On Sat, 23 Mar 2002 21:59:42 +1000, "john rigby" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Sridhar, > First, thanks for all the help I've seen you offer to newbie and geek alike > here, me included. > I am very happy to discuss the bits of the GNU World that I can, seeing as > my contributions technically are zilch! > My only skill is really in seeing solutions for sick corporations - and > sometimes people who are really ill.
But we're not dealing with a corporation here, we're dealing with a community. Anything you do to Mandrake needs to be community-compatible. > MOST people like to contribute in some way, there are really very few - and > usually very young and frustrated - who don't. > > As Joy C says, " Even Cybervandals (scriptkiddies) usually burn into people > by 30." > I am very happy to help anyone where I can and discussing practical > commerce-oriented matters is where I do have the experience to share is how > to do it. > Answers to your post : ********** > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Sridhar Dhanapalan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 2:26 PM > Subject: Re: [newbie] Living in the real world - Win4Lin4 NO INTEREST TO > GEEK FOLKS > > > > > 2. If you are a serious business user, you NEED to be moving toward > voice > > > recognition as you know. > > > > No, I don't know. Why would a business need voice recognition? I once > tried > > using Viavoice for a whole year -- my productivity decreased despite my > best > > efforts at speaking clearly (something which I've been told I'm good at) > and > > training the software. These packages often advertise 90%-95% accuracy. > This > > sounds great, until you realise that this means that every 10-20 words > will be > > incorrectly interpreted. John Dvorak recently wrote an interesting article > on > > the topic: http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1107-826862.html. > > ******** A point at a time: > 1. Because real men never did type and modern liberated females won't > anymore. :-) > Like Dvorak, you might have vocal range problem, much less an accent one. I > couldn't imagine a "Good Ol' Boy" ever getting to use it, or an excitable > Southern Indian. :-) I wouldn't know, because I'm not "Southern Indian". Your assumption would be like me thinking you're English simply because the name "John" came from England. I was born in Australia, and years of private school education has trained me to speak clearly and properly. I pronounce my words in the 'proper' (i.e. British) fashion (although this wasn't something which was taught at school), and I don't have a vocal range problem. I was using the British English version of Viavoice, which better suits my voice than the American one. > More to the point, at around 40 w.p.m. with 90% accuracy as a typist, VR > will break even under most conditions. Over that it drops rapidly. HOWEVER , > in the publishing world, in technical material we used to cost on 19 w.p.m. > with girls whose "rating" was 65 w.p.m. in Pittmans test. In the real world > ( that phrase again!) it was extremely rare to find an executive that could > properly dictate to a stenographer. They were status symbols for the most > part. > As a professional dictator (ha!) I must say I do know few people as > experienced, trained and natural as me at it, for over 30 years. I am > approximately 120% more effective/productive using VR. BUT as a typist I am > only "quite fast" - about twice the rate of finished work as an average > self-typing person creatively trying to do the two things at once. > But poor old Dvorak - a most unhappy puppy alla time - lives in the wannabee > world of pontificating pundits. He has no idea of the incredible science and > wonder that has got VR this far! But, it isn't for everyone. Like playing > with command lines thrashing around with broken software and loving it! :-) Most (probably over 95%) of businesses are still not using voice dictation, and probably won't be doing so for the foreseeable future. > > What is your definition of "incredibly poor presentation"? Open source > > developers usually prefer to focus on code quality rather than polish. MS > bangs-and-whistles. > ********* I used to teach methods engineering ( IT speak Systems Analysis) > and the very first thing I would stress was: forget the production, write > the manual. Do that first and you will always do well. Yes, it is boring - > and usually embarrassing, too. But I also meant overall. The physical > display of onscreen fonts was not acceptable to a serious user. Imagine > trying to write for 5 hours using it. Ah, Systems Analysis! I studied that last year. The course was 100% buzzword-compliant. I don't think I learned anything truly useful from it at all. University IT courses nowadays (at least in Australia) seem to be headed by business and marketing people who know nothing about technology and how it really works. It is these sorts of people who created the entire Dot Com speculative bubble, which as you should know burst and hurt everyone. Ever wonder why countries like Japan and South Korea were able to grow so fast from pariah states to world leaders? Among other things, their main companies were headed by engineers and scientists, with business and marketing people only taking secondary importance. These people actually knew and understood their respective industries, and so were able to maximise gain from their limited resources. The economic 'difficulties' experienced in Japan and South Korea over the past ten years coincided in a large wave of 'Westernisation' in business and governmental practices. To put it simply, there is more than one way to skin a cat. I'm not saying you're wrong, but from every example you can give about supports your point of view, there will be others that contradict it. There is no magic bullet. > StarOffice and KDE (to use your examples) are very usable > > and stable. They _do_ have extensive help structures, so either you didn't > > install them or you just didn't look properly. > ********* No they just weren't there - it was a problem not resolved at the > time on this list - it was a known bug as I recall. I think I remember your problem. Mandrake 8.0 didn't install htdig by default, and this was needed to enable searching through the KDE help. If you installed htdig as advised the problem should've been fixed. KDE _does_ have extensive help. StarOffice 5.2 has an excellent help system. There are literally hundreds of pages there. If you can't find it then there must be something wrong. > > Nothing is perfect. Go to a Windows list and I'll guarantee you that > you'll see > > many users with problems. On this list, most problems are quite minor, and > many > > messages are simple enquiries. > ******** Oh, I agree 100% on both points. But I've never failed to get a > Windows system up - and remember I'm not a geek. I just can't get them to > keep up!! Microsoft have it easy. Hardware manufacturers bend over backwards to get their products working in Windows, often using proprietary drivers and systems that won't work properly on other OSs (Winmodems and companies like Western Digital come to mind). MS can even charge manufacturers for "Windows certification" and for the inclusion of drivers on the Windows CD. Minority operating systems don't have that luxury. Often, they have to reverse-engineer things themselves and write their own drivers. GNU/Linux is less likely to work on 'marginal' hardware because it expects certain standards to be met (simple things like ATA and USB that many manufacturers refuse to implement properly) and because it stresses the hardware more. Unfortunately, many budget-priced systems out there are made from cheap and marginal hardware. > > You seem awfully pessimistic for one who is "in hopes". > OH no! Just realistic. On current performance levels and rate of > improvement, at least a year to go, unless someone gets the message and > looks at the true market mechanics. Then you need 6-8 months, in my > experience of many product developments over the decades, to eradicate the > negative past and develop impetus. > Financially Mandrake has not got anything like that long on its dwindling > reserves and realistic income expectations. So what do you propose? How can Mandrake charge for something that's already free? It would be like selling air-in-a-can. What's stopping somebody from switching to Red Hat or Debian if they don't like Mandrake? To use an economic term, it's 'perfect competition'. > > > I believe you really need a Geek to get you online. > > > > Then the geekiness kicked in. I remembered that LILO used to have a > problem with > > booting from a partition that was past the 1024th cylinder on a drive. I > deduced > > that Win2K might have the same problem (probably deliberately, to prevent > users > > from dual-booting with a non-MS OS). I repartitioned my drive, making an > NTFS > > partition at the beginning. After reinstalling Win2k, it booted to the > GUI. Had > > I not been a geek, I would not hae known this relatively obscure tidbit of > > information. > *********** Actually, you had a well-documented problem there from using > Partition Magic. > I take it you were using V.4 or prior? It didn't know about Big Bill's > inalienable right to come first! > Drive C: or else, amongst others. No, it was a Windows problem. I encountered the same problem after using both Partition Magic 5.0 and cfdisk. For Windows to boot, it needs to be able to install system files on the first partition it can read and write to. If the first partition on the drive is, say, ext2 or ReiserFS, Windows will skip it (since it can't read it) and go to the next partition. If this partition is FAT or NTFS, and it at least partially exists below the 1024 cylinder 'barrier', Windows can use it to boot. > But remember, people do not install OS's in the real world. They come on the > machine, or the shop that flogs them the "upgrade" does it. Most people don't. But there are still many who do. > > Getting online was the interesting bit. I have a Netcomm external modem > (which > > are very common in Australia), which has a _real_ Rockwell (now Connexant) > > chipset. I tried a variety of different generic and vendor-issued drivers, > and I > > tried just about every Dial-up-networking setting. After a week of trying > and > > then giving up, my modem magically started to work. I still don't know why > this > > happened. > *************** Netcomm always was strange.......... .they started out > making for Apples you know - nobody could get anything to work with them. Netcomm has for many years been the most popular modem brand in Australia. They used bog-standard Rockwell chipsets, so they were not really any different from the others. There is nothing truly 'special' or "strange" about a Netcomm modem, apart from the fact that they managed to tweak their products to run a little faster than the competition. My modem is a Roadster II 56Ultra SVD, which to this day is still amongst the best analogue modems you can buy. If the modem was so "strange" then it wouldn't work at all in GNU/Linux, which expects certain standards to be met. Windows has proprietary drivers, usually made by the manufacturer. This allows manufacturers to create truly "strange" devices and still have it work in Windows. Winmodems are a prime example of this. What does "they started out making for Apples" have to do with it, anyway? Netcomm make good modems, they always have. > know - > > > ( the ones who keep buying Apples!) > > > > Please tell me why you hate Macs so much. Enlighten me. > ************ I don't hate anything that is successful without it hurting > people, Sridah. I am simply astounded. If EVER my case for marketing being > the key success always, it is the juxtaposition of Apple and Amiga - or > even Linux Domestic. There is more to life than marketing. Apples failed to catch on for many reasons, most notably their relatively high price. This does not make them bad products. The Amiga was a fine machine, almost a decade ahead of its time. The problem was that Commodore didn't properly appreciate the product, and so were not able to exploit its strengths. > > Like with GNU/Linux, you obviously don't even know what Macs are about, > and > > what's worse is that you don't even want to know. How can you criticise > > something you don't understand? > ******** Incorrect. I know perfectly well what they are about. I owned > Unix systems while you were in grade school. Believe me I knew quickly. Same > with Linux. As for GNU - well, I can bat that ball with lawyers, much less > philosophers. I think you've just proven my point. You are treating the closed source proprietary world of UNIX (where your strategies would actually work) with the free software GNU and Linux (where your strategies would not work). In fact, GNU stands for "GNU is Not UNIX". > You are confusing the mechanic with the owner/driver. I do not want/need to > know how a gearbox works to drive a car well. > Apples? Well, I owned part of a company that used to sell them. The owner > had owed us money. They sold those dreadful things into critical commercial > situations as networked devices. We got them out of trouble. My own > Technical Director heavied me into getting out of that Company. He was a > German perfectionist and a REAL Computer Engineer. "We shouldn't have > anything to do with those things, they are just expensive toys for the > unitiated and I don't feel that we should take advantage of people." He was > right. We built 10x better machines for less than half the price. AND I'm > talking about the good ol' days when the simplest PC installed could set you > back $4,000. Macs were never designed to do anything critical. They were always designed to be desktop devices that were easily networkable. Server capabilities were minimal, and deliberately so (The OS couldn't handle anything heavy-duty). It sounds like you were making Macs do something they weren't designed to do. > I hope that this does explain things a little more clearly for you, Sridhar. > It will eventually be good people like yourself who can save the whole > Freedom Of Choice thing for us. It is simply a matter of reading Kilneth's > "The Lion & The Lamb", an explanation of singular disparity of commonsense > missing from the "Cathedral & The Bazaar" and the succinct explanation of > why the very few "They" are filthy rich and "we" are not. > It is not nice. It is not warm and fuzzy like "Cat & Baz", it is cold, hard > truth, impeccable if unpleasant, logic.................. It sounds like you could write an article or even a book on the subject. Why don't you? You could post an article on, say, OSopinion.com or OSnews.com (both are OS-agnostic sites) and see what kinds of responses you get. I'm not trying to flame you here. On the contrary, I would very much like to read it, and so would many others. For example, an evaluation of "The Cathedral & The Bazaar" in the light of "The Lion & The Lamb" could be exceptionally interesting. I don't think anyone here thinks you're flat-out wrong, but rather that your ideas are simply inappropriate for this particular industry. You're bound to get that on this list, so why not go and preach to a wider audience? > Remember at school/uni? The two ends of the political spectrum were always > sold as communism one end, fascism the other and democracy............? No-one actually knowledgeable would teach that nonsense. My history teachers used to stress the ridiculousness of the "political spectrum". Afer three years of studying university-level international relations, I have come to the conclusion that this is a very 'Westernised' idea, and it doesn't work in most cases (even in the West). The idea is just a convenient oversimplification, fabricated so Western states can 'prove' themselves to be superior to the 'evil commies'. > The two ends are Anarchy and Feudalism and on the right IS everything else. Yes, I see your point. -- Sridhar Dhanapalan "I've always liked penguins, and when I was in Canberra a few years ago we went to the local zoo with Andrew Tridgell (of samba fame). There they had a ferocious penguin that bit me and infected me with a little known disease called penguinitis. Penguinitis makes you stay awake at nights just thinking about penguins and feeling great love towards them. So when Linux needed a mascot, the first thing that came into my mind was this picture of the majestic penguin, and the rest is history." -- Linus Torvalds
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