Ubuntu 6.06 criticisms from a programmer

stan@worldbadminton.com wrote:
> In comp.os.linux.misc bill <bbaka@syix.com> wrote:
> :> 
> :> 
> : How about, if you haven't got a clue how it works you have no business 
> : using it?
> : Bill Baka
> 
> OK- just for the fun of it- 
> 
> Bill: please explain the quantum physics involved in the semiconductors
> in the computer that you are using. Or even explain the basic
> tradeoffs in the choice of doping profile for the RAM cells
> as contrasted with the active transistors for the FPU.
> 
> You _do_ know how your computer works, right?
> 
> Stan
> 
More than you think. Intel tried to hire me as a manager of a new fab in 
Washington but I turned them down since they only contacted me after it 
was built and the local housing had already gone through the roof.
Explain the physics to a programmer?
Yeah, right.
Bill Baka
Engineer, but not an Intel fan.

In comp.os.linux.misc bill <bbaka@syix.com> wrote:
:> 
: More than you think. Intel tried to hire me as a manager of a new fab in 
: Washington but I turned them down since they only contacted me after it 
: was built and the local housing had already gone through the roof.
: Explain the physics to a programmer?
: Yeah, right.
: Bill Baka
: Engineer, but not an Intel fan.

I'm a hardware engineer ( microwave, RF, et al )-- so explain away.

Please start with doping profiles for the RAM chips in your computer.
What are the basic tradeoffs needed?

Stan

-- 
Stan Bischof ("stan" at the below domain)
www.worldbadminton.com 

stan@worldbadminton.com wrote:
> In comp.os.linux.misc bill <bbaka@syix.com> wrote:
> :> 
> : More than you think. Intel tried to hire me as a manager of a new fab in 
> : Washington but I turned them down since they only contacted me after it 
> : was built and the local housing had already gone through the roof.
> : Explain the physics to a programmer?
> : Yeah, right.
> : Bill Baka
> : Engineer, but not an Intel fan.
> 
> I'm a hardware engineer ( microwave, RF, et al )-- so explain away.
> 
> Please start with doping profiles for the RAM chips in your computer.
> What are the basic tradeoffs needed?
> 
> Stan
> 
This was in 2000 and they wanted me to be up on 'Tunneling transistors' 
at that time, but mostly a manager to oversee things. These days I 
understand doping, but since I am not paid to worry about it, I usually 
stop at around the InGaAs point due to the absurd amount of different 
materials being experimented with. Looking at the chemistry of LEDs can 
be scary in itself. My RAM chips, huh? Speed, power, yield, voltage, 
leakage, COST, and just about anything else that can be measured. My big 
background was designing semiconductor test equipment, but even 2000 was 
like ancient history compared to today. I grew up using point contact 
transistors, Germanium then Silicon, then in the late 80's all hell 
broke loose with different types of semiconductor being experimented on.
I know what they are doing, but give a shit about the details anymore.
Bill Baka

On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 15:28:05 +0000, stan wrote:

> In comp.os.linux.misc bill <bbaka@syix.com> wrote:
> :> 
> :> 
> : How about, if you haven't got a clue how it works you have no business 
> : using it?
> : Bill Baka
> 
> OK- just for the fun of it- 
> 
> Bill: please explain the quantum physics involved in the semiconductors
> in the computer that you are using. Or even explain the basic
> tradeoffs in the choice of doping profile for the RAM cells
> as contrasted with the active transistors for the FPU.

Agh. Five years ago I would have known what all that meant.

Amazing how fast we lose it all once we stop using it.

> You _do_ know how your computer works, right?

You press on the keys and little letters appear on the screen?

On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:43:57 +0000, bill wrote:


> Games and the excess time kids spend playing them are one of my pet 
> peeves. When he told me he was going to play soccer I thought "Good" 
> until I found out it was some video game he found. There just have to be 
> better ways to get kids into computers.

Games would be fine if written to teach kids the things we want them to
learn. Online teamplay is a great way to teach kids teamwork and
responsibility. But teaming up to kill as many people as you can (with
corresponding display of exploding blood and organs) is sort of the wrong
idea.

arachnid wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Oct 2006 13:43:57 +0000, bill wrote:
> 
> 
>> Games and the excess time kids spend playing them are one of my pet 
>> peeves. When he told me he was going to play soccer I thought "Good" 
>> until I found out it was some video game he found. There just have to be 
>> better ways to get kids into computers.
> 
> Games would be fine if written to teach kids the things we want them to
> learn. Online teamplay is a great way to teach kids teamwork and
> responsibility. But teaming up to kill as many people as you can (with
> corresponding display of exploding blood and organs) is sort of the wrong
> idea.
> 
Total agreement, since I just saw an ad on television for a game called 
something like "Kill all Humans". What's up with that? Terrorist 
training video? I am totally against government interference but I am 
afraid that if this trend continues somebody will get the bright idea to 
pass a law. If this video game actually sells enough it might trigger 
some politicians little brain cells. The game company in this case needs 
to have it's upper management in jail or any and all of the companies 
products banned to the point of putting them out of business before a 
law gets written.
Draconian government action?
Maybe, but better than a law that screws things up for everybody.
Bill Baka

["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.misc.]
On Tue, 17 Oct 2006 09:04:03 -0500, Don Seglio 
  <don.seglio@cox.net> wrote:
>
> Forced by law? Isn't that a bit extreme and intrusive, do you think that 
> the government can protect an fool from itself? These are the same kind 
> of people that respond to Spam to get them to stop and are bewildered by 
> the increase in Spam, feel free to educate them, but leave government 
> out of it. The only thing government is good at is to force you to pay 
> ever increasing taxes, so they can have more money to waste.
>
And look what happened when the government tried to regulate spam: they 
passed a law called the CAN-SPAM act!  Not that it matters, since most 
spammers operate outside US jurisdiction anyway.


-- 
We can found no scientific discipline, nor a healthy profession on the
technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and IBM.
		-- Edsger Dijkstra

On comp.os.linux.misc, in <45319D27.387BD15A@yahoo.com>,
"CBFalconer" wrote:

> I have just mounted this on an IBM Thinkpad T30.  It is driving
> me up the wall.  Problems:
>
> 1.  Lack of keyboard alternatives for routine operations.
> I can't get to the master menus without using the mouse
> equivalent.

You are a programmer. Why don't you run linux from the
commandline? Just takes a little understanding of bash.

A high-level scripting language shouldn't pose any problem
for a C programmer.

_And_ you'd be able to use _any_ linux box.

That's what I do, and I'm not a programmer. Not a C programmer,
anyway. Just bash.

>
> 2.  Nothing is mounted for program development.  No gcc, no
> make, etc.  No diff.

"Mounted"? I think you mean "installed". Isn't ubuntu a debian
derivative? Point apt-get at the CD and install what you want.
Or point it at the web. << (after reading the rest) I have
a dialup and most things don't take long to install. Just put
it in the background and do other stuff in the foreground.

>
> 3.  While info is mounted, the proper .inf files are not.  For
> example, for dd it simply accesses the obsolete man pages.

So install them.

>
> 4.  On a Thinkpad, at least, it is excessively easy to touch
> the mouse movement area during typing, and this seems to
> generate either unwanted mouse movements or unwanted clicks.
> There seems to be no way to reduce the sensitivity.  Nothing
> appeared in the bios configuration area.

I hardly ever touch a mouse, so I can't help you there. But it's
probably configured in /etc/X11/XF86Config. Or the equivalent for
xorg if that what it uses.

>
> 5.  All sorts of things just don't work without a network
> connection.  

That's bizarre. I have no idea what you mean by that. Unless
you mean apt-get is pointed at the web rather than the CDs.
You can fix that. /etc/apt/sources.list. 

$ man sources.list 

> When and if I allow such a machine to network, it will be via
> dial-up.

That's what I use. 

pppconfig is the utility you want.  Maybe setserial too, if your
card isn't recognized at boot.  And you'd have to have the serial
module or have it be compiled into the kernel. I've heard ubuntu
is a graphical distro, so it might not have those.

<snip>
 
> There is no doubt that Linux is a superior OS to any version
> of Windoze.  However, it must also be admitted that the GUI
> interface on Windoze is generally better than the equivalent
> under Gnome.

Don't use a GIDE (Graphical Integrated Desktop Environment),
but I do know that almost everyone who does uses KDE instead of
Gnome.

>  I can almost always operate Windoze from the
> keyboard.  This does not apply to this version of Ubuntu.

It's a graphical distro. What do you expect? Linux doesn't _need_
'keyboard shortcuts' because it doesn't need a GIDE.

> I will concede that my versions of Windoze use 4dos as their
> shell, which is much superior to COMMAND or CMD.  My rodents
> sleep peacefully in a corner 99% of the time.

Bash is infinitely superior to any windoze shell.

> Both systems are excessively lacking in showing immediate
> response to user input.  After a click, something on the
> display should always change immediately to show reception.

The GIDE is always slower than the commandline. Your keystrokes
are filtered through layers and layers of software.

But that still doesn't sound right.

(By-the-way, I run screen, a textmode window manager, in an
x-terminal-emulator. It's as fast as greased ligtning.)

>
> While there may be suitable answers to my complaints, the 7 day
> return period will prevent my investigating them.

That's a reference to the laptop? What does that have to do
with linux?

>
> As a result I am still in the market for a reasonably priced
> laptop, which MUST include real serial and parallel ports,
> CD/DVD reader, CD writer, and should include ECC memory
> capabilty.  I also suspect that Ubuntu is not going to be
> the right distribution for me.  I don't want to suffer long
> downloading sessions tieing up my phone line.

<snip>

>  All this stuff should be on the CD(s).  

It isn't? That's bizarre. Try Debian or Slack.

> Some time ago I mounted Mandrake 8.0 locally,

That's like suse or (apparently) ubuntu or redhat. These are
attempts to emulate windoze. They aren't the distros a programmer
would want.

>  and it seemed
> quite satisfactory.  The major problem is that dual booting
> just doesn't cut it.  I need a separate machine for the Linux
> installation.

Nah. Just use a boot floppy/CD. 

Alan

-- 
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconnor/contact.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconnor/survival/index.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconnor/linux-unix/index.html

On comp.os.linux.misc, in <slrnejrtvs.4ca.i3x9mdw@b29x3m.invalid>, "Alan Connor" wrote:

<snip>

Postscript:

>> 1.  Lack of keyboard alternatives for routine operations.
>> I can't get to the master menus without using the mouse
>> equivalent.

The only graphical app I use these days is a browser, and the IE
clones like mozilla drive me nuts.

I highly recommend w3m-img with ssl. It just displays the images
in place, along with plain text. Does frames but not javascript.

Takes the bullshit out the Web. 

I call it aliased to "www='w3m -o auto_image=0"

(Set to "1" [yes] in the config file.)

That makes it pure textmode. If I want to see the images, I hit
"!" and enter "img" and it brings up the same page with images.

"img" is a script in my $PATH:

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/w3m `tail -1 /home/me/.w3m/history`

W3m doesn't need a mouse at all. (I think it _can_ use them,
though.)

The image capability is still new for w3m, so it's a little 
buggy, but quite usable.

<snip>

Alan

-- 
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconnor/contact.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconnor/survival/index.html
http://home.earthlink.net/~alanconnor/linux-unix/index.html

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Usenet Beavis writes:

> On comp.os.linux.misc, in <45319D27.387BD15A@yahoo.com>,
> "CBFalconer" wrote:
>=20
>> I have just mounted this on an IBM Thinkpad T30.  It is driving
>> me up the wall.  Problems:
>>
>> 1.  Lack of keyboard alternatives for routine operations.
>> I can't get to the master menus without using the mouse
>> equivalent.
>=20
> I am the Usenet Beavis.  Why don't you point your finger
> at me, and laugh?  Just takes a little understanding of kookbags.

Beavis, you're beyond understanding.

> A high-level Usenet kookbag shouldn't pose any problem for
> a normal person.

Right, Beavis.  You're not a problem.

> _And_ you'd be able to use _any_ part of the Beavis FAQ as the source
> of amusement.

Right.

> That's what I do, and I'm not a normal person.  I'm The Usenet Beavis,
> King of Kookfarts.

Correct.

>>
>> 2.  Nothing is mounted for program development.  No gcc, no
>> make, etc.  No diff.
>=20
> "Mounted"? I think you mean "installed".

I think you were dropped on your head, as a child.


>                                           Isn't ubuntu a debian
> derivative? Point your web browser at the Beavis FAQ,
> http://www.pearlgates.net/nanae/kooks/ac/, then point your finger
> at me, and laugh.

Sounds like a plan.

> I have no brain, and most people don't take long before figuring
> out that I'm a kookbag.  Just put away any sharp object before reading =
my=20
> daily kookfarts.

Beavis, you should come with a warning label.

> So smack my bitch up.

*SMACK*

> I hardly ever touch myself, so I can't help you there.

You're lying, Beavis.

>> 5.  All sorts of things just don't work without a network
>> connection. =20
>=20
> That's bizarre. I have no idea what you mean by that. I have no
> idea about anything, for that matter.  And even if I do, remember
> the golden rule of Usenet: whatever technical advice I give anyone
> the correct answer always lies 180 degrees to the opposite.

Right.  Errr=E2=80=A6  Wrong.  Whatever.

> Don't use a GIDE (Graphical Integrated Desktop Environment),

Beavis is making up acronyms.

> but I do know that almost everyone who does uses KDE instead of
> Gnome.

You don't know anything, Beavis.  You're just repeating what Bigfoot tell=
s=20
you (http://tinyurl.com/23r3f).

> Beavis
>=20
> --=20
> http://www.geocities.com/suhatrasabib
> http://www.pearlgates.net/nanae/kooks/ac/
> http://tinyurl.com/23r3f



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