TOT as usual: train spotters

On Dec 15, 5:08*pm, The Real Doctor wrote:
On 15/12/11 16:18, ian batten wrote:

ESR attempted to claim in the 1990s that open source
(ie, not free) software would inherently out-perform closed-source
software, as many eyes make all bugs shallow (I think was his
phrase). *What he failed to realise is that poor industrial design
isn't a bug, it's more fundamental than that.

I think his fundamental problem (well, the fundamental problem in "The
Cathedral and the Bazaar") was in his claim that since support is a cost
to commercial software writers and an income stream to free software
writers, free software will inevitably be better than paid-for.

Quite. He clearly had little idea of how large-scale commercial
software is funded. The reason they give you immense discounts on the
capital cost is that the maintenance costs make up for it, in spades.

My favourite ESR moment was at UKUUG conference he spoke at (or it
might have been a Linux UG meeting, I can't recall) around the time
the book was published. The scene was the Commonwealth Centre, and a
lot of the usual Unix offenders of the period were there. After he'd
outlined his model of cathedrals and bazaars, someone who shall
perhaps remain nameless stood up and pointed out that cathedrals were
built precisely like open-source projects: you could show up with a
pile of money and have a side-chapel put on in memory of your dead
wife, just as you can show up with a pile of money and get gcc
targeted at your weird choice of processor, but the core design was a
closely held project from a small ground of people. It all went
downhill from there.

ian

On 15/12/2011 14:48, ian batten wrote:

None of this impacts on the ubiquity of Linux as a kernel with a
minimal GNU user-land, which has been a god-send to embedded
developers too cheap to buy a license for vrtx, psos or whatever. But
using that as an argument as to why it's a viable ecosystem for any
end-users other than hobbyists and industry insiders is something of a
stretch.

So is P4 the same as S4?

--
Arthur Figgis Surrey, UK

On 15/12/11 20:52, Froot Bat wrote:
Find me one with XP. Sales of Netbooks have dropped thanks to MS.

Nope. They have slumped thanks to Apple and to a lesser extent Google.
The market which netbooks targetted - small, lightweight, portable
devices for content consumption rather than creation - now belongs
wholly to the tablet makers. MS had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Ian

On 15/12/2011 22:02, The Real Doctor wrote:
On 15/12/11 20:52, Froot Bat wrote:
Find me one with XP. Sales of Netbooks have dropped thanks to MS.

Nope. They have slumped thanks to Apple and to a lesser extent Google.
The market which netbooks targetted - small, lightweight, portable
devices for content consumption rather than creation - now belongs
wholly to the tablet makers. MS had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Ian


I have a cheap netbook which I occasionally use. It is only XP but I
can run much of the software from the main PC.

I can plug an AIS or MODE-S receiver into the USB ports and run software
to track ships or aircraft (or both at the same time). I can plug in
dongles to the USB to connect to either the 3 network or Vodafone
network. Can I do these with an iPad?

On Thu, 15 Dec 2011 08:50:31 -0800 (PST)
ian batten wrote:
Really? =A0They don't install applications? =A0Not even with apt-get?
They just need a compiler and they write them all themselves? =A0Every
end user requires an ecosystem: it's where the applications come from,
and how they get onto their machine. =A0It's what motivates developers

Err no. Applications get installed by an installer like rpm or an unzip
type program such as tar. Thats nothing to do with an "ecosystem". Is tha=
t
the latest IT buzzword or something?

It's quite tricky to do tar xvf /dev/urandom --- the tar file tends to
need to be produced by someone. That someone needs compilers, and
food on the table, and a means to ship their code to you. That's why
there are a lot of applications for Windows, quite a lot of OSX, quite
a lot for Linux, rather fewer for Solaris and essentially bog all for
anyone wishing to run OpenVMS on their laptop.

Ok, we've been talking at cross purposes. By ecosystem I think you mean all the
companies that go into running the computer industry, I thought you meant the
processes running desktop system itself.

In which case I agree with you. Argument over.

B2003

ian batten wrote:

there are a lot of applications for Windows [...] and essentially bog all for
anyone wishing to run OpenVMS on their laptop.

There used(?) to be a CD collection of opensource utilities for VMS,
it's still listed here, I must have a few mouldering away in the loft
somewhere!

http://www.openvms.org/pages.php?page=OpenSource

On 15/12/2011 10:07, ian batten wrote:

The Gnome 3 debacle has made things worse, but today we have
at least three desktop options, all of them under-designed, under-
engineered and working on the assumptions that if ten tunables are
good, twenty are better.

Certainly not true in the case of GNOME. If there's one thing GNOME has
always taken stick for post-1.4, it's (the perception among geeks) that
it has far too few user configurable options. Linus Torvalds famously
ranted about this not long after GNOME 2 was released.

GNOME 3's main problem at the moment isn't lack of design (I know quite
a few of its designers personally, and they are designers first and
foremost-- not geeky hackers), just that it's half-finished and
(understandably) being judged before it's really become what it was
intended to be. But the schedule had already slipped a couple of times,
so they decided just to release it and take the inevitable flak anyway.

It's also quite amusing that a lot of the people claiming that GNOME 3
is an unmitigated disaster and that GNOME 2 should never have been wound
up (including that man Torvalds again), made almost exactly the same
fuss about their now-apparently-beloved GNOME 2 when that was released...

On Friday, December 16th, 2011 at 14:31:27h +0000, Calum explained:

It's also quite amusing that a lot of the people claiming that GNOME 3
is an unmitigated disaster and that GNOME 2 should never have been wound
up (including that man Torvalds again), made almost exactly the same
fuss about their now-apparently-beloved GNOME 2 when that was
released...

But they could have learned a few lessons from the KDE3 to KDE4
transition which was inevitable because of the fundamental changes
from Qt3 to Qt4.

Now that KDE4 has matured considerably, more and more people are
taking a second look and saying it it nowhere near as bad as they
thought it was and are giving it another go.

No doubt the same will happen with Gnome 3.

Of course the major difference with the transition to Gnome 3
has been the decision of Ubuntu to adopt a cell phone style
interface Unity, because they have commercial hopes in
making money from the mobile device market.

In article
, ian
batten wrote:
On Dec 15, 3:22 pm, wrote:
On Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:48:22 -0800 (PST)

ian batten wrote:
developers too cheap to buy a license for vrtx, psos or whatever.
But using that as an argument as to why it's a viable ecosystem for
any end-users other than hobbyists and industry insiders is something
of a stretch.

Your average user doesn't need a desktop "ecosystem"


Really? They don't install applications? Not even with apt-get?

So far as I can tell 'average users' of computers generally have little or
no concept of any distinctions between a 'desktop' or an OS or application
software, and don't think of 'installing' anything. They just buy and use a
'PC'. Then use that as a package.

So they use 'Windows version whatever' until adverts (or files they can't
now read when sent to them) get them to 'upgrade' by buying a new 'PC' with
the 'newer version of Windows' with its software package for their uses
(office, home, whatever).

Or buy a new 'PC' because the old one goes wrong and they decide to replace
it.

In such cases I suspect any choice offerred over 'desktop', etc, would just
be regarded as needless or confusing. Not what they have become habituated
to, and adds another decision.

Interesting contrast, perhaps, with the Neoclassical Economics myth of the
'rational consumer'. :-)

Those who have tried and/or used a variety of systems, and take some
interest in other aspects like programming come from this at a different
angle. So they may prefer Xfce to Gnome, or like ROX, or even RISC OS, or
to have no 'desktop' at all, and are quite comfortable with seeing choices
around them. Perhas also quite happy to use more than one system as suits.
But I don't think that - as things stand - they are 'average users'.

Slainte,

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
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We were discussing something about the nerdiness of trainspotters and now
the thread seems to have been hijacked by nerdy computer geeks. :-)

Pot, kettle, black?

--
Cheers
Roger Traviss


Photos of the late HO scale GER: -

http://www.greateasternrailway.com

For more photos not in the above album and kitbashes etc..:-
http://s94.photobucket.com/albums/l9...Great_Eastern/