Disqus - Latest Comments for guzzie

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:35:51 -0000

crap, I always confuse your mother with the donkey - I meant to say arse. My mistake.

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 15:28:30 -0000

On corporate networks it doesn't really make a difference what system there is to keep data in and bad guys out. Corporate networks have one thing in common: they add small networks and systems to implement some department's requests - accompanied by small loopholes. In my current job I can access the *nix main Monte Carlo grid from the "welcome to X" touchscreen at the reception by connecting to an oscilloscope at the lab. Neither IT nor *nix nor MS is to blame for this, the culprit is the idiot from PR who wanted a shiny animated display for business suits to look at and decided that a trainee from HR should be responsible for what's displayed.

Re "nothing of value inside a regular user's account on a *nix server": The days when everybody had all his data in his desktop and accounts were centralised have long passed. Most corporations force you to take weekly backups and my data is sitting on 5 servers for the simple reason that although I can access all of the places they represent from my desktop, these servers can't inter-communicate directly for good reasons (example in my first paragraph) or won't because of incompatibility. There's also not really something like "a regular user's account on a server" ... there are a number of servers and what they store is literally everything. There's a small server for time-registration, a server for finance, about 4 for engineering, one for QA, ... and this is for one location. A 4000-employee with a dozen locations (a rather small corporation) can easily have 50 servers spread over the globe.

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:14:04 -0000

I'm going to give a brief overview of Linux in my own microcosm, criticism is welcome but won't help much. Not a lot of people have a career-path that matches mine. And criticism isn't going to change anything on what I've seen and experienced during the past decade and a half.

1. The corporate game
The problems fall under the umbrella "permissions". Let me clarify.
Most people (including IT departments, but I have muchos sympathy for those devils) assume that in a corporate setup the permissions reflect a departmental hierarchy. I.e. you work at department X, then you have access to x ... your job-description is Y, then your permissions are that subset.
Works perfect on paper.
In the real life, the employee has to take over someone's task for a small amount of time - no matter whether you're an engineer or maintainer for a storage facility where they stock the cubic meters of toilet paper and tubing. Very simple reasons: someone's sick/on holiday/got fired and you need the results or you're stuck for a few days. This generally means repeatedly calling IT for administrative support. In a company of 500+ employees the IT guys get bugged a few times per minute for this. They get fed up. They install systems on the server to slipstream the requests.

In large companies there are 2 kinds of servers: the linux-type and the MS-type.

The first have extremely bad general purpose interfaces with GUI concepts from when the birds went on foot. Each application has its own approach and set of bugs. Your colleagues share tips on what not to press. One colleague can even navigate the white arrow on a black screen because after all those times he knows where to find the button if the desktop flips out. The dedicated software for access to a location or a service is written in-house and results in having a page in your notebook with lines of scripting code and locations of other scripts with cryptic names. You don't know what they do and you don't want to know. Sometimes they brake and you end up at IT, you and a few dozen other colleagues. You go home early and return late the next day or take a day off.

The second type of servers have proprietary business software. You need access to a computer with IE or you vmware it. You follow the links in IE and fill in your credentials. You have access. They too get broken, IT reports it to their contracted supplier and you go get an ice-cream with your colleagues. An hour or two later it's fixed and everyone complains about MS.

2. The academic field.
There's a conference and oh-dear there's a workshop. You and a few others have problems installing that particular gnuarm. You and some others have trouble with curses. You and some others have problems with the USB for a piece of hardware kit they're demonstrating. Guess what you and some others are running.
A small group can't make it to a meeting and decide to have it on adobe connect or via the university meeting url. Guess which guys have to test it an hour in advance and which don't.

In a few weeks I'm switching back to XP full time. In about 6 months I'll be installing some new linux flavor and give it another go. It's what I'm interested in, I get frustrated as much as you guys but I like to fool around with software and hardware. I have the same relationship with yogurt.

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:18:10 -0000

As soon as I get it out of you mother's ass

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 00:13:19 -0000

Phew, that cleared things up. Unfortunately I'm stuck with kubuntu for a few weeks to come. Let's say it's a deadline, let's say that the "temporary decision" to work on Kubuntu turned out to be a bad idea. Let's say that migrating my code to my XP install has been evaluated and labeled as a bad idea because I'm lazy as hell.

Put up with the bugs, but spend your time whinging on blogs, until some FOSStard says 'go back to Window$ then!!11One'. At which point you get -- more -- disheartened and just go back to the Microsoft fold.

Will do !

I've been trying various Linsux distros on and off for a while now. My background is in asm (should give those that know what it is an idea of what kind of person is typing this), and my first encounter was minix. During the past decade and a half I've been working on just below a dozen distros in both academic and professional settings. The glazing has changed but the cake still tastes like old women's underwear. I'm still trying Linsux from time to time because it's fun to stop the verbal diarrhea of the occasional 20 year old Fosstard I encounter on my path to the grave.

Been in Vancouver once and you're right, the whales were better than the hookers.

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:01:39 -0000

correct! (sorry ranpha)

but how do you then measure the penetration ? By the number of downloads ? How do you take the number of people in account that dumped it after a few weeks ?

The tracker doesn't give a correct view in absolute numbers but it's useful when you look at it in percentages since they only count unique IP's per day.

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:43:32 -0000

one can edit comments, you just don't know how.

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:42:05 -0000

I suggest to wait 3 months and take note on the feedback of those consumers.

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:39:19 -0000

You also failed to factor in the 378 Windows Updates that XP demands that you get after a fresh install... taking approximately... a long damn time.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott...

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:21:37 -0000

an example re bugfixes:

I've been writing a document in OpenOffice for the past 12 hours. During a brake I put on some music in VLC (can't work with music). After 15 minutes I decided to close VLC, the window disappeared but the music continued. Not the first time, so I started htop to kill VLC. During the past few hours I noticed that my dual-core 2gig rammer had slowed down a bit. This is when I noticed ...

http://img391.imageshack.us...

hmm, 6 identical processes with each 225Meg reserved. Surely, can't be - the splash-pipe at the end of the process probably refers to pipelined data, and htop is showing it as if the data is there 6 times. So I looked up splash-pipe:

http://wiki.services.openof...

nothing about pipelining there, but it does state that the binary is forked. So my quest went on ...

https://bugs.launchpad.net/...

well what do you know ... I'm running KUbuntu 8.04 with OO 2.4 and the bug has been around since Kubuntu 6.10

Or am I misinterpreting something here ?

Re: Challenged

guzzie — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:02:16 -0000

It's a shame that this blog is focusing more and more on Ubuntu

Remove the "linux for humans" caption and I'll stop my whining on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the ultima thule of Linux ego-tripping and as long as they keep sowing this PR and backfiring updates they'll keep harvesting criticism.

Ubuntu is currently the biggest contender for pre-installation on new machines and you know as well as I do that this is a bad service for the consumer. The happy few percentiles that will embrace it will not outweigh the overall majority that will feel screwed as they payed good money for something that they can't work with. They'll realize that the few bucks they saved on buying a system with linux results in an added cost of buying the good OS full-priced a few weeks later ( or having to download it illegally ). You can bet your ass that linux pre-installs are going to result in a very, very bad after-taste for the linsux community once the average consumer gets involved.

Re: One bug report to rule them all

guzzie — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:24:53 -0000

This is reflected in the market share: the tiny amount of people using these systems are the ones who are willing to take the crap. The overall majority doesn't know how to program the microwave and will never last more than a few days on Linux.

Re: One bug report to rule them all

guzzie — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:12:27 -0000

My favorite all-time bug is the disk-killer
http://ubuntuforums.org/sho...

Re: Rants heard 'round the community ver. 10

guzzie — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:45:33 -0000

just wait till we're out of oil, vega. The pigs won't have trouble loosing weight then.

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver.4

guzzie — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:03:34 -0000

look, someone's reading the blog on the toilet.

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver.4

guzzie — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:02:20 -0000

c'mon dude, multitask. I'm baking spacecake.

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver.4

guzzie — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:03:21 -0000

On the video itself you see the same window on the taskbar of all four desktops simultaneously.

One of the other things you see on "the video itself" is glitches. I have them in Compiz too and it compensates your organized overview with a nice headache after working with it. Another thing I experienced with this eye-candy is a flash of blackness, followed by pieces of the programs disappearing (mostly the top meny bar). Also, they have the tendency to lock up the screen after x amount of hours.

I know, I know, it'll get fixed.
You know, you know, that's a lie.

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver.4

guzzie — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:18:26 -0000

Wowowow ... enough with the BS. For once ... and I really mean "for once" that there's a blog which will attract absolutely zero women... take the opportunity. Sexist is goooood. Ever since we extended the collar on those funbags the world has been taking dive after dive. We should've stopped after we gave them the freedom to choose the store to do the shopping. Have a wank, not a woman in sight when you're talking about linux.

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver.4

guzzie — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:01:53 -0000

To add to that: most if not all notorious open-source projects are commercial products that have been disclosed.

And there's also this strange notion that running an MS System is mutually exclusive with open-source. The strange thing is that the most reliable parts I've seen in Linux desktops come from closed software ... and the best open-source SW you can get are those which can be run on Windows. Strange.

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver.4

guzzie — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:54:42 -0000

It's strength in numbers, something you see constantly in the FOSS community: the common voice constantly yells out clichés and conspiracies, but when shouting back you're just talking to a few individuals. It's this blog's raison d'ètre. By the time everything is settled ... we'll have a PDF to show that it's all happening again :P

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver.4

guzzie — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:46:36 -0000

There really needs to be someone ...

... or something: I see few carrots and no sticks. That model worked pretty ok so far.

Re: Lusers make me laugh ver.4

guzzie — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 05:41:26 -0000

that's basically cloning OS X, which is a good thing IMO

Could you elaborate on why it's good to put energy into cloning something which has been branded as excellent ? IMO you either work on something better or you try to come up with something better.

Re: Foxnews^H^H^H^Hconn conspiracy

guzzie — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:46:42 -0000

Why would Konqueror need too? Does it actually affect Linux?

Ok, just re-installed FF on the same Kubuntu ... and it shows the warning. Apparently it needs to show the warning. Apparently linux is affected.

Trust me on this: the world isn't waiting for a Konq port to windows.

Re: Foxnews^H^H^H^Hconn conspiracy

guzzie — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:41:39 -0000

You linux geeks are all so proud having choice

Linux desktops are actually a restriction on choice. The amount of linux software I can run on windows is close to 100%. The amount of Win software you can run on Linux ...

Re: Foxnews^H^H^H^Hconn conspiracy

guzzie — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:20:53 -0000

Excellent: Konqueror in Kubuntu 8 doesn't catch it. Windows does.
So why don't I use FF in Linux ? Because the Flash doesn't work Freetards.

Things I probably won't do today: file bug-reports for Konqueror