Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Educators know that Gates is bad for education (Score 1) 151

There was no competition

Actually, there was. OS/2 Warp, by many accounts, was superior to Win95 in every technical way. It even ran Windows software reasonably well. The major problem: it was never sold by OEMs bundled with PCs. You could buy it on the shelf and install it yourself, but most people wouldn't do that. And then later, the compatibility started to suffer as well, as the popular software (Office, IE) started using APIs that weren't implemented by OS/2. What OS/2 really needed was it's own software ecosystem (very similar to the challenges linux has today), but that never emerged.

Comment Re:It's not broken. (Score 1) 1154

*sigh*

I don't deny that there are certain usability problems with linux, and I don't deny that you have been frustrated at some point while using linux. But the problem with these types of discussions (this seems to be the third on /. in the last week) is characterized perfectly by your comment. Well, yours and the GP. One person claims that he/she is perfectly happy and nothing is wrong. The other says everything is broken and complete crap with no actual specific or constructive detail. Let's take a few examples from your post.

- In many cases it doesn't work out of the box.

What does this mean? What doesn't work out of the box? Is it a piece of hardware? Is it a piece of software? Is it a part of the UI? What are you talking about?

The reason this is important is because, depending on the specific problem, it may span from trivial to very difficult and likely requires different groups of people to be involved in the solution. A piece of hardware may not work out of the box. Well, there are a lot of approaches. Arguably the "best" solution would be to get that piece of hardware working, but for different reasons it may not be easy or possible (ex: hardware is complex to reverse-engineer and vendor refuses to support linux). So then what are alternate approaches. Well, picking your hardware more carefully is one. This can be done by the users, but is probably better done by the OEMs. Guess what? Almost every Windows or OS X workstation sold is put together by an OEM. They do the work to assemble the proper hardware and make sure it works with OS. If you try to install OS X on a random collection of hardware, or even if you just try to use a random piece of hardware with a mac (like a USB wifi adapter, say), there is a pretty good chance it won't work. Does that matter to most mac users? No, because they buy their mac from Apple, and all of the hardware they care about just works.
Summary: hardware support is a problem for every OS. The primary solution has been OEMs selling bundled systems. So with better OEM support, this wouldn't likely be a problem on linux either. Unfortunately, there is little the linux community can do to gain OEM support. The commercial distributions have had limited success in the past (ex: Ubuntu partnering with Dell), but it's still not great.

On the other hand, a different problem warrants a different analysis. Pulseaudio doesn't work? That is purely a distribution problem, and I couldn't agree more. Distributions should not ship broken software or software with broken configurations. I have been frustrated by this in the past, with many distributions, and have become much more conservative about my choice of distribution as a result.

- Their requests for help are met with instructions to apply themselves toward learning more about how the tool is/was made and toward improving the tool itself.

Who? Where? When? Why?

It's important to know where you are asking for help. Complaining about hardware support on the kernel mailing list will likely result in exactly the response you describe. Why? Because kernel developers are busy people often employed by companies like Red Hat to hack on specific problems. It is not that they don't want to help. It is just that they aren't there to solve your problems for you. They may not be able to duplicate the problem you are experiencing on their machine, or they may not have the hardware you are having trouble with. So they will ask you to help them diagnose the problem, by doing tests and sending them logs. They may send you a patch and tell you try it out. That is how the kernel list works. It is a list for the kernel developers to communicate with each other.

On the other hand, the Ubuntu forums are usually very friendly. You will find people there who will give you step-by-step instructions for a lot of things. I would find it hard to believe that someone on the Ubuntu forums would tell you to write some code and submit a patch upstream. Unlike the kernel developers, most of the people on the Ubuntu forums are there to help you solve your problems.

- The defaults are almost always wacky. No distro or desktop has really ever shipped with good (non-ideological/non-developer) defaults to this day.

Back to needing more specifics and more clarity. Which defaults are considered wacky or "developer-oriented". This is one where I just have to purely disagree, because I have been pretty happy with most defaults for a number of years (Ubuntu fixed most of these problems for me). The only thing that is somewhat lacking is multimedia, and that is really just due to licensing. In other words, there isn't much a distribution can do because it is illegal for them to distribute certain codecs or *ahem* dvd reading software in the US. So that stuff has to come from servers outside the US, and can't be on the distribution cd. Most distrubutions have made it fairly trivial to get the proper multimedia support after installation, but you are right in that it is not the default. Problem is, I don't think it can be, and I don't see how you can label it as "ideological-driven". There are ideological distributions, but they aren't all that way.

- Create a desktop kernel fork. Linus & co. are not in the business of writing/maintaining a desktop kernel. Their goals are larger (and smaller) than that. The desktop kernel can track the mainline kernel, but shouldn't adopt every latest ABI or other change—just do a major update every 3-5 years.

Not a good idea, in my opinion. First of all, there isn't much of a difference between a desktop kernel and a server kernel. There are certain problem with the kernel, in general, that disproportionately affect the desktop over the server. Believe it or not, but this has been debated and flamed quite a bit on the kernel dev list over the years. As of Linux 3.2, though, desktop performane (ie: responsiveness, latency) is pretty good, and I don't think there is much improvement to be gained by forking the kernel. Meanwhile, doing so would put you out of sync with kernel. Maintaining a kernel is a HUGE amount of work. There is a reason why most distributions prefer to, at a maximum, just apply custom patchsets to the mainline kernel. And you would be 3-5 yrs out of date with respect to hardware support and performance optimizations, which I don't think is good for the desktop. Part of the reason why desktop linux is getting better is because of changes made in the kernel in recent years (preemption, scheduling improvements, filesystem improvements, integration of things like KMS), so getting rid of all that just so you can have a stable ABI is worthless, in my opinion.

Comment Re:It's not broken. (Score 1) 1154

These are not people who equate ease-of-use with "pretty translucent buttons" either. These are people who just want to upload their photos to the desktop, edit them, organize them, and email them to friends, for example. Or type a letter, take it to the library and print it.

Please describe exactly what about those task was difficult. Because one of Ubuntu's primary missions is to make those kinds of workflows easy. And I think they do it pretty well. Shotwell for your photo example (works almost identical to iPhoto) and LibreOffice for your letter example. Only thing I can think of that might have inhibited the latter is needing to specify the Microsoft Word file format while saving, but I don't think that is too difficult to learn.

When people complain about linux desktop usability, they aren't usually complaining about tasks like you describe. Off the top of my head, the complaints I hear the most often (and I think they are reasonably valid) are software availability, hardware support, software installation, and system administration tools, usually in that order. People are usually first looking to run software they need or already know (Microsoft Office/Adobe Photoshop) and they usually have some complaint about the alternatives offered in Linux. After that it is usually some hardware that doesn't work (a multifunction printer or wireless adapter, for example). If those two are good, the next complaint usually has something to do with software installation, and this usually boils down to some software/version not packaged in the repository of their distribution. Finally, certain system administration tasks can be awkward or difficult to some users (like configuring the graphics adapter or managing the permissions of a directory tree).

So, yeah, there are some usability problems with linux. I think most linux users are aware of them. But the solutions aren't trivial.

Comment Re:What exactly does it do? (Score 1) 249

BtrFS has not been completed yet. ReFS is shipping. ReFS will not have all the features of the completed BtrFS, but for now ReFS offers features not available in any shipping Linux.

I don't think ZFS is production quality on Linux yet either. Storage Spaces under Windows is nor shipping.

I guess I should have qualified...many features are available and stable with BtrFS today, on Linux 3.2. If you need something more, like ZFS, it is available on BSD or one of the free Solaris distributions (if you're setting up servers, chances are you will be using a mix of the three). However, the architecture and intent of ReFS vs. BtrFS/ZFS is not really the same. And if we're talking about filesystems, one of the strengths of linux is access to unique special purpose fliesystems, like GlusterFS, NILFS, and XFS, if you have needs that are better suited by one of those. On Windows you really only have NTFS and I guess now ReFS.

Dynamic Access Control actually ups the ante for SELinux, grsecurity apparmor etc. While it still protects access to resources it does so based on potentially very fine grained policies which can express rules based on a very wide range of properties. And it brings claims based security all the way into the primary access control of an OS. Linux does not sport claims based security.

Ok, but let's see how it actually gets used. I don't know if you've actually ever used SELinux...there's a reason why almost no distribution ships with it enabled. It's a huge pain in the neck. Red Hat ships it with generic policies that kind of work, but don't really make use of its full capabilities. If you are storing military secrets, fine, but for most general purpose computing it just gets in your way. Creating even more fine-grained control just seems to me to be a feature set nobody will ever use.

Sure. I am not aware of any effort to bring something like VSS to Linux, though.

If you mean snapshotting, it is available in a number of different formats: at the block level (ZFS, NILFS), file level (BtrFS, OCFS2), volume level (ZFS, BtrFS, LVM2), and filesystem hack level (RSnapshot). I don't see what difference it makes whether it is a local or remote filesystem. It will work in both cases.

Yes, an automagic always-on, bi-directional VPN on steroids. No calling, no VPN client installations. Just take the laptop outside the perimeter and it is still connected, still secured, still managed.

Well, to be fair, you do still need to set it up. It doesn't just happen. The capability sounds a lot like IPsec to me, and this has been available on Linux for a long time. Windows too, but it seems they have added better integration with Active Directory.

Uhm, not quite. But unless you experience the new Server Manager you are not going to understand. It has this "declarative" feeling - comparable to controlling your network with declarative network policies as opposed to relying on scripts running on each node to set thing up.

Maybe you're right, I won't understand without actually using it. But based on your description, this sounds exactly like Chef. I would put this firmly in the "Microsoft playing catch-up" category, because this type of management has long been a strength on Linux.

Comment Re:What exactly does it do? (Score 0) 249

Ummm...?

* New resilient file system ReFS (think BtrFS when completed)
* Storage Spaces (think ZFS storage pools)
* Dynamic access control (claims and policy based access control). Think SELinux, grsecurity. Access control based on what application the user is running (sandboxing), from what type of device the user is accessing the resource, on other user attributes than security groups (e.g. who is the manager, what department does the user belong to etc), access control based on attributes of the file (e.g. classification, select words of a Word document)

So in other words, by your own description, things that you can already get in linux.

* SMB 3.0 - higher performance network transfer, transparent failover, SMB scaleout (multiple servers serve same shares and aggregates bandwidth), SMB Direct (efficient remote direct memory access), SMB Multichannel, Volume Shadow Service (VSS) for SMB file shares, SMB encryption, SMB Directory Leasing (negotiates and updates local caches of metadata over slow networks)
* Block sized data de-duplication

Ok, things linux doesn't have yet, but are on the way.

* Hyper-V 3: ethernet cable live migration (neat trick) lets you migrate VMs off one server onto another server over the network without the servers sharing anything. Many Hyper-V manageability improvements. Crazy scalability, e.g. a 63-node Hyper-V cluster runs 4000 concurrent VMs simultaneously. Hyper-V replica.

Ok, Microsoft's own hypervisor technology. To get this on linux you would need to purchase a proprietary solution, like VMware or Xen.

* RemoteFX improvements, e.g. virtualized GPUs (can use local or remote shared GPUs during RDP sessions), remote low-latency multitouch.

An admitted weakness in linux at the moment.

* Direct Access over IPv4. Think hassle-free VPN.

I really don't understand what this is. An automagic VPN? Doesn't sound all that special. NetworkManager has been able to do system-wide VPN connections for a while now.

* Server manager: Yes, a Metro (oops - "Modern") style management app for multiple servers. Integrates with response files and powershell workflow scripts to manage multiple computers (servers/workstations) at once - e.g. install new software, perform configure actions.
* PowerShell 3 with new features such as resilient remote connections (you can detach from a remote session and pick it up later/from another device), workflow scripts which can perform actions with suspend/restart/repeat semantics. No, not just "suspend process" - but actually persisting the state of a script to be continued later, e.g. after a computer restart (or from another machine).
* Thousands of new PowerShell cmdlets (many/most automatically derived from WMI providers) to control virtually anything on local or remote computers.

So the equivalent of what you can already do on linux with a combination of SSH, Puppet/Chef, and Screen. Admittedly an improvement for Windows, but this has always been a strength with linux.

All in all a meh, in my opinion. If you really have a need for the high-end features, perhaps Microsoft is offering at a competitive price. But otherwise doesn't seem to offer much that you can't already get with a linux, bsd, or solaris distribution.

Comment Re:Why do FOSS library folks hate ABI compatabilit (Score 1) 505

If you use something completely built into the operating system, it's easy. If you're using some kind of library, then you have to fuss around to make sure it's either staticaly compiled in or the .so or .dll or .dylib is shipped with your program. If it's not defined as part of the OS, you have to take care of it yourself.

Thank you. I was going to say exactly this myself. ABI-compatibility is a half-issue. Windows has some shared libraries that remain ABI compatible for years and others that don't. It wasn't very many years ago that Windows had ".dll hell", where different programs would install conflicting shared libraries and screw up everything. On OS X, (almost) every app ships with its own libraries to avoid the problem completely.

Bottom line: if you want to use dynamically-linked shared libraries on linux, it's very easy, and the advantage is you don't have to worry about distributing and keeping those libraries updated. The disadvantage is it is impractical to do this without releasing your source code to a distribution maintainer who can recompile and package it for you. If you need to keep your source closed, distribute it with its own statically-linked libraries. This makes it equivalent to Apple's "app bundles" and plenty of commercial software handles this just fine. Although, Ubuntu has been toying with their commercial partners repository for a number of years, and I can see them providing a "compile it but keep the source closed" service to software companies, but I don't think they do this currently.

Comment Re:Blames (Score 1) 505

That's true, but in the case of the browser wars, it was all about mindshare first, then market share.

Two things:
1) Mozilla was able to get a pretty good boost from IT departments that banned IE due to its security problems. While IE7 alleviated most of those concerns, it was a long enough window for many people to be exposed to Mozilla (to learn that it exists, to use it, to realize it works just as well as IE, and that IE is not synonymous with "the Internet").

2) Firefox, Seamonkey, Thunderbird, etc... are applications. It is not completely foreign, and for many people fairly normal, to try out various applications and find something that they like the best. Compatibility issues are usually minimal (exception: Office). So Firefox was able to gain a lot of mindshare by simply being better (faster, prettier, extensions, UI innovations). That just doesn't happen with the OS. First of all, compatibility is a huge burden. If it's not hardware, it is software that prevents people from trying something new. Second, an OS is a tool for running your favorite applications. As long as it does the job, people don't really see an OS for its own qualities. So linux can be better (in some ways it has been for a long time), but it will fall short in mindshare because software people want to run doesn't work on the hardware they own. It's just too technical to switch the OS, for the vast majority of computer users.

Comment Re:It's too bad (Score 1) 933

It depends on what that something is. In your grep situation, for example, I highly doubt there was no way to stop the command, or that a true lockup occurred. The separation of such commands into userspace is precisely to contain out of control processes. You maybe did not know how to stop the command. That is different from being unable to stop the command.

If you are programming drivers, or otherwise tweaking directly with hardware or kernel functions, you definitely can completely lockup the system. There is no way to conceivably prevent this. Some programmers need that kind of access, and with that kind of access comes the risks of lockups, race conditions, and data corruption, if you do something wrong.

Comment Re:Backwards Compatibility. (Score 1) 933

You definitely can't ride your bike on the freeway, but the analogy is poor anyway....

We're not going to use something that keeps "breaking" every 12 months.

Quite a bit of an exaggeration. Thanks to (mostly) sane versioning schemes, API changes that result in breakage are usually restricted to major version numbers (ex: Gnome2 to Gnome3) not minor version numbers (ex: Gnome2.10 to Gnome2.12). Major versions are usually not rolled out every 12 months, and when they are the previous version often continues to be supported for a while as a parallel installation (Gnome being one of the exceptions). No, the breakage on linux that occurs (or seems to occur, at least) frequently is not due to a lack of backwards-compatibility. It is due to pushing out hastily developed, incomplete, alpha quality software before it's ready (ex: Pulseaudio).

Firefox deciding AddOn "compatibility" wasn't important.

Do you have a reference for that? I know plenty of techies that still use Firefox, because AddOn compatibilty is not that important. I mean, how many "Download YouTube videos" extensions do you need? If there was ever any mass exodus of techies away from Firefox, it was due to Javascript performance and memory issues (mostly solved now), not AddOn compatibility.

65% of the entire market, despite it's high cost and "horrible underpinnings". XP alone still commands 22% of the entire desktop market, and I can still run most software released for Windows on it, and vice versa.

"Fucked up right from the ground" meaning that I can install 15-year-old software on it and have it run perfectly?

Combining your comment with another in the same thread because I'm lazy. Why do you need to be able to run 15 yr old software on your computer? Certainly there are niche cases, but on my desktop machine I don't have anything more than 2 yrs old and on my servers nothing more than 5 yrs old. Quite frankly, if you're running software that old, it's most likely because it's not being developed anymore, which creates more serious issues than library compatibility.

The problem created by backwards-compatibilty, in my opinion, is that it perpetuates laziness on the part of the developer. Adobe Photoshop CS5 was the first version to actually use the Mac OS X Cocoa API, five versions and ten years after the Carbon API was officially deprecated.

Comment Re:Another perspective (Score 1) 1218

My point is that even in the non-science courses where cultures are studied and religious aspects are talked about, Christianity is rarely studied, thus failing the neutral test.

You mean the history and english courses where a large amount of time is spent studying things like the Babylon captivity, the Avignon Papacy, the Spanish Inquisition, the Church of England, the rise of Lutheranism and other Protestantism, the Puritans, the Great Awakenings, the Amish, the Shakers, the Quakers.... No siree, no Christianity at all.

Comment Re:Oh, the delicious irony! (Score 1) 923

Sweden wants to question him...and that needs to take place in Sweden legally.

Citation please. Preferably from the actual section of the Swedish legal code that compels this.

It is called Arraignment,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arraignment

Happens after arrest and before a trial. Since the arrest warrant has already been issued, arraignment (where the formal accusation is made) is the next step. This isn't an investigation anymore. It has moved into criminal proceedings.

Don't have a citation from Swedish law, but it is the procedure used in many countries and likely Sweden as well.

Comment Re:Ohhh shiny (Score 1) 392

Apple pulled out because they now glue their batteries to the chassis, thus making the batteries and chassis non-recyclable

Not EPEAT certified != non-recyclable

Apple has had for years (and continues to have) a free recycling program for all of their electronics.

Slashdot Top Deals

HOST SYSTEM NOT RESPONDING, PROBABLY DOWN. DO YOU WANT TO WAIT? (Y/N)

Working...