> Unfortunately, software development has turned into a social endeavor
> the last decade or so. You can no longer obtain, learn, and use software
> without talking to other people who have written or obtained, learned,
> and used the same software.

That is unfortunate indeed. Finding the manual can be hard sometimes, 
but it's infinitely easier than finding a human being who actually knows 
WTF they're talking about and yet somehow still has the time to tell you 
about it...

>> latest Ubuntu basically asks you for a username and password, and then
>> just
>> *installs* itself. Next time the PC reboots, you have a fully-functional
>> Ubuntu install.
>
> And you know something funny? People who made that work get a lot of
> flak from the rest of the Linux developer community because they're
> working on user friendliness instead of on patching the kernel to
> frobulate 3% faster or something.

Well, yeah, but as a user, you can just vote with your feet... It's not 
exactly news that many Linux users consider user friendliness and easy 
usibility to be undesirable.

>> Essentially, things have evolved to the point where you can compare
>> Windows
>> and Linux, and see that each of them actually have merits compared to the
>> other. And the point we're currently arguing about is one of them. On
>> Windows, you just *install* stuff, and it works. Under Linux, you try to
>> install stuff, and mostly it just works... except when it doesn't. And
>> then
>> all hell breaks lose.
>
> I've never had software from a repository not "just work" when I
> installed it. Certainly no worse than Windows, which will still
> occasionally get confused enough to need you to uninstall and reinstall
> a device driver.

Problem #1 is when the software you want isn't in the repository, or is 
in a different repository. Problem #2 is when the package depends on a 
different version of some core library that everything in the entire 
system uses.

I've seen crappy Windows drivers do lame things. Applications tend to 
work reasonably well - except stuff written for Windows 3. (It depresses 
me how much software of that kind I still have to deal with at work...)

>> And it irritates me when people tell me I don't know what I'm talking
>> about...
>
> It would probably help if you less often proclaimed that you don't know
> what you're talking about in other fields. :-)

Alternatively, I guess I could just not talk at all. That would fix 
it... I mean, everybody thinks I'm an idiot, but I don't have to remind 
myself of that constantly I guess.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 18/10/2011 6:14 PM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I mean, everybody thinks I'm an idiot, but I don't have to remind 
> myself of that constantly I guess. 
If that were so then you would be ignored. *No one* thinks that you are 
an idiot. Your interactive drivers need upgrading, that's all. One of 
the reasons that people keep saying get a new job. Is because you need 
to get out of your rut and the longer you leave it the harder it will be.
Honestly you are liked and respected. Do you think that Jim and Darren 
would spend hours writing to you if they thought that you were an idiot. 
Neither of them seem to be the sort of people that enjoy running someone 
down.

PS Would a line of kisses help? ;-)

:-* :-*

:-P

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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On 10/18/2011 1:15 AM, Invisible wrote:
>> Time you changed your town.
>
> Of all the reasons to move to another town "because the tills run
> Windows XP" has to be one of the lamest reasons ever! :-P

Actually, its semi-probable that "office machines" will remain supported 
for longer, and run far older versions. The reason being that the code 
on them is mission critical, not 100% certain to work on a newer 
version, and thus businesses are likely to cling to them by their 
fingernails *much* longer than the home users do. They need to know the 
things are stable, and even more so when the last "stable" one wasn't 
all that stable to start with.

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On 18/10/2011 09:07 PM, Patrick Elliott wrote:

> Actually, its semi-probable that "office machines" will remain supported
> for longer, and run far older versions.

Quite. Often moving to a new version means spending time testing that 
everything still works right. And time is money, right?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On 10/18/2011 3:42 AM, Invisible wrote:
>>> Question is, how often does the average person buy a new PC? Not very
>>> often.
>
>> I change my laptops, about every two years for one reason or another.
>
> Clearly you have drastically more money than me. I'm still trying to
> scringe together enough money to afford the CPU to go with the
> motherboard I just bought...
>
>>>> Time you changed your town.
>>>
>>> Of all the reasons to move to another town "because the tills run
>>> Windows XP" has to be one of the lamest reasons ever! :-P
>> Okay! I did not see *tills *I'll give you that. But even so... ;-)
>
> By an unusual coincidence, I've just come back to my desk after trying
> to fix one of the three Windows NT machines we're still using... I
> wonder if that control software works on XP?
Should. XP was the "upgrade" for both 98 and NT, replacing both. So, 
there isn't likely a reason it wouldn't. Unless, of course, there is 
some wrench in the gears, due to some minor quirk they changed between 
NT and XP, which suddenly hosed those specific applications. That is 
generally why, combined with pure ignorance of even if they would work, 
and how well, that keeps old crap in the system.

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On 10/18/2011 2:20 AM, Invisible wrote:
>> Some dependencies are very coarse, yes. Some are not. Your assumption,
>> based on a high level understanding, is incomplete - and you certainly
>> *could* ask for more information about it and possibly even contribute to
>> making it better.
>
> IME, although the open source development model means that theoretically
> anyone can contribute to improving the product, in practise this doesn't
> work. It's extremely rare for submitting a bug report to actually result
> in a fix. [That's assuming the problem is even strictly speaking a "bug"
> and not merely a "hey, maybe if the system looked more like THIS it
> might be better".] Actually contributing code is usually a practical
> impossibility, for various reasons.
>
> I'm sure somebody somewhere is committing code. But for most of us, it's
> just not an option.
>
This is *highly* dependent of which distro and/or project you are 
talking about. There is a habit, once a project, or even a distro of an 
OS, gets beyond a certain popularity, either bugs start getting ignored, 
due to the number reported spiking, or they start munging with the 
interfaces, and features, and neglect actual problems. There is probably 
also an unfortunate tendency for some people to think, "Wow, everyone is 
using this, so everyone must be fixing it, so I will just sit and wait 
for them to do so." All of those things combined result in the smaller, 
less known, ones often progressing faster than the really well known 
ones, in some cases. The latter loose focus on what matters, which is 
everything bloody working right, even after you added some new feature.

This can also even result in, "We are too busy to fix that right now, so 
your code that *does* fix it is going to vanish into a black hole."

Or, so it seems to me, from things I have read off and on, with various 
things, once enough people started paying attention to them, versus when 
they where "new".

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On 10/18/2011 10:14 AM, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>> I've never had software from a repository not "just work" when I
>> installed it. Certainly no worse than Windows, which will still
>> occasionally get confused enough to need you to uninstall and reinstall
>> a device driver.
>
> Problem #1 is when the software you want isn't in the repository, or is
> in a different repository. Problem #2 is when the package depends on a
> different version of some core library that everything in the entire
> system uses.
>
> I've seen crappy Windows drivers do lame things. Applications tend to
> work reasonably well - except stuff written for Windows 3. (It depresses
> me how much software of that kind I still have to deal with at work...)
>
No, depressing is realizing that most of those things "would work" well, 
if you still have Windows 3, because fixing them usually amounted to 
updating every single damn system file, to the most stable version, and 
in the right order, due to the tendency of one program to install and 
destroy the prior, better, version of that library (which might have 
been 2.4, while the one your "new" program replaced it with was 1.3). I 
really fail to comprehend how MS ***never*** thought of version checking 
back then, and why the hell, even after they did, all they did was go, 
"Do you want me to screw this up, by replacing the newer version with 
one that won't work?" Huh??? Gosh, sure...!

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>> By an unusual coincidence, I've just come back to my desk after trying
>> to fix one of the three Windows NT machines we're still using... I
>> wonder if that control software works on XP?

> Should. XP was the "upgrade" for both 98 and NT, replacing both. So,
> there isn't likely a reason it wouldn't. Unless, of course, there is
> some wrench in the gears, due to some minor quirk they changed between
> NT and XP, which suddenly hosed those specific applications. That is
> generally why, combined with pure ignorance of even if they would work,
> and how well, that keeps old crap in the system.

We have an application for Windows NT which doesn't work under XP 
because it replaces serial.sys with its own custom version. (I'm not 
kidding!) Fortunately, we don't use that damned useless program any more...

The application I was fixing yesterday does communicate via the serial 
port, but I don't think it does anything particularly special. Indeed, 
it appears to be designed for Windows 3, not NT.

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On 10/19/2011 0:58, Invisible wrote:
> We have an application for Windows NT which doesn't work under XP because it
> replaces serial.sys with its own custom version. (I'm not kidding!)

That's exactly why in later versions of Windows, you started seeing code in 
the OS to roll back such changes automatically.

> The application I was fixing yesterday does communicate via the serial port,
> but I don't think it does anything particularly special. Indeed, it appears
> to be designed for Windows 3, not NT.

One of the biggest upgrade problems between Win3/Win98 and the NT series was 
stuff that used the serial port, because on NT you had to go thru the 
drivers and on the single-user OSes you could access the hardware directly.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   How come I never get only one kudo?

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On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:00:16 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> On 10/17/2011 16:05, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> And I suppose it's possible to put stuff in the registry that IIS won't
>> read, so I'm not sure what your point is with that...
> 
> That you'd have to put it under a name that IIS won't look at, whereas
> grep has no way of knowing what files Apache won't look at. It's much
> easier to say "IIS roots are stored under \HKLM\blah\yadda\*\docroot"
> and get all of them than it is to parse XML with include files using
> grep.

Well, sure, you'd have to put them someplace where IIS won't look at it.  
With Apache, the same holds true - if you want to put it someplace where 
Apache won't care, don't put it in /etc/apache2. :)

Jim

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