Some notes on improving Linux for the home user (A.K.A. Joe Sixpack) and related rantings and concerns.(FYI you can read BSD or others for Linux in many places here, but my experience is primarily with Linux)

First off, this is just my considered opinion and I make no claims otherwise. Second this all assumes that Linux as a major player on the common desktop is a desired goal, if you disagree with that then feel free to keep Linux on your machine exactly how you like it. Open source it great that way. Third this is a VERY rough draft, little to no spell checking or grammar checking, heck some of the ideas aren't even entirely fleshed out well explained or well organized yet. My point here to show some of my thinking and hopefully get others thinking about some of these things.

There are many things Linux does that rate good to incredible. There are a few areas, however, where Joe will find not find it useable enough to adopt without significant motivation. Joe doesn't care enough about lofty ideal to switch to Linux. Cost can be, but since from Joe's perspective he got Windows free and installed with his PC and Linux is separate box of software he has to pay for and go through the hassle of installing, cost is actually against us here.

Two other major issues for Joe are usability and Software. How many software boxes on the shelves at Joe's local store? Say they run under Linux- of those, how many does he actually care about, and how many actually will run right out of the box on HIS install of Linux? This is a bit of tough one, as it's a chicken and egg problem. The Joes won't buy Linux because it won't run their favorite games and programs. The software Joe cares about are not ported / written for Linux because not enough Joes use Linux. Fortunately the increasing corporate adoption of Linux is helping here, as more and more people are exposed at work and find a need or desire to run the same software at home. This factor helped the original spread of the home PC. However, this alone may not be enough, and will certainly be slower than it could be. There are however things that CAN be done to help. And proselytizing random strangers like a religious cult is not it (kinda fun though isn't it:) ).

First of all, software has to install easily for Joe. He should be able to put the CD in the drive, click a single icon, and wait for the install to finish. Which brings us to DLL hell and the file system layout. It wasn't that long ago I downloaded an app of some sort, it required a newer version of some lib than what I had so I downloaded that and the libs. THAT required new versions. Now, of course, somewhere someone decided backwards compatibility wasn't important between version 4.5 (for example, not exact ver numbers) and 4.6 of some lib and a good chunk of my system became useless.

THIS IS STUPID! now if it had been from say version x.0 and version x+1.0 I could almost buy it if x is no greater than 2, but within a major number compatibility should be backwards-maintained.

Indeed, if a function in version x is to be replaced by an incompatible version in x+1, every effort should be made to keep the deprecated version as well until x+2 unless the release cycle is fairly slow. Another factor of dependency hell and install hell is package management. What's needed is an install system for apps, not for distros. Almost every windows app is distributed this way and it just works almost every time. Now you could argue there being only one distro maker for Windows makes this much simpler, and you'd be right. Doesn't change the need for it, though. It's my seat of the pants guess that if an installer that could handle the top 5-10 distros was built, and done such that others could adapt it to their distro's without breaking it, then that hurdle would be mostly dealt with.

Now I would like to bring up the Windows registry: good idea, poor implementation. Linux distros have their own versions in thier package management databases and config files also not an ideal implementation. I don't have firm ideas here except that claiming Linux's habit of putting many of the config files all in one directory with cryptic names isn't that much better than how Windows does it. each app really should have its own directory and subdirectories as needed. This has the added benefit of being able to provide a mechanism for handling dependency hell. Put the otherwise useless version of a lib in with the one app that needs it. Another thing to help break the chicken egg cycle is to help the guys developing Joe's favorite games and apps produce the Linux version as much as possible. Now, they won't give us the code to do it ourselves for obvious reasons, so it behooves us to develop the tools they need to do the job quickly, easily and painlessly as possible. I'm currently favoring the idea of a high caliber development environment for Linux that makes porting to Windows (and hopefully Apple) a simple, integrated matter.

This brings me to DirectX. This is very extensively used by game makers and does some very good things (though how well it does them I'll leave to others to comment on). Linux has many of the bits and pieces, but unifying them into a single consistent API would be a serious boon all around. This probably should be done with an eye towards portability to/from direct-x in keeping with the desire to get more games on Linux. Joe is also going to expect to be able to do familiar things in familiar ways. Now, I know some studies have shown that a modern Linux desktop is no harder to learn from scratch than Windows.

Guess what? It doesn't matter. That's right it's a pointless study. The simple truth is Joe probably already knows how to use Windows and after a few minutes of things not working like he expects he's going to call it stupid and broken and insist on Windows. Now this isn't to say everything has to be exactly the same as Windows, but where it's not fairly close it needs to be as obvious as possible. Pushing in on his mouse wheel shouldn't dump mystery text into the middle of that report he's trying to write. And if copies something from a browser window to quote in an e-mail, he should be able to easily paste it in without having to hunt through man-pages, online help, and use some obscure app as a 'way station' for the text. This brings me to the current us-vs.-them attitude with respect to Microsoft.

Frankly, I'm not Microsoft's biggest fan, either - they are the major dictator of what people can and will do with their home PCs right now. They have been convicted of illegal practices in court that hurt the consumer. I think most of us don't like them much for one reason or another. Unfortunately, this means to many: "no matter what, if Microsoft did it, it must be bad, evil and sloppy programing." Folks, If you refuse yourself tactics and tools simply because the enemy used them or used them badly instead of judging the tactics' and tools' merits themselves, you hand them the war. Microsoft has done a lot I and others disagree with, but they've also done a lot that works and works well, and we must not be reluctant to use what works - whoever did it - so long as we don't compromise real principles. I think making so many hate them so much we won't touch anything they've done without regard to merit has been a very successful tactic of theirs.

And for all the faults and shortfalls I've mentioned Linux has gotten lots of things right. ONE-reboot installs, (including base apps, drivers, GUI, desktop - everything!) for example, are in my mind a HUGE VERY GOOD thing. Now I'm sure some will say, "but distro x fixes that with app y"- well, good. Get it in as many distros as possible, or "but that's easily fixed, just go to /some/damn/dir/ and edit /this.idiot.file/ to include something.joe.won't.get.right.half.the.time". Well, if it doesn't work out the box, odds are it doesn't work as far as Joe's concerned.

And finally, anyone who wants to pick on my musing for grammar or English or some other minor detail (minor as in not really germane to the point) [or major as in making it unfuckingreadable - ed.] in an attempt to paint my arguments as invalid is free to do it elsewhere. If my poor grammar or spelling is honestly confusing my point or you then just tell me and skip the flames.

I'm not trying to start an argument or flamewar or any such nonsense and don't want it. What I do want honest discussion with the end goal of improving Linux, especially for Joe, because I like Joe, he's a nice guy and a good neighbor even he thinks assembler is that cartoon that replaced the Autobots on Saturday morning and thinks his current operating system is MS Works. Joe deserves better than Windows BSOD and virus-enabling systems and techie-only Linux. Joe works hard to support his 2.3 kids and probably has a retired parent in a nursing home and a relative in harms way a cop or firefighter or soldier.

Well that's all for this rough draft, and I do apologize for that roughness. I'll refine and add more as time goes on Hopefully this will get some good discussion with meaningful results started.

"Mycroft " June7, 2004

If for reason someone wanted to distribute this for free, with or without fixing my spelling and grammar, that's fine as long as otherwise it stays basically unchanged.

-- some kind ac cleaned it up a bit so I'm reposting this as hopefully more readable, especially since the line breaks and newlines were all screwed up compared to how I originally posted it (though the AC's version is cleaner still, thx) not mention it's old enough for /. to 'close' it.

Man, I tell ya. Some people need to lighten up around here. People are now modding down funny comments with the overrated tag. Of course I'm grousing because it happened to me (wasn't my best work, but eh...)

I know you're all raging with teenage hormones, and life isn't fair, and how come she gets a car while I get a computer, and so forth.... Geez....take a break and just enjoy some levity once in a while.

(Blatantly stolen off Boingboing)

Okay, now this is absolute bullshit. It's stuff like this that drives me crazy.

During the pledge of allegiance recital at school, a kid decided to recite the Star Trek Pledge of Allegiance.

Mind you - nothing vulgar nor inappropriate, in fact, the ST PoA is something that quite nicely encapsulates the spirit of humanity.

And what happens? The kid gets suspended and the kid's Mom gets called to school. Not to mention, the kid gets a punishment of having to write the pledge 50 times.

The Mom's got the story in her blog.

"So, anyway. What did he do?" I picked at the hem of my sweatshirt, looked just to the right of her face. I couldn't meet her eyes. I felt nervous. I felt underdressed. I wondered where 8 was.
 
    So she told me what he did. And as she told me, I started to laugh. I didn't laugh a little, either, but I belly-laughed and grabbed my stomach. My son stood with his class this morning, put small right hand over heart, faced the American flag, and recited his own personal pledge of allegiance:
 
    I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.
 
    "Mrs. Jaworski. This isn't humorous. The Pledge is an extremely important and patriotic moment each morning in the classroom. I am ashamed of your son's behavior, and I hope you are, too."

I'm at a loss for words. I hope that stupid principal and teacher get kicked out - if anything, that kid needs to be applauded for his spirit and creativity.

Damn!

I submitted this a while ago, but no idea if it has been accepted. Anyway, thought I'd preserve it here for posterity!

metlin write "A very crucial step in the procedure of decrypting today's commonly used encryption codes by Quantum Computers has been demonstrated by physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). According to a paper which was published in this month's Science, physicists at NIST were able to demonstrate a quantum version of Fourier Transform using electromagnetically trapped beryllium ions as qubits. This is a big step in Quantum Computing as well as its applications, since the quantum version of FT is the most crucial and final step in Shor's algorithm -- an algorithm for finding the "prime factors" of large numbers -- the prime numbers that when multiplied together produce a given number. Paper abstract available here."

Turns out I've been banned from home. No, it's not DHCP - it's a static IP, and one day I'm able to post and the other day I'm not. No particular reason, either - I had have two of my comments modded down, but then I had been modded up atleast double that many times.

So, I mailed moderation@slashdot.org. And what do I get? A blindingly brilliant and insightful mail from the Einstein reincarnate Robert Rozeboom -

"You have been downmodded too many times and are in timeout for a bit."

Wow! Hey, genius.

Anyway, I mailed him back telling him in extremely precise terms that I can post from elsewhere, just not from my home. Even though I've been modded up, not down, in the recent past.

No response yet. I wonder what else his blindingly awesome intellect is going to conjure up next.

I call you my son not cause you shine boy, but 'cause you are my own. You ain't too bright, boy.

It may just be the mood I'm in tonight, or perhaps that I've had one too many drinks, but I got lost in my thoughts while perusing through my kitchen cabinet, looking for a bite to eat. I found a can of cashews, and without moving the containers, found the hostname, planters.com. My eyes drifted to a box of granulated sugar -- dominosugar.com. I glanced upon an old bottle of wine I had stashed away after a long, good weekend with a great friend of mine, and found kj.com. I looked at a box of cereal -- kelloggs.com. They were even lost in some mid 90's time warp, saying something to the effect of "Look! We're on the Internet!"

It donned on me that we're not on the fringe anymore, in fact, we're not even just an alternate. In some cases, we're the primary communication mechanism. This is a major change in just 10-15 years. There has seldom been a change of this magnitude in brand recognition or customer awareness possibly in the history of marketing. In short, they're on to us.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Quite the opposite. After all, my previously superlative knowledge of the Internet and websites is something that allowed me to purchase my house and get financially established. It furthered my drive to learn more about the systems upon which I built these web applications for my employers and for myself and to understand at a low level what makes them tick and what people want and desire of them. It keeps me profitable today. But I'm also quite aware that I'm no longer a uniquity. There are countless kids coming out of high school even who have the skills and knowledge (if not the wisdom) that I have after 13 years of doing this for a living (if sometimes a quasi-living, but nonetheless). But it is simultaneously encouraging.

If this is the new world order, then my childhood passion and my adult decision to pursue this has definitely been the right choice. The concept of ubiquitous computing is something that endears itself to marketing schlock like this. Where ever there is a product, there is likely a need for the information behind that product -- where to find it, how it was made, who likes it. That kind of information greatly lends itself to information technologies, and although I may not be as up to date as the high school technorati, I'm at least aware that I'm on the right track.

But this is not about me. It's about the Internet -- a technology little known to the average person only 10 years ago is now found everywhere. You can't go anywhere, look at anything anymore, without finding a URL or at least a domain name on it. This of course exempts dated materials, like old books, or your dad's tools, or photo's your mom took of you in the 70's (assuming she hasn't scanned them all in and uploaded them to whatever picture-site-of-the-day is popular), but we're a throwaway society as it is, and it's, for lack of a better term, pervasive. I don't mean to say that as either positive or negative, but just that it is what it is. It's there. It's everywhere. It's unavoidable. It's sometimes annoying. It's sometimes disturbing (do I really need to know that Charmin has a website when I'm on the toilet? They seem to think so). The website has replaced the 1-800 number.

And way back, deep within some repressed part of me, it's sad. The answer isn't talking to someone, conversing my an actual person. It's reading a FAQ, or going to techsupport.emptybusiness.com. It's telling us "We can't be bothered with your request, please try to figure it out yourself". The exchange of ideas is there, but the face-to-face is gone. The picking up on facial expressions, and inflections in tone to understand more than words can express. We've evolved (devolved?) into a printed word society. And yet, I'm not immune that world. After all, you're reading this blog. You (and I) are part of the new world.

Mind you, it's not a problem, just....different. The rules aren't broken, but they're bending -- strongly. There's stress fractures on the old way of doing things, but we're coping. It is quite interesting to me when we, those so-called techno-geeks, get together to talk about things, and we are lost for words. But online, we are masters of an expression-rich environment. We express ourselves textually in a way that would make our 10th grade English teachers proud (my apologies to my English 10R prof -- I forget your name).

So what's next? We make do with what we've got, and we realize that we're only at the beginning of the Information Age. We've only begun to tap it's potential. It's both awesome and frightening in the same thought. The scene from "Minority Report" where Tom Cruise's character is being advertised to in the mall comes to mind. "We know who you are, where you are, and what you want. And gratification is but a step (click) away."

Welcome to now.

Apparently Slashdot has problems with people hitting their RSS feeds way too often, and taking too much bandwidth. So it seems that the site automatically monitors this, and cuts you off if you're causing problems. And it appears that my feed reader is causing those exact problems, forcing me to get cut off. Which reader an I using? Why, the Slashdot front page of course! screenshot here It's a crazy world we live in.

Gee!

Sometimes my powers of prescience startle me.

Just the one guy that I do not want elected Pope gets elected Pope.

Yeah, just what we need. Yet another hardliner right wing nut-job for a Pope. As if the world wasn't full of them already. Oh yeah, we need more of these folks. Absolutely. Yup.

I'll be surprised if the human race makes it very far.

Well, thanks to Ethelred Unraed for this one!

---

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

The Fireman's Manual.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Ayesha from "She", by H. Rider Haggard.

The last book you bought is:

The Egyptian Book of the Dead - (The Papyrus of Ani) by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge.

The last book you read:

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

What are you currently reading?

The Egyptian Book of the Dead - (The Papyrus of Ani) by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge.

Eight Lectures in Theoretical Physics by Max Planck.

Death of Chaos (part of the Saga of Recluce) by L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Five books you would take to a deserted island.

The collected journals of "Annalen Der Physik" - I'd die without having to do physics.

"The Bhagavad Gita", Hindu religious/philosophical codebook of sorts - every man needs to contemplate his existence :-)

"The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" - like EU said, everybody needs to laugh once in a while.

"Lord of the Rings by Tolkien" - what can I say? I've read this again and again and again since childhood, and it never seems to lose its charm!

Well, either the "Table of Integrals, Series and Products" by Gradshteyn and Ryzbik or "On The Shoulders of Giants" by Stephen Hawking.

---

Damn, didn't realize I was that lost a geek. :-/

Ah, yet another pristine example of the Slashdot groupthink.

For some odd reason, they cannot accept the fact that there maybe genuine folks out there who could use software patents.

Not to mention the fact that half the folks do not know the difference between patents and copyrights or the requirements and pre-requisites for getting the patent.

Nope, but we will however say things like, "I doubt you have ever been involved in a court case, never mind a patent infringement lawsuit." and mod-down those whom we disagree with rather than argue.

Bah, am just ranting. Fucking asshats.

But why oh why can't people see that there MAY be someone out there for whom something maybe beneficial? Perhaps it doesn't agree with your worldview, but that doesn't make it wrong.

Am serious here - am I the only one who seems to think that perhaps there is another side to things, too? It's disappointing to see one sided and biased arguments.

Okay, so a lot of you do know that am very picky about movie adaptations of books. So perhaps you should take this with a pinch of salt - but if you're indeed a big fan of Douglas Adams, I'd strongly advise you to NOT watch the movie.

I was in the theatre the other night to watch Constantine (which btw, was a good movie). And they show the trailer of the movie adaptation of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

It does not even look or feel anything like the books and a lot of it looks *SO* ridiculous that it grates on you. I could go on ranting about how they've changed a lot of things, but that probably doesn't make a difference -- what *does* make a difference is that they have made the humour very obvious and flagrant, almost like a standup comedy rather than the subtle PG Woodehouse-ish British humour that Douglas Adams was so famous for.

There are so many points that really are painful - Zaphod's second head comes upwards out of his tummy, Marvin looks *SO* ridiculous (white little thing), Trillian looks like a housewife and not an astrophysicist, Arthur is a short stocky guy and Ford Prefect cracks black humour jokes - if they can be called that. And they all talk in *AMERICAN* accents, for cryin' out loud. Vogons look like something George Lucas would create and the book is shown on a bloody LCD screen.

And the way the dialogues were rendered, nothing would make sense to folks who've not have read the book. While I do know that the movie did have Douglas Adams' blessing, am sure he's probably spinning in his grave.

Man, they're killing ALL my favourite works - Isaac Asimov, JRR Tolkien, Douglas Adams....

DAMN YOU!!!! Can't you guys just let the bloody books be? Can't you create something new rather than copying works of art and screwing them over? DAMN YOU ASSHOLES.

Update

Seems like I've been banned (yet again) for bad posting and am not even gonna try and do something about it. Bah. Maybe because a lot of my previous comments got modded down :-(

Will reply to ya'll when I get back my "Right to Post" (TM).

What do I even say to this one?

A couple of teen-girls decided to be nice and distribute cookies to their neighbours in an act of kindness. And they get sued.

The worst part? The neighbour who sued them won the case for medical damages worth $900. Just how rotten can we get?

Lesson, kids. Please do not be kind to neighbours. Or for that matter, anyone.

Update: Allen Zadr has written a rant on the topic.

You know, you ought to let people post on some of your more interesting journal entries. =)

The Thread

Well, I came home to India a couple of weeks ago to my home-city of Chennai, and it so happened that this is one of the places badly hit by the Tsunami.

While it is definitely sad that the whole Tsunami thing happened, the way aid organizations, world governments and others are handling this is really quite disgusting.

It's become a blame-game of trying to find whom to blame - and nobody seems to care about the facts and how to prevent such things from happening again.

The thing is that this region has never experienced Tsunamis before. I've experienced a few small Earthquakes as a kid on several coastal cities in India, but we've never had to worry about Tsunamis. And for the most part, Chennai has been protected by Sri Lanka which bears the brunt of most of the tectonic activity in the ocean.

So the government did not feel that an early warning system was economically justifiable (the exact words that they used) - until now. And now, they're trying to find people to blame for this whole event.

This is a natural disaster, and natural disasters happen. You cannot really do anything and merely warning systems will not suffice. One needs to tell people where to go and what to do.

Mere warnings will result in rioting and looting and mass panic, and would genuinely cause more loss of lives than no warning at all. We need a system in place which can really handle this through proper procedures, channels and processes -- not merely just a warning system.

I wish our politicians understood this -- now you can be fairly sure that for the next N years, any tectonic activity around the oceans will be considered as Tsunamis and there would be mass panic.

We also need to worry about another thing - the spread of epidemics. We're scared of approaching the beaches of Chennai for the simple reason that these places had (and still have) a lot of carcasses and the whole place is rotting. The government needs to take care that the areas are well protected from any unwanted spread of disease.

That said, one of my very good friends from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands got married in Car Nicobar. Her husband is in the Air Force and apparently an entire Air Force base has been wiped off Car Nicobar. I've not been able to get through to her or her family (who are in Port Blair). I can only hope they're alright.

Update: Well, to make matters worse Andaman & Nicobar Islands have been experiencing even more quakes and tremors, and that's been scaring people from continuing with the rescue/clean-up effort. And no news yet from my friend :-/