. Last time I looked it was the 21st century, did something happen and I got sent back to 1998? Though I recall having to jump through the same hoops on Kubuntu last year on the same PC.
There are some commands that are occasionally useful, and which helped me get the scanner to work. The first step for any scanner connected to a Linux PC is to consult the SANE supported devices database. (SANE is the scanner backend for Linux.) This isn't 100% complete, but it's a good start.
Then run this command to see if SANE detects your scanner:
$ scanimage -L
No scanners were identified. If you were expecting something different, check that the scanner is plugged in, turned on and detected by the sane-find-scanner tool
Don't take no for an answer; try it as root:
# scanimage -L
device `hpaio:/usb/HP_LaserJet_3050?serial=00CNBK406377' is a Hewlett-Packard HP_LaserJet_3050 all-in-one
This is good news and bad news. The good news is SANE sees it. The bad news is this indicates a permissions problem, and since the advent of udev adjusting device permissions is hell itself.
Next step is find the USB address:
# sane-find-scanner
found USB scanner (vendor=0x03f0 [Hewlett-Packard], product=0x3217 [HP LaserJet 3050]) at libusb:005:002
We're getting closer, really we are! Ordinarily at this point we would take this information, the vendor=0x03f0 and product=0x3217, and plug it into a /etc/udev/rules.d/ script. On my Lenny PC, that is /etc/udev/rules.d/z60_libsane.rules. Quit laughing, it is too. I don't invent this stuff, I just use it.
OK then. This file is already full of rules, so all I need to do to create a new one is copy-and-paste, using the vendor and product ID for my printer. My new rule looks like this:
# Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 3050 MFP
SYSFS{idVendor}=="03f0", SYSFS{idProduct}=="3217", MODE="0664", GROUP="scanner", ENV{libsane_matched}="yes"
Then I need to add myself to the "scanner" group, and log out and log back in to activate my shiny new group membership.
But still no scanner. A fast test is to scan a document as root and as an unprivileged user with the scanimage > filename.pnm command. This tells you if it works at all, and if you have permission problems.
Somewheres in my peeve-fueled Google searches I learned about this command from the HP Toolbox:
# hp-check -t
This spits out a lot of information, and the key bit for me was
'hpaio' not in '/etc/sane.d/dll.conf'...
SANE backend 'hpaio' is not properly set up.
Um. OK. I guess the person who crafted this message was charged by the word and ran out of budget. But it turns out it is literal-- I added the word "hpaio" to /etc/sane.d/dll.conf and lo, forsooth, and boy howdy I now have a functioning scanner.
At any rate the thing works now. ]]>
It has been a marvelous education thanks to Groklaw. Without Groklaw we would not have enjoyed such deep, educated coverage, and would have been at the mercy of shallow, inaccurate reporting. Surprisingly, a lot of lousy news coverage continued even after Groklaw became famous-- I guess even spoon-feeding isn't enough in some cases.
In addition to the noisy and ever-quotable Darl, we also got to meet Dan Lyons, Laura DiDio, Maureen O'Gara, Rob Enderle, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, and various other shills, trolls, and mouthpieces. I hope it was worth it for them; me, I can't imagine a high enough price.
Good-bye Darl McBride, it was fun while it lasted. Well, no, actually it wasn't fun at all. I wish you well, and hope you find an honest job this time.]]>
[Joe User] [ASUS]
I own an ASUS motherboard. They offer a version of Linux in the bootloader the call Splashtop. It allows you to get to the internet in 5 seconds from power up. Thats the good news. There is no mention of Linux anywhere. Thats the start of the bad news. There are upgrades of Splashtop available. Thats the good news. You can't run Linux and upgrade. Thats the bad news. There is a USB gadget that allows you to safely overclock on the fly without rebooting or bios changes. Thats the good news. There is no functionality to do this in Linux. Thats the bad news. ASUS made mountains of money off of Linux by putting it on notebooks. Thats the good news. ASUS dropped Linux and berates it, as often as they can, and offers no support now. Thats the bad news.
Joe"
"[Khan Md Ashraf] [Motorola]
I have a 'Linux' based Motorola phone. The A810. It comes with a Windows only software for sync. Motorola also is not making it easy to make it compatible with GNU/Linux" http://community.developer.motorola.com/mtrl/board/message?board.id=JavaME_Connectivity&thread.id=117
There were some good comments on why source code availability matters to end users, like this one:
"[Onan the Barbarian] [Re: The last paragraph]
> Even if a person never looks at the source code and may not know any programming at all, that person is covered mainly because others have the ability to look at the code and ensure it is quality."Exactly. Once I listened to RMS giving a talk and he explained this with a nice analogy: software freedom is like freedom of press. Saying "I'm not concerned with software freedom because I'm not a programmer" is just as silly as saying "I'm not concerned with freedom of press because I'm not a journalist". Freedom of press is actually meant for the benefit of all who read the press, not just those who write it -- that is, it really means freedom for the people to get informed. In the same way, software freedom benefits all users of software, not just programmers -- that is, it really means freedom for the people to use their computer as they see fit, and not letting anyone dictate what you can or cannot do with your computer (DRM anyone?)."
Thank you as always to everyone who contributes thoughtful, interesting comments! ]]>
Like a lot of Linux users, I am fluent in Linux and Windows, and used to speak good Mac as well. I'm not up-to-date on OS X, but you know what-- it wouldn't take me long to get up to speed, and I certainly wouldn't waste my time and insult readers' intelligence by spouting nonsense about it. I chose Linux as my primary computing platform based on informed comparisons. I wish the Windows partisans would return the favor, and shush when they don't know what they're talking about. What a quiet Internet it would be....
Free tip: Nobody cares if you use Linux/FOSS. Use it, don't use, just please spare us the windy blather.
The last bit of proprietary software on my system (that I know of) is Adobe Flash. That's a tough one; my whole job is living on the Web. Try Web surfing dozens of different sites without Flash-- it might shock you how much the modern Web depends on dratted Flash. I keep trying Gnash and SWfdec. They work on some sites, but not all of them. So I need to support the Gnash and SWfdec projects and help them mature. Gnash is on the FSF's High Priority Free Software Projects list.
Those are very small examples, the idea is to help make the future happen. Don't just wait for someone to develop what you need. If your business relies on a certain important piece of software, there is probably a FOSS alternative. If it isn't quite what you need, support it and help it become more useful. You're building your own escape from lock-in, overpriced restrictive licenses, and insane EULAs when you do that. FOSS is your ticket to controlling your own business systems and data.
Vote with your wallet. Every vote for Microsoft is a vote against FOSS. The poster child for this is Linux OEM PCs-- often the comparable Windows PC is the same price or cheaper, or has more and better hardware. Saving a few bucks in the short term pushes a truly competitive computer marketplace that much farther into the future. Let vendors know when they lost a sale because of this sort of tricksiness. Independent Linux OEM vendors are good to buy from because they don't have to dance the razor's edge of trying to please both Microsoft and their actual paying customers.
It's not always easy to balance immediate needs against longer-term goals. But as the saying goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Any progress is better than no progress.]]>
Sun Solaris already offers 128-bit computing-- 2 to the 128th power bytes of storage, and 2 to the 64th power for everything else such as file systems, snapshots, directory entries, devices, and more. In comparison, one exabyte is 2 to the 60th power.
This Slashdot comment raises some interesting points:
Of course my first reaction to the news that Windows is going 128-bit is "They couldn't even get 64, 32, or 16-bit right." But snarks aside, it seems this is coming, and as far as I know nobody is working on a 128-bit Linux. Does this really matter? Don't ask me, I'm still on 32-bit :)."Most 64-bit processors provide 40 or 48 bits of address space; they ignore the other two or three bytes of the address (often they support a larger virtual address space than physical, but even then it's usually less than 64-bit). I've yet to see a consumer-grade machine with more RAM than PAE (36-bit addressing) could address. That said, memory is not the only place where the number of bits is important. Hard drives are typically addressed by 512-byte blocks, so 32 bits gives you 2TB, which is a single disk these days. 64 bits gives you 8ZB, which is quite a lot, but it's not a completely unreasonable amount; some people are going to find that constraining in the next few years, which is why ZFS uses 128 bits. It's not that 128 bits are necessary, so much that 65 bits are and 128 is the most computationally-convenient size after 128. Making sure everything in the kernel supports 128-bit filesystem offsets is an important for long-term project."
Allow me to repeat myself-- the goal of an ad campaign is to get people to contact you. What you do after that is what either turns them into paying customers, or into walkaways.
One thing I have done with good success is to teach classes. The key to making them work is to teach a specific task-- I taught basic digital photo editing and management, how to sell things on Ebay and Craigslist, and email composition for business people. Get people's hands on Linux PCs and teach a specific skill. Then there is a natural entry into some of the reasons for using Linux, showing them more things they can do, and they see for themselves that it works and isn't all weird. And you make some money.
So maybe a good way to handle an influx of noobs from a general Linux ad campaign is to steer them to a free 30-minute introductory class. Real-life in-person meatspace contact is great for a local business; good small-businesspeople know that they're really selling themselves. Another thought is to film a ten-minute introductory presentation for YouTube and steer them to that. (Remember, my beloved but oft long-winded geek friends, shorter is better.) Show, don't tell; demonstrate common tasks and show what it looks like.
There should also be a static page with photos and transcript. Spend a few bucks printing up some postcards with short blurbs and the URLs; paper mail is still a fabulous way to reach people. If they're not willing to look at any of those, they're probably not serious candidates and you know to steer your energies elsewhere.
Think about the whole picture-- what does a person need besides knowledge to run a Linux PC? Partnering with an OEM Linux vendor means hardware support and a place to shop, and if it's a local shop so much the better.
A big thanks to Ken Starks for once again putting his money where his mouth is, and generously sharing the fruits of his labors. And a big rude noise to those titans of industry who profit handsomely from Linux, but can't be bothered to promote it in any way. The Linux "brand" is valuable and has many important differentiators; it's all in how it's presented.]]>
These are all quotes of Mr. Shuttleworth's words, as exact as I could make them. He starts off with an attractive and ambitious vision, and then right away makes a dumb pun about ejaculation. Thanks a lot, what a way to set the tone at a technical presentation. No, talking about female orgasm would not make me happy. Talking about Linux and Free software would make me happy, and leave the dumb stuff at home.
""People often ask me why I'm so fascinated by Free software , and why I put so much time, energy, and money into Ubuntu...I really believe the Free software process is the right way to build software. Not only that, there is the potential, if we raise our game... that we could end up re-defining the experience that the average person has whenever they turn on a computer."Here is the infamous "explaining to girls" comment:"A release is an amazing thing. I'm not talking about the happy ending, I'm talking about a software release, the fresh meat."
"The release is the beginning of the journey for many other parts of the community and for our users. When you make a release it has all sorts of other benefits...Think of all the other people in the community who want to be helping you get your software out to the world. Documentors, translators, artists, advocates; their job begins once you commit to making a release... Committing to a release effectively broadens the base of the people who are going to be participating in your project."
"...agile development guys..."
"free software leaders, guys who are really interested in the code, the guys who started and founded the projects..."
"...gnome guys...
"...kde guys...""...guys who are driven primarily by software deployment, and guys who are driven primarily by hardware issues....
...hardware guys...
...software guys...
...hardware guys...
...software guys..."'...guys writing that code are all free software guys..."
"...when it lands in the hands of your grandma it doesn't do what you intended it to do..."
"...opening up the doors to new developers...a lot of upstream projects take the form of a couple of guys who know each other really well...hard to cross the chasm... getting to the point where you're one of those guys..."
"Maybe for some people it's part of the fun, you have this cabal effect. But it's damaging to our ability to grow projects. Only people who are insanely persistent can cross that chasm. Whereas if you're more open to code that's coming in from people you don't know then it's really exciting for those guys...
"...you don't want some other guy, or girl, coming along and trampling that..." Aha! He does know the difference!-- ed.
"...you can actully create the feeling of having two guys sitting looking at some code, three guys, four guys sitting looking at some code and working through it....get this guy and that guy to review it..."
"...guys say "Look, I work on the kernel, I do device drivers, i don't have to worry about the user experience..."
Thanks. Thanks a lot. If all of you men Linux devs work really really hard someday we'll have computers that even girls can understand."How many of you guys know Till [Kamppeter]... making sure that your printer, your mom's printer, my grandma's printer just work out of the box...if we can do the same with sound, if we can do the same with wi-fi, we can do the same for various other amazing subsystems that are going to come into the kernel...if we approach this from the perspective of saying "How do we make this just awesome for end users" then we'll have less trouble explaining to girls what we actually do."
"...connected in and work with those guys...."
"I hope you guys have a phenomenal collaboration summit."
In this talk the subtext is crystal clear- guys are all those awesome brilliant software developers and tech gurus, girls, moms, and grandmas are the adoring helpless end users who totally rely on the brilliant guy gurus.
Mark Shuttleworth is not the only one who does this; it permeates Linux and FOSS. But he talks the most about leadership, the future, community, and inclusion. I think that Mr. Shuttleworth owes us an apology. Not only for assuming that women are not worthy of respect, but for also assuming that all men like smutty puns and dissing women. How refreshing it would be to hear "I'm sorry, I will do better". What an example that would set, what a show of leadership, especially coming from the man who speaks so often on the importance of courtesy and respect, and reins in heated discussions with admonitions to cool off and be constructive.
Here are a few free tips for speakers and writers: Stay on topic. Save your dirty jokes and other dumb stuff for when you're partying with your friends. Women and men are adults. Girls and boys are children. What is your goal, for your audience to listen to what you're saying? Or to be distracted by dumb stuff? It seems a simple choice to me.
I still recommend that everyone watch this-- just try to eat around the flies and taste only the soup.
*edit*
For those who think the opinions of a woman don't count for much on this topic, here are some perspectives from some men: Chris Ball, Matt Zimmerman, and Adam Williamson --
Now that Lenovo is the official Thinkpad vendor it's worse than ever. They've made a couple of feeble attempts at selling Linux boxes, but sabotaged themselves so skillfully it never worked. You couldn't even find the alleged Linux Thinkpads on Lenovo.com. Though here is a funny thing: if you go to Lenovo.com and enter "linux" in their Search box, it finds a bunch of links--- to pages on Ibm.com. Why? Because when IBM sold its PC division it retained an 18.9% equity stake in Lenovo. So IBM is still in the PC desktop business.
This whole arrangement is bizarre, it's like Lenovo is the grouchy spouse who goes around offending Linux users, and IBM tags along behind apologizing and trying to smooth things over. I saved the best punchline for last: Lenovo's slogan, "New World. New Thinking."
Point #9 is already here. The Linux desktop has been outperforming Windows for a long time, which is a low standard to beat. Apple has the reputation for prettiness, but Linux has long beat the pants off both of them in flexibility, features, customizibility, power, and stability. It is doing quite well for prettiness too.
Point #7 is interesting, I agree with it. Chasing Windows is futile because that is going in reverse. Linux is already the champion of desktop environments; the remaining hurdle is applications and quality of applications. We're close, but not all the way there.
But the real message here is #10. IBM is not interested in standalone computer desktops, but selling software as a service. Or cloud, or hosted services, or whatever you want to call it, it's all the same thing: keeping control of customer's software and data, and feeding them like little baby birds, only little baby birds who pay for the privilege. And that is what all the big vendors are chasing now. They're not interested in OEM desktop Linux and never will be. And just like Google and Amazon and other huge consumers of Linux, they'll have a built-in GPL dodge and share only whatever code they feel like sharing.
The big unanswered, and unasked, question: Linux and FOSS are hot and trendy now. Every PHB wants to do Linux. But what's in it for all the people who are actually writing the code, only to see all these big businesses profit from it? Stay tuned, as I am going to try to find out. ]]>
Dan Lyons as contestant is just plain baffling. You might recall this is the same Dan Lyons who used to publish reams of anti-Linux trolling and pro-SCO guff for Forbes magazine. So what happened, wasn't Rob Enderle available? Or Maureen O'Gara? With Ms.O'Gara you get a twofer-- anti-Linux troll and your token woman. I suppose it's a play on his schtick as Fake Steve Jobs, which is about as relevant to Linux and community-building as any random celebrity impersonator. A Fake Elvis would have been better, then we would have some cool music to listen to.
The schedule of talks looks a little more enticing and not quite so corporate-driven. Lots of great subjects, a gaping dearth of women presenters.
I'm guessing some of my friends at the Foundation and at Linuxcon might be a bit upset with what I'm saying. They work hard and put a lot of themselves into the Foundation and Linux. That makes us even because I'm upset with them, because in this here year of 2009, well into the new millennium, it's ridiculous to be this tone-deaf towards women in Linux and FOSS. It's no good talking about going mainstream, and big growth, and rosy visions of the future without having a grasp on the fundamentals of the here and now. The here and now is dismal. Linux is hampered by its lack of real diversity and growth in numbers of new contributors: hardly any women, 1.5% according to the FLOSSPOLs study, and any man or woman who doesn't have rhino hide and near-sociopathic stubbornness is not going to stick around.
How do we attract and retain new contributors? By reaching out, and by providing help and mentoring to get new contributors off to a good start. By presenting a variety of highly-visible role models. By valuing all contributors, because coding is just the beginning. Ongoing software maintenance and improvements, ongoing user support, documentation, providing a welcoming path to turn users into contributors, artwork and music, site design, marketing and talking to the press, and on and on...it's not enough to fling some code out into the world and hope something good happens.
Linux is at a crucial crossroads now. We can show some real vision and leadership and create a great future, and show the world how it's done. Or we can stay trapped in the old rut of sink-or-swim, Kevlar hide required, and continue to muddle along in the same old way. There is nothing visionary about ruts. ]]>
I've been thoroughly spoiled by my various Linux PCs: I can open and close applications all day long, and surf the Web, and check email, and run various system and network administration commands, and install or remove apps, and run remote graphical desktops via VNC, and open NFS and Samba shares, and do all of this whenever I feel like it, and nothing bad happens. Unlike Windows which must be babied along, you can't have too many apps open, and you certainly don't open and close things all over the place without suffering the consequences. So when Firefox behaves like a frail Windows application it stands out like the weakling at a body-building convention.
Another amusing Firefox quirk is inconsistent Ctrl+T behavior. This is supposed to open a new tab. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.
The Location Bar History has gone insane. On normal browsers you click the little arrow to see a drop-down menu of the most recent pages you have visited, in order. I love this. But Firefox horked it and now it shows old pages I haven't visited in ages, and recent entries are nowhere.
The Google toolbar does not automatically clear seaches. What the heck is that about? I just love having extra work because Firefox thinks I need it. Konqueror on Debian automatically clears entries in the Google bar, and if I want to repeat a search there is a nice dropdown menu with recent searches.
People rave about how great having huge thundering herds of plugins to use is such a wonderful thing, and it is. But there is no easy way to tell which ones are FOSS and which ones are proprietary, and I do get tired of wading through mass pages to try to figure that out.
Another thing that troubles me about Firefox extensions is they bypass your distribution's package manager. One of the great strengths of Linux is having trusted software repositories. We can install whatever we want and not have to worry that's it's some nasty piece of malware. I have cron jobs that run updaters every day. No worries, this isn't Windows where updates break your system as often as they fix it. But Firefox extensions operate far outside of this safety net, just like Windows applications. This is extra-scary in this shiny new era of Web threats and Web browsers being the dominant security worries.
Probably the next update will fix the instability. After all, the infamous Firefox memory leak is mostly fixed, though not completely, even though the devs were bothered by us silly users calling it a memory leak when they said it really wasn't, but something else that behaved like a memory leak, and how were they supposed to fix something when we weren't even right about defining the problem? Or it was a feature, depending on who was doing the explaining.
About the Firefox "memory leak"
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_%28Firefox%29 only mentions Windows users.
Calling a bug a feature is rather Windows-ish, is it not? At any rate the Web is a better place thanks to Firefox, and for that I give thanks.]]>
Neither the Mac nor Windows are intuitive, and I wish the word "intuitive" would go away entirely because the poor thing is so misused it needs a long vacation. Here is a dictionary definition of intuitive:
"Known or perceived by intuition."
What is intuition?
"The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition."
Some synonyms are clairvoyance, innate knowledge, instinct, premonition, presentiment. Some antonyms are knowledge and reason.
So "intuitive" has nothing to do with computers. It's all learned. Duh. But the poor huddled Mac and Windows masses have been fed this line of bull for so long that they believe it even though it directly contradicts their own experiences, and it even leaks into our nice little Linux world, and we see all kinds of exhortations to make Linux more "intuitive."
Of course we must always continue to improve ease-of-use; computers are supposed to serve us, not the other way around. But I do wish this "intuitive" nonsense would stop, because it is nonsense. The last thing we need is even more willfully ignorant computer users.
That last one is especially difficult because no matter how many years people have been pounding on their PCs in frustration (Windows users in particular) they still believe that it is "intuitive". Such an intense level of indoctrination is not overcome overnight.
Have patience, brave penguin, and you will succeed, and great will be your glory. OK probably not glory, but hopefully personal satisfaction and happy new Linux users.]]>
"Now market theory does claim competition causes efficiency, but that in turn is based on two more basic ideas. First, people are homo economicus--they are motivated entirely by financial gain. Second, competition results in people who perform better getting rewarded financially and people who perform less well getting penalized...In fact, psychological studies suggest that people are motivated by a number of things, and that financial gain past a certain point is not really one of the most effective motivators. Done wrong it can even *de-motivate*. Another problem is that firms are not the same as people. CEOs may be financially motivated to improve a firm's profits (in the short term), but are line workers? Certainly not in most big businesses. To many, profits are something that happens when their wages are squeezed. Certainly it has been some time since there was a link between increasing worker productivity and increasing worker wages.
So for motivational purposes, capitalism in large firms is pretty much indistinguishable from Soviet communism. Finally, markets aren't actually optimally efficient; to approach efficiency they require fairly firm regulation to reduce opportunities for fraud, "moral hazard", the creation of externalities--just generally cheating. They also require a certain amount of planning, as well as intervention to create public goods such as infrastructure which would go uncreated due to free-ridership problems if left to markets. The most successful economies around the world, including the US, all interfere in their markets extensively."
Windows security is always good for some laughs:
What is a botnet? Tont O'Bryan says "It's what results from connecting Windows to the Internet."jp joins the fray, responding to "The problem is really just that Windows is so immensly popular":
"Once again, widespread does not equal popular. At one time polio was widespread but I doubt anyone thought that made it popular."
Finally, GreyGeek answers the question that will not die: If Mono is bad, how can Samba be good? Here is an excerpt:
"So, SAMBA is a green room development with no Microsoft licenses currently needed. Microsoft may change that in the future by patenting software technologies it uses to extend SMB in future releases, thus blocking SAMBA, if the current challenges to software patents fail. So, if Linux is not connected to a Windows network it does not need SAMBA to operate at all.That is not true with MONO. de Icaza did not use the "French Cafe" to figure out .NET because because he has been in frequent contact with Microsoft developers during the development of MONO. I understand that he wrote MoonLight, a SilverLight clone, in 20 days and finished it on a plane flight to Europe, where he presented it. Considering his MS contacts I can understand how he did it.
To make matters worse, the Ubuntu Technology Board voted on June 30, 2009 to make the Ubuntu desktop remix DEPENDENT on MONO! Since MONO is a clone of .NET, and .NET is owned and controlled by Microsoft, that means that Microsoft will, directly or indirectly, control the Ubuntu desktop in future releases, unless the UTB comes to its senses and reverses itself. Now, consider this: GNOME is built using C and the GTK+ API, and compiled with gcc. MONO (.NET) has it's own API and GUI dialog frameworks, and is written using C#. There is NO NEED for GTK+ if GNOME because dependent on MONO. Expect the Ubuntu Technical Board, after a "reasonable" period of time to allow MONO based GUIs and utilities to gradually replace GTK+ counterparts, to announce that it is removing the GTK+ toolkit to "save room" on the ISO. That is the same reason it used to remove GIMP from the ISO in favor of MONO."
Thanks again LT readers for posting the finest and freshest comments anywhere! ]]>