Novell Desktop Linux 10: getting closer to a toss up between Linux & Windows?

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:39:33 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:42:04 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

Imagine a screwdriver, JUST A BLOODY SCREWDRIVER.

If that's the best analogy you can come up with, uh, it's a loser. I have
a perfectly good screwdriver that's over forty years old. I certainly
don't have a computer anywhere near that age; perhaps 1/8 that.
mm so, i have read your usual critism of WORLD and will as I please
air some of my own.

By my guest. You will, umm, air out your dirty laundry anyway.

So 40 year old, no money to buy a nice new one?

Oh, I have probably fifty screwdrivers of all varieties. I don't use them
much though.

Since I've gone electric I rarely use manual screwdrivers for much mroe
than opening paint cans.
But you do not do electronics obviously, or ever tried to fix a watch..
You know these nice instrument screwdrivers....

I do quite a bit of electronics (it's my profession - hardware engineer)
and no, I don'e even own a watch. I can't wear them, so there is no
point.

My 12YO 12V Makita driver-drill is about at the end of its batteries
(it's been more or less replaced by a 14.4V Porter Cable), but it still
works. Batteries are too expensive so I bought a new driver.
Bus driver?????

Wow, you are stupid. Screw, perhaps?

If there is a similarity to computers, this is it.
Nope, wrong again....
Screwdrivers are long and thin, computers are big boxes.

What a maroon!

As Tony
has pointerd out, parts are too expensive.
Depends, floppy drive is 10$, DVD drive 50$ or so here....., monitor
250$, keyboard 10$, mouse free with a box of chocolates.... ;-)

Try supporting a 1,000 (or 100,000) employees with your junkbox parts.

Funniest thing, my (new) neighbour (well the one who bough the house
just a bit around the corner... he had one of those pneumatic
hammers...

Yep, I have three and will likely buy at least two more this year.

You want ??YOU?? want to look superior,

Nope, just pointing out that there are tools for every job. If you want
to do the job, buy the tool.

not me,

Yes, *you*.


problem with you Keith
is that you are a little screamer with too much money and opinion and
too little knowledge where it counts.

Really? From you, that's quite a compliment! Naw, you looked in the
mirror and got scared. Pneumatic hammers do things that are quite
difficult to do with standard hammers (thought I have several of them
too). You don't see professionals swinging hammers much anymore.

We

You got a mouse in your pocket? ....what a maroon!

all already figured that out
from your previous replies. Have you ever written an OS Keith, no you
have not. How many applications do you have out there for Linux as GPL
Keith? Howe many of those did you have to do user support for for let's
just say BSD Linux Suse, redhat, Debian Mandrake and quite a few other
Keith?

I'm not a programmer and never want to be. I'm a hardware developer.
Software is only there to sell hardware.

I'd say come and talk again when you have. As to you using 'a' PC that
needs 64 bit ?? to do some job faster, sure, there are (for example
technical) cases (for example running a FPGA syntesize) where that would
be nice.
Specially when you are really bad at it and need to do it 30 times to
get it right.
But that is NOT the normal 'office' job.

....and writing yet another newsreader (that only one person
on the planet uses) is? Like it or not, command-line doesn't make it in
the "normal 'office'".

So the point of your diatribe against GUIs is that some people
shouldn't
be allowed to use computers? That is, if one uses a GUI one shouldn't
be *allowed* to own a computers?

Last time I delivered a 'turn key' system (running Linux) I spend 2 days
instructing the users... Had one phone call and one telnet session to
remotely fix a problem....
Yes there is a GUI, but all they use it for is scripted, with menus,
applications written with xforms, small fast and GPL. No overhead. And
to explain how to use fvwm with 8 xterms took an hour. And solved
........ help desk calls....

Ah, so even you write GUIs that you hate so much. Why is that? Perhaps
because they're needed?

You need to learn people to do the right thing. You should NOT addict
people to the wrong thing, then they are always depending on YOU. And
this is what I mend by 'customer binding, 'market protection'.

Such a Europeon attitude; "I know what's good for you, better than you."

LEARN people the basics of Unix, and they can fly. Learn them how to
click on a GUI and they STILL have no clue after 15 years what they are
actually doing or what a computer or processor is.

In most cases they don't care or want to know what is happening under the
covers. The typical office worker shouldn't care what's going on under
the GUI. I don't really want to know. I just want it to do what I told
it to do.

To teach them Unix is not a really big job, it is in essence simple.

Please. TO a non-technical person it's an insurmountable learning curve.
I'm a technical type and really don't want to know. Just do what I want.

But those who build sand castles on it, and teach people sand castles
-those should know- when the sea comes in, all will be of the past.

I personally believe in the sanity of people as far as they have not
been misinformed by others...the GUI has become a religion... for them.

....and a contorted command line and *IX is your religion. So be it. If
you want to sell to them, better supply what they want. ...and that is
*NOT* Unix instruction.

I hope you can see that when you have 6000 commands that it makes no
sense to have an icon on the desktop for each one, or have a pulldown
memory structure to access these n a normal size normal resolution
screen.

If you have 6000 commands that need to be mastered to use your software
you have a far larger problem than rearranging deck chairs.

GUI is nice for some stuff, but think, our language has thousands of
words. Most of the time you know what you want 'pizza, cola, car, house,
yes even electric screwdriver, sex, money, etc etc,' so let's make a
menu. Now we want a submenu for pizza pepperoni, fungi, salami etc...

Good idea. I don't want to have to remember esdxwr -lg 6 -tp
plps_2 to reach into my toolbox for a #2 phillips tip on my electric
driver.

I hope you with your superior intellect can see that it is so much
simpler to USE THE LANGUAGE WE ALREADY HAVE (caps are free on my PC BTW)
and say: pizza mozzarella.
And here it pops up.

No, I don't. Ever notice that the keys on McDonald's cash register
have no letters or numbers, only pictures of food? You supply the
tools a customer wants.

Of course that expect you to have leaned reading and writing, know pizza
types... and thus probably excludes large parts of the world, but those
would not be using the PC anyways but chasing rabbits in the wild... so
for the rest it is faster then a GUI -either via icons or menus-.

The simple *fact* is that a GUI is faster for tasks that aren't done every
day. Frankly, I don't have the time to learn a new command line and
hundreds of switches for every tool I use. When forced into command
line (when a GUI isn't available or is particularly horrid) I end up
writing a one-line script for every variation I'll likely use. Then it's
"only" a matter of remembering which one does what I wanted to do. This
is *not* better than a usable GUI.

snip - no more time

--
Keith

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:47:11 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:56:54 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 20:47:43 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 3 Feb 2006 12:24:58 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :


It seems SuSE thinks playing DVDs is immoral.
No you just type this in an xterm:
mplayer dvd://[title]

Command not found.
So no mplayer in suse-10.X???

9.0

I have it removed now, but the disk still here....
If it was true (did you install it with all addons?) then it just PROVES suse-10 is a monster,

No it proves nothing, since I'm not using 10.0.

even the most basic grml ( www.grml.org ) comes with the latest mplayer, and that is only one *CD* image,
not 6 CD like suse.

One DVD.

So maybe you need to upgrade Keith ;-)??

I may upgrade to SuSE 10.0, though I have unanswered questions (some
asked here) to satisfy before I spend the time.

--
Keith

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:39:33 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:42:04 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

As Tony
has pointerd out, parts are too expensive.
Depends, floppy drive is 10$, DVD drive 50$ or so here....., monitor 250$,
keyboard 10$, mouse free with a box of chocolates.... ;-)

Is this an act with you -- having to have it spelled out in excruciating
detail -- or are you really that thick? It's not the "part" in itself
that's expensive - it's the IT infrastructure you need to keep on hand to
do diagnostics, replacement, reinstalls, etc. etc.

I'd say come and talk again when you have.
As to you using 'a' PC that needs 64 bit ?? to do some job faster, sure,
there are (for example technical) cases (for example running a FPGA
syntesize) where that would be nice.
Specially when you are really bad at it and need to do it 30 times to
get it right.
But that is NOT the normal 'office' job.

Unfortunately the vast majority of "normal 'office' job" is tied to use of
M$ apps, file formats and data base storage. Live with it.

So the point of your diatribe against GUIs is that some people shouldn't
be allowed to use computers? That is, if one uses a GUI one shouldn't be
*allowed* to own a computers?

Last time I delivered a 'turn key' system (running Linux) I spend 2 days
instructing the users... Had one phone call and one telnet session to
remotely fix a problem....

Good luck selling your "turn key" system (do you really know what that
means ?) to a corp which is "standardized" on M$ applications and formats
with SQL Server and wants a Web-based interface.

The $100 laptop will get here when there is a government somewhere willing
to subsidize the other $400.

It will not be made in the US but looks like Taiwan now.
They will make profit at 100$

What utter bull****.

Keith
As agreed earlier Keith is a special case.
We will never agree on anything likely, probably even on the fact that we
will never agree.
How can one disagree with that?
Keith will tell us ;-)

Add me to the list and, judging by your other comments on teaching the
world 6000 Unix commands, everybody is out of step except for you. Ye'r
****in' into the wind son - ye'r gonna get wet and ye'll smell bad.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Feb 2006 17:17:09 -0500) it happened George Macdonald
wrote in
:

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:39:33 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:42:04 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

As Tony
has pointerd out, parts are too expensive.
Depends, floppy drive is 10$, DVD drive 50$ or so here....., monitor 250$,
keyboard 10$, mouse free with a box of chocolates.... ;-)

Is this an act with you -- having to have it spelled out in excruciating
detail -- or are you really that thick? It's not the "part" in itself
that's expensive - it's the IT infrastructure you need to keep on hand to
do diagnostics, replacement, reinstalls, etc. etc.

Save me your petty insults and incompetence.
It MUST be incompetence if you think you need an 'IT infrastructure' to replace
a mouse.
Get a life, if not you will have to carry on like that.
What a pain it must be :-)

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Feb 2006 11:36:29 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

No, I don't. Ever notice that the keys on McDonald's cash register
have no letters or numbers, only pictures of food? You supply the
tools a customer wants.

Of course that expect you to have leaned reading and writing, know pizza
types... and thus probably excludes large parts of the world, but those
would not be using the PC anyways but chasing rabbits in the wild... so
for the rest it is faster then a GUI -either via icons or menus-.

The simple *fact* is that a GUI is faster for tasks that aren't done every
day. Frankly, I don't have the time to learn a new command line and
hundreds of switches for every tool I use. When forced into command
line (when a GUI isn't available or is particularly horrid) I end up
writing a one-line script for every variation I'll likely use. Then it's
"only" a matter of remembering which one does what I wanted to do. This
is *not* better than a usable GUI.

Hey I agree with a lot of this.
As for Mc Donalds do you think you can get them to upgrade the cash registers
to more expensive ones with 3D moving burgers?
Is not that what Billy The Gates wants to sell next?
And of cause customer will have to sign a 'will not copy hamburger' slip each
time (DRM).
And pass a fingerprint ID test.

Yes, in the case -in fact in many cases- there are only a few choices, and
those icons for salad etc shakes are likely just scripted too.
Yes that is turn key.
So you are a hardware developer, well so am I.
I am a software developer too.
Your chance to learn something.
Actually a hardware developer at least in this world I live in, needs to be
able to write in many asm languages, C, C++ perhaps plus some scripting.
The turnkey I was talking about is selling electronics controlled by PCs
running yes: Linux.
So I take it then that your are a IC layout jockey, yes that is hardware,
but a small small part of it all.
I only have some FPGA experience, not with chip layout stuff at all.
So .. and the physics of that is also beyond me.
I can live with that.

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Feb 2006 11:45:57 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:47:11 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:56:54 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

On Fri, 03 Feb 2006 20:47:43 +0000, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Fri, 3 Feb 2006 12:24:58 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :


It seems SuSE thinks playing DVDs is immoral.
No you just type this in an xterm:
mplayer dvd://[title]

Command not found.
So no mplayer in suse-10.X???

9.0

I have it removed now, but the disk still here....
If it was true (did you install it with all addons?) then it just PROVES suse-10 is a monster,

No it proves nothing, since I'm not using 10.0.

even the most basic grml ( www.grml.org ) comes with the latest mplayer, and that is only one *CD* image,
not 6 CD like suse.

One DVD.

So maybe you need to upgrade Keith ;-)??

I may upgrade to SuSE 10.0, though I have unanswered questions (some
asked here) to satisfy before I spend the time.

I have 9.3 (think it is) .
mplayer is at:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design7/news.html

I am pretty sure suse-9.3 has mplayer (find and install via yast perhaps)
whereis mplayer
or
locate mplayer
or
apropos mplayer
or
man mplayer
or type
mplayer


But if not get the latest one 9and ffmpeg) from the above lionk.
The other good player is xine,
www.xine.org.

On Sat, 04 Feb 2006 14:15:16 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:
So what is a 3-year old computer? For most companies that would be a
Pentium4 2.4GHz processor, 512MB of memory and a 40GB hard drive. If
this is your "low-end" system, you usually don't have to worry too
much about KDE or Gnome bogging things down. I run KDE on a similar
setup and it's pretty darn speedy.

All good and well, and those arguments make sense about old PCs, but that
is not the issue.

Imagine a screwdriver, JUST A BLOODY SCREWDRIVER.
You need one, but now all you can buy is an electric battery powered 5 gear
ultra high torque hyperspeed huge monster.
Sure, there are applications for that, but many more for the simple
screwdriver.

There's nothing wrong with using the right tool for the right
application, and that's just the point. Why should someone limit
themselves to not using a GUI just because they have really outdated
hardware that is costing more money then replacing it would?

Well, I compiled the new QT-4 2 days ago (You know that is what KDE (and open
suse) is build on.
It took several hours on a Duron 950, just for me to find out that is totally

A Duron 950 is a rather outdated system these days (probably around 5
years old). You might be fine using it at home or in a small business
if you're doing all your own IT work, but in a business where you need
to pay for IT systems of that era would cost you an arm and a leg to
support as compared to buying new systems.

different (making a new system) and incompatible with everything (other older
Qt applications) like for example the kernel xfonfig.
Just got 2.6.15.2 running now...... (menuconfig).
So all that new QT gives (check the demos) is some playing with graphics.....
layout...
Not worth the *****B*L*O*A*T*****

So why the heck did you upgrade?! I'm not advocating upgrading for
the sake of upgrading, I'm saying that people shouldn't be limiting
themselves to old applications due to the capabilities of their PC
when a newer one will add capabilities that will make them more
productive.

See, you claim about cost of PC maintenance contracts..... you seem to need P4
3.2 GHz dual core for email...
Sure most offices do NOT run video editing suites like I do!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No, you need a system that is covered under a warranty because support
costs for desktop PCs are roughly 3-5 times as much as their upfront
purchase cost.

All Suse desktop does is ape Billy's windows.
If you want to start an application you have to work through menus.
If you want to INSTALL something (from DVD) you have a select 'Yast' that
takes ages to 'update and read database'.

Take a simple xterm, one virtual screen in fvwm.
You want to save money in your office?
See, there are a thousand or more
(
bash I hit tab 2 times)
Display all 6696 possibilities? (y or n)
)
programs -or commands I'd rather say- already on this NEW system (now up 3
days), if you want 'something' to run, you type in an rxvt:
something

If that's what you like then fine, but you have to realize that you're
ALWAYS going to be a VERY small minority. For the VAST majority
(read: 99%) of the world, this is going to be MUCH less efficient then
going through a GUI to find what they want most of the time. Only a
few crazy masochists are going to even try to learn even a fraction of
what all those applications are going to do, so spending the time
searching through the man pages to figure out what they need is not an
efficient use of time.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:46:27 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Feb 2006 17:17:09 -0500) it happened George Macdonald
wrote in
:

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:39:33 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:42:04 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

As Tony
has pointerd out, parts are too expensive.
Depends, floppy drive is 10$, DVD drive 50$ or so here....., monitor 250$,
keyboard 10$, mouse free with a box of chocolates.... ;-)

Is this an act with you -- having to have it spelled out in excruciating
detail -- or are you really that thick? It's not the "part" in itself
that's expensive - it's the IT infrastructure you need to keep on hand to
do diagnostics, replacement, reinstalls, etc. etc.

Save me your petty insults and incompetence.
It MUST be incompetence if you think you need an 'IT infrastructure' to replace
a mouse.
Get a life, if not you will have to carry on like that.
What a pain it must be :-)

In a company of more than ~10 people, yes you DO need some form of 'IT
infrastructure' to replace a mouse. Or do you want your employees to
spend their working hours driving to the store to buy the mouse
themselves? Many employees could easily be costing the company $100
to go to the store just to pick up a mouse because theirs went bad.
And that's your best-case scenario. What happens when a power supply
or motherboard goes bad on your out-of-warranty computer?

You might not need a BIG IT department, it could well be just one
person that does this as only part of their job, but in anything other
then the smallest of small companies you need SOME kind of IT group.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca

On Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:09:48 -0500, Tony Hill
wrote:

On Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:46:27 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sun, 05 Feb 2006 17:17:09 -0500) it happened George Macdonald
wrote in
:

On Sun, 05 Feb 2006 13:39:33 GMT, Jan Panteltje
wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 04 Feb 2006 11:42:04 -0500) it happened Keith
wrote in :

As Tony
has pointerd out, parts are too expensive.
Depends, floppy drive is 10$, DVD drive 50$ or so here....., monitor 250$,
keyboard 10$, mouse free with a box of chocolates.... ;-)

Is this an act with you -- having to have it spelled out in excruciating
detail -- or are you really that thick? It's not the "part" in itself
that's expensive - it's the IT infrastructure you need to keep on hand to
do diagnostics, replacement, reinstalls, etc. etc.

Save me your petty insults and incompetence.
It MUST be incompetence if you think you need an 'IT infrastructure' to replace
a mouse.
Get a life, if not you will have to carry on like that.
What a pain it must be :-)

In a company of more than ~10 people, yes you DO need some form of 'IT
infrastructure' to replace a mouse. Or do you want your employees to
spend their working hours driving to the store to buy the mouse
themselves? Many employees could easily be costing the company $100
to go to the store just to pick up a mouse because theirs went bad.
And that's your best-case scenario. What happens when a power supply
or motherboard goes bad on your out-of-warranty computer?

Yep, and even for the "bad" mouse, it might just be a symptom: could be
that some idiot unplugged a PS/2 and replugged with the power on and blew
the interface or mbrd fuse; I've also seen where a hamfisted user buggered
the mbrd mouse socket by forcing it - 10mins poking around with a push-pin
umm, fixed it.:-)

Just last week I had a server which was hanging because the chipset fan was
stalling and replacements are impossible to find retail -- a 30mm buried
frame fan?.. d'oh -- FWIW MSI sent me three new heatsink/fans just based on
an e-mail with serial #s mentioned... and this is supposed to be a
"part-time occupation".

You might not need a BIG IT department, it could well be just one
person that does this as only part of their job, but in anything other
then the smallest of small companies you need SOME kind of IT group.

The current fad seems to be outsourcing but I wonder about that - I've
heard some horror stories and eventually it can still pay to have someone
who knows details of the local network/computing infrastructure.

--
Rgds, George Macdonald

On a sunny day (Fri, 10 Feb 2006 02:09:48 -0500) it happened Tony Hill
wrote in
:

If that's what you like then fine, but you have to realize that you're
ALWAYS going to be a VERY small minority. For the VAST majority
(read: 99%) of the world, this is going to be MUCH less efficient then
going through a GUI to find what they want most of the time. Only a
few crazy masochists are going to even try to learn even a fraction of
what all those applications are going to do, so spending the time
searching through the man pages to figure out what they need is not an
efficient use of time.

I pointed out SEVERAL times that I use fvwm a nine page pager, and that
gives one screen with icons and 8 with xterms.
So I have the good of both worlds.
And fvwm does not re-arange icons either like my win98 did.

As for the 'newer PC is better' or 'newer OS is better' it total nonsense.

I am testing Linux 2.6.15.2 , the 2.6 kernels have no longer OSS for the sound,
and yesterday it locked on audio DMA and I had to power down.
The kernel performance sucks relative to 2.45 kernel, the dvb driver sucks
and NOTHING new that is of ANY use I have come acrosss.

That is Linux, I'm sure Billy's windows is similar.
Not even metioning all the 'services' that run, power management that
does not work correctly, yes Linux sucks a lot in 2.6, maybe I will write my
own OS, getting tired of rewriting apps for each Linux kernel....

So new or faster PC usually only means use more power for the same thing
these days.
Well I do not care YOU pay your electricity bill I hope.

You do not read man pages?
What do you use a PC for then?
To click on mediaplayer to watch porn only?

This issue is that ONLY A MASOCHIST SEARCHES IN MS MENUS just to find it is
not in the sub-sub-sub-subs0ub menu(ater it flipepd back several times, so retry nnn),
while yiou KNWO the program is called 'mplayer' and you CAN type.
So mplayer mymovie.avi is SOOOOOO much faster.
And if you want bells and whiteless you type man mplayer.

You are free (if you do not like the word mplayer) to make a script or link
and call it 'm' too.
'm' is stil lfree on my system I notice, so hehe jus tdo not type 'rm'...
When youcan no longer take it be brave and do rm -rf /* and go watch baseball
or play with the cat .