Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

From what I can see, it's not available in Off Topic section.

I personally think it's a bit arrogant to say that Flash is the downfall of linux.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

dunno. I see the [Edit] button on my own posts, so it knows I'm logged in. The only button I see in the bottom right of everyone's posts in this thread is the [Quote] button.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Yeah, probably Qwerty is right, there is a Thanks button in the other threads. (can't thank him though :D)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Nah.. http://xkcd.com/386/

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Most european state business is FOSS? What are you smoking?
Most european state business is Microsoft all the way.

Edit: hang on, do you mean the state business of the european union (which is what, a couple of offices?), or the business of countries who are a part of the european union (which is hundreds of thousands of offices)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

okay, you forced me to be semi-productive.


http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/sandwich.png

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

I had to lol at that one.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

well, google certainly. Wikipedia if they have done something on critical evaluation of sources, as it is hardly a source I would rely on!

But anyway, this newbie who is searching, he can find some great regular expression sites, true. How does he know that he has to look for regular expressions? It is not like the name gives it away.

In fact I would never recommend that a newbie tried to learn regular expressions, unless they had to do a lot of text processing.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Probably, but it helps understanding the universe too. :D

No, but how do YOU know about them? Lots of reading is needed whatever their idea. You can't expect to sit, ask two times in a forum and learn web development (for instance) without any reading. The problem is that its not that easy to learn the hard way. :)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

um... well, if it was, then it'd be the easy way. ;)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

I am a programmer. They have always been there, and I have always gone to great lengths to avoid them!
Now I know them enough to know what reference to look up when I need one (well, with a handy regular expression testing tool)

No, but you can expect to ask in a forum 'wheres a good place to learn about web development' without a bunch of people jumping on you because someone asked that question 3 years ago.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

There's a difference between trying to help yourself, failing then asking for help, and immediately posting a new topic for every little bump you run into demanding everybody jump to hand you everything on a silver platter.

What most of the people arguing for 'newbie rights' seem to miss is that it's the second one people object to. By and large, nobody here has an issue with newness. What people take issue with are rude idiots with unbelievable senses of entitlement.

Defend unpleasantness all you want, but I don't spend my free time here to encourage it. If you want to spend your time putting together custom solutions for every single unpleasant idior who comes through here, feel free, but don't tell me what to do with my time and don't be surprised when you get tired of it after a few months. Trust me, I've invested a lot of time helping people, and it grates on you after a while.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Thanks, General Antilles. Very well stated. (I'd have just clicked the Thanks! button, but this is one of those pages it isn't showing on.)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Hehe, Off Topic forum. It's just as well with all the sneaky, devious ways Texrat has thought up to use that evil little button. :D

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Of course there is.
I am not talking about people who demand help when they don't know something, I am talking about the people who ask a reasonable simple question that they have obviously been unable to find the answer to anywhere else who could be helped with one 'you could do this' post, who instead get a tirade about how stupid they are for posting when the answer was so obvious.

I didn't notice anyone asking for newbie rights anywhere (whatever that is) and obviously there is never a shortage of rude idiots, either new or well established.

Who is telling you how you spend your free time? Not me.
Personally if I find someone like that I find it reasonably easy to just ignore them then posting a load of useless scolding, but I am not one to tell you that you could be friendlier - that is your choice.

I have incidentally been helping people on forums and boards since the beginning of the 80s on various topics, and I know what grates. Just don't really think going on the offensive works well from any point of view

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

By the way, thanks for all the one star votes for this thread.

I didn't think it was a terrible first post, I tried to be very specific in my argument. Please don't vote a thread down just because you disagree with the opinion, or because you disagree with some of the replies. :(

If you're one of the people who gave this a one star, could you say exactly what was wrong with the original post?


Don't get me wrong, I wasn't attacking everyone involved with Ubuntu, I was merely highlighting the attitude of SOME of its proponents, because I was worried that this attitude was holding Ubuntu back. I personally love Ubuntu and recommend it to as many people as I can. It's incredibly easy to install and one of the most newbie-friendly products ever to come out of the open source movement. If you can use Windows, you can use Ubuntu, which is what's needed if we're going to get ordinary folks using Linux.

Obviously if Flash can't be fixed in Ubuntu then it can't be fixed, there's no point worrying about it. But that wasn't what worried me in itself.

What worried me were those who implied it SHOULDN'T be fixed, merely on the basis that it's a proprietary standard which didn't deserve anyone's attention. That kind of attitude seems very odd to me, as IMHO it's incompatible with the notion that Ubuntu should replace Windows in the mainstream market.

It's not a question of defending proprietary standards, it's a question of most users expecting common standards to be adhered to. Most users don't care if it's open source or closed source, all they want is that it works.

Just as an example of a similar attitude being damaging in another sphere:

Here in Finland we recently moved over to digital TV transmissions. A very large proportion of digiboxes here cannot cope with the official standard for adding subtitles separately, and as many programmes are imported this is a very serious problem. All the other networks solved this problem by including the subtitles in the original video signal, but the main network YLE clung to the plan of transmitting the subtitles separately. Even when it became clear that the separate subtitles weren't working properly, YLE just kept doggedly saying "it's not our fault, it's the fault of all these digibox manufacturers for not sticking to the agreed standard". No one was blaming YLE for the digiboxes breaking the standard, but they most definitely did blame YLE for failing to respond to this break in the standard the way the other networks did.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

hmm, what would a "reasonably simple question" acually be?

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Maybe that's the heart of the problem on support forums: one person's reasonably simple question is another's *****ic demand.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

I don't particularly care what the question is about, I'm worried about the attitude. If somebody comes in oozing entitlement and unpleasantness, then they're going to have trouble but on the other hand, if somebody comes in with a good attitude, asks nicely and indicates that they've at least put forth a little effort into trying to work out their issue then I'm more than happy to help.

It really has nothing at all to do with the questions themselves. How those questions are being asked, and whether the inquirer has bothered to put forth a little of their own effort to match mine, is the important part.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

A reasonable simple question I would say was a question you could answer with very little effort. And if you can't, you don't need to answer.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

That is reasonable enough, but how do you tell how much effort they have put in, and what is the right amount of effort to put in?

I will always put in effort trying to find out what I want but half the time in a new field that you are unfamiliar, the problem is knowing what you need to search for.
If you don't know what the problem is, how do you know how simple the question you are asking is?

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

"I searched, but I don't think I used the right terms . . .", or "I searched and didn't see anything . . .", or "I couldn't find anything on this . . ."

More than just clicking New Topic.

Try. That's all I ask. Try to help yourself first. If you fail, fine, but invest at least a little effort into it.

We already established that the simplicity of the answer is irrelevant. . . .

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Sorry about the space consumed by the following quote-train, but I think it's the best way to make this clear.Well, as I said above, if nobody wants to answer your question, you figure it out yourself; I guess my way of figuring stuff out (of the sort nobody wants to answer) is manual-intensive. Maybe I shouldn't assume other people solve their problems the same way. A few minutes of googling, if you are able to abstract a layer above where your purpose is, to what generic task is done by the tool you seek. You can also use apropos...

Maybe you feel that way, but I think a lot of very intelligent people don't know every detail of everything in their field, so I wouldn't expect you to know that. The best thing is not to know, but to know where to look. For repos, that's www.gronmayer.com/it/.Using apropos, mainly. But I will take the moment to pronounce myself an anomaly; Briand suggested a book, and I spoke to my brother over the weekend, and he thinks the grep man page is a great reference (indisputable) but a lousy way to get started. I dunno, it made sense to me; maybe I was a regex guru in a former life... in any case, regex was apparently a bad example.There is; that's what the man pages are. But if the following is your primary argument, I can't see what the level of documentation has to do with it, anyway.
Doesn't hold water; ever hear of Debian and slackware? How about Redhat, and these days Novell? The former are largely for enthusiasts; the latter largely for business applications. None of them are targeted at the same lowest-common-denominator market as Ubuntu. They were here first, and show no signs of dying.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Linux for the unwashed masses will ultimately be beneficial to everyone involved in Linux. Ubuntu is about making money with corporate support by first becoming a household name at home. So no need for disdain and elitism.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Not just a book. The O'Reilly book on the subject. ...and (IMO), that holds true for any subject on which O'Reilly publishes a book, in my experience.

In this case, it'd be this specific book from their catalog.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

heh, i think i should grab some of those ;)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Nothing 'hobby' about it, the Linux phenomenon has created large new possibilities in industry, companies have grabbed the opportunity to make and sell products on a scale not possible in the past, based on Linux servers. I know lots of people living well on Linux-created jobs, and a big part of my own income is also originating from there.

What often happens is that all these companies relying on open source software will dedicate some part of their effort to fix, adapt and improve the software, which is then fed back to the community (as most Linux software is GPL or LGPL licensed, feeding back to the community is the only way to legally distribute the OSS we work on). Among all the companies involved this adds up to a huge number of hours invested and paid for to OSS. And happily paid for, I should add. (And I'm one of those many who have done this kind of work, so I know it's for real :)).

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

No need for disdain and elitism of the infuriating populist variety, either; I was responding to a claim that "Linux for the unwashed masses", as you put it, was necessary, and I didn't deny it was beneficial.

@briand: Thanks for pointing that out; I caught it, but it was immaterial to that statement which book; my point was just that you did not recommend learning regexps from the grep man page, but somewhere else.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

I did that largely because the implementation varies somewhat, depending on which context it is used in. regex in grep != regex in perl, for example. There are some slight differences (and, they're covered in the above-cited reference/tutorial volume from O'Reilly), so reading the grep man page wouldn't necessarily help you gain a comprehensive knowledge of regex.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Bah! Anything not in grep(1) isn't 'regex', it's e.g. 'perl regex'! (NOT criticizing perl regexps, just insisting on righteous taxonomy...)

Hence my notion of grep(1) sufficiency, if (apparently) not optimality.

For other programs' variants, I'd tend to consult their docs, which usually winds up referring either to perldoc or grep(1). But I'm content to be good with generic regex, and look up other implementations as needed; anyone looking to "learn regex" is probably well served with such a comprehensive volume.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Oh, and since this is apparently the unofficial tangential xkcd link thread:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/lisp.jpg
Mouseover: We lost the documentation on quantum mechanics. You'll have to decode the regexes yourself.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/with_apo...bert_frost.png
Mouseover: Some say the world will end in fire; some say in segfaults.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Posix style regex is very limited, so i usually mean pcre when talking about regex :)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

if this really about flash compatibility, I have a 64bit desktop running kubuntu gutsy 64 and firefox has no probs with flash sites.

support is a joke on proprietary systems! I can still remember being on the phone for hrs with some techidiot trying to get my comp working. since I switched, no more phone calls for help. no more system crashes. the linux community for the most part (90%) is so helpful.

It bugs me when I hear/read a post like this. If flash isn't working it's because someone hasn't taken the steps to get it to work. Not a hard thing to do.

Too much variation!? Thats is the best part about linux! Variation fuels innovation! just remember not to use repos that don't support your distro. This is another great point for linux, you can't install some stupid piece of software that could possibly slow down or damage your sys.

one more thing. the rest of the world is switching to linux. 53 million desktops in Brazil educational system. After deploying linux in government they decided to do it for the schools. Several german cities have done the same. The french parliament has made the to linux. The EU has made software patents illegal. Last I heard, China has throwm MS out of the country and is working on Asianux linux.

Java is opening it's code and Adobe is taking similar steps (not open but accessible)

There is an idea that everything works otb with windows. Try installing windows with one disk and try to print a document or rip/burn a cd or watch a dvd or even connect to the web. Good luck.

Put a kubuntu live cd in and you can browse the web or use the word processor while installing. when installation is complete you boot into a fully functional desktop (except wireless in some cases).

when was the last time anyone had to recompile a kernel (yes, thats with two e's). I haven't done that in 3 yrs! Even then it was more for the experience. The linux kernel is well over 6 million lines of code. darn near every driver written is in there. So much harware is supported these days that , with a little research, you can get everything you need and not have to alter a system file or RECOMPILE a kernel!

BTW, how long did it take ms to make windows 64 bit compatible or multi core compatible?

Here is a little tidbit for ya, windows 7 will not be compatible with any previous windows software.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Hahaha. Right. Linux programs never get memory leaks or hog the processor. Hahaha.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

on the topic of perl and regexp:
http://99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-perl-737.html

cheers ;)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

And on the topic of macromedia's flash, linux support and web future in general:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles...rt_2_of_3.html
(it even cites the Nokia tablets...).

I am still thinking that the question is not wether "flash compatibility is holding back linux and oss in general", but "isn't trying to imitate windows reinforcing Microsoft's monopoly?". OS/2 tried to run windows programs and OS/2 is dead. Apple chose not to run flash on the iPhone (and is even actively preventing adobe to develop a player), and sites like youtube move their content from flash to open codecs.

So?

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Apple has too low market share to force Youtube to do anything. That's under a contract. And I'm not sure about the openness of H.264.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

ROFL at Benson's cartoons.

I remember teaching myself LISP. The days upon days of agony. The headaches. The trial-and-error-and-error-and-error. Then-- the EPIPHANY! The sudden peeling of skull from brain like an onion or ogre... well, something with layers anyway. Ah, what a beautious day that was! :D

And not one damn person for miles to share it with.

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

b-b-b-but, you shared it with us!


we don't care... but you did share it j/k ;)

Re: Is this what's holding back Linux and OSS in general?
 

Yes, because people are always happy to have people running up to them to tell them they understand LISP!

ok.. back away but keep smiling and maintain eye contact.