off topic

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 04 May 2006 05:13, Michael T. Richter wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-05 at 22:49 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:


> > I for one would like to see him tone
> > down the cynicism a notch and share more of his expertise.
>
> I'd be less cynical if I saw less hypocrisy.  Hypocrisy like the
> same people who scream FUD anytime someone says something bad about
> Linux screeching hysterically -- and more importantly incorrectly
> -- about the flaws of Windows.  Hypocrisy like saying two things
> are identical except for where they're different, and then getting
> offended when that difference is highlighted and thrown back at
> them.  Hypocrisy like complaining to high heaven about the myriad
> of flaws in an operating system they don't even use (!) while
> acting like faeces-flinging bonobos when a person who is actually
> using Linux points out the flaws in it.
>
> So, let's make a deal.  The community at large gives me less reason
> to be cynical and I'll be less cynical.

Deal.

But I want a reciprocal deal too. See below.

> > It's
> > there, he just doesn't let it out to play with the rest of us too
> > often.
>
> Well, I don't have that much expertise in UNIX.  I hated UNIX on
> contact when I first encountered it.  I honestly think that the
> computing world was held back by UNIX's so-called "design".  (Scare
> quotes present because I generally don't consider layered kludges
> to be a design.)  I'm a devotee of the Stanford school of thought,
> not the New Jersey. (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html)

Ah, but the Standford lot are theorists, the New Jersey crowd are 
pragmatists and engineers to boot. Some (most?) of Unixes internals 
are so hopelessly "wrong" that they never should have seen the light 
of day. But it's exactly those wrongnesses that are Unix's success, 
and most engineers would give their eye teeth to have success like 
that. Personally, I usually design to Stanford myself, then end up 
building something New Jersey-like because the "right" thing becomes 
a major pita and the "wrong" thing a) works b) is understandable c) 
is portable and d) is maintainable.

Case in point: try-catch-finally in Java. It's obviously the best way 
to do it. Till you write Java code. 

> If someone has questions about ripping DVDs under Ubuntu, I'll be
> all to happy to help out there.  It's one of the areas I spent a
> lot of time on because of the confounded problem with my wedding
> video.  I have pretty much all aspects of that covered except for
> the final little problem of properly annotating the screen ratio. 
> That I still can't reliably do while ripping.  I'm working on it,
> though, and in the meantime I just manually switch the screen ratio
> when I play the movie.
>
> > Michael, I have a question for you: Why did you _really_ switch
> > to Ubuntu on your desktop and drop Windows?
>
> I ran across the "Trusted" Computing Initiative and saw that Vista
> was going to be a TCI platform.  DRM is, to me, a blight on
> essential freedoms -- freedoms far more important than whether I
> hypothetically have access to source or not.  (More clue-by-four
> time: free source don't mean squat to 99%+ of end-users.)  I refuse
> to accept the almost-literal hijacking of my computer by software
> vendors and content providers.  So I made the conscious choice to
> do without.

That makes sense. It's the same reason why although I have an XP 
install around here somewhere, Vista will never cross my front door.

> Later, as Ubuntu improves, I may even convince my wife to make the
> switch.  Not if, however, the howling gibbons who rise up at the
> slightest hint of criticism continue to have their way.

So here's the reciprocal deal I mentioned. Find a bit in Linux that 
impacts your life negatively, and that no-one else is working on 
much. Fix it to your liking, test it for usability using your wife as 
test subject, and submit it to the appropriate maintainer. Meanwhile, 
Windows is something from your past. Leave it there.

-- 
If only you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five