Slashdot Mirror

I can't believe the growing ridiculousness of this website.

First off, what terrible research. You should have linked to the actual website, where'd you see that there actually is AOL for Linux coming our way.

Secondly, rather than let the uncompromising, closed-minded crowd continue to hate LindowsOS because it appears to be stylish amongst the l33t, you should have posted an actual story (submitted and rejected) that would be truly informational about LindowsOS, like this story.

This is turning into selective and irresponsible technology reporting.

OSNews ran this a few weeks ago. It is gold, unless you sold/threw away/lost your floppys too.

OSNews ran this a few weeks ago. It is gold, unless you sold/threw away/lost your floppys too.

Read here how much KDE sucks. You KDE faggots will never beat the hell out of GNOME. Click Here On the long run KDE will die.

why in hell are they using CCMSN in this screenshot ?

WAKE UP AND USE AMSN!!!

Yes, Red Hat is good, but Mandrake one ups it. And look at the publisher of OSNews -- David Adams. This man founded Akopia, which was acquired by Red Hat. Red Hat is good but this site reeks of bias and who knows what other special interests have stakes in it. Maybe his link with Red Hat didn't affect the article, but theoretically (of course), what if a big name in a major operating system advised the government on, say, software security? Would that smell fishy?

I really would like to know what, if any, qualifications Eugenia has.

She's got boobs? Seems to be about it.

I want to correct myself; the Intel Compiler 6 is also available with a frontend for Fortran, and as a C-compiler with a EFI bytecode backend.

Speaking of which, here's a link to that horrible interview Eugenia did with gcc engineer Mark Mitchell.

After browsing your /. comments I actually read her article, which Eugenia considers "NOT a review article, it is a commentary", which sounds to me like an excuse for flaming.. Anyway, from my experience Yast2 improved a lot with SuSE 8.0, lets see what 8.1 will do, and I think it is one of the fastest-to-install distros for the average user... Although I personally prefer the apt-* stuff for upgradebility and dependencies. (Distro wars please stop here..)

While E. starts with hitting on Yast2, she later gets deeply into critizing package management and the free software community distributing process, and she is pretty much having the same points as the so-called other " excellent article" " on OSNews: Linux installations are much heavier to handle for "the user" because there is no intuitive way to install new packages, and again, the new Yast2 fails to offer a plain and simple way.

But:

• When she is refering to "the user", she always means someone used to a Microsoft Windows system. So she is preoccupied with MD Windows, and the intuity she wants basically sums up to resemblance of Windows systems. And in fact, 80% of the plain Windows users I know are incapable of installing new programs simply because the whole system is not intuitive to them.
  
  
• Saying a user should be able to work with a system without knowledge of the system is continuing the myth that mastering new technologies can be done without any education on these technologies, as long as these technologies stay "intuitive". There is no intuitive technology I know of, and to handle devices, you need some knowledge on how they work or at least how they are operated. This is the case with cars, microwave ovens, vcrs, telephones, even pdas (ever seen a computer illiterate trying to retrieve an address from a Palm?) and these devices are way less complex than full-featured computer systems. You need to learn to operate a system, and that's the painful truth both with MS Windows and Linux. The fact that MS products are more widely deployed on desktops and some people (esp. MS itself) refer to them as almost 'culture techniques' does not void the need for learning how they work.
  
  
• While MS Windows systems come with a handful of applications and usually will have maybe two dozens applications installed, Linux distros come with thousands of application. No wonder that these are harder to manage and oversee than the small number of Windows killer apps. This is the trade off between freedom of choice and simplicity. Linux install managers most often offer profiles which choose the packages for you based on a given profile, which tries to make the abundancy of applications more manageable. In the end, awhen a user (which, as above said, I require from any user) has become aquianted with how the system works, the user will profit from that freedom...
  
  
• Dependancy hell on Linux resembles DLL hell on MS Windows, at least if you are going to run newer Windows apps which require specific patches and service packs. The concept that one program might need some components of another program is easily understandable even to the newbie user (though not intuitive because you have to grasp the concept of programs, applications and installation in the first place), and in fact providing thousands of packages, providing shared resources is mandatory. (For example, think ELF)
  

I know Linux (or any other free software system) sometimes is more demanding to the user than other systems in terms of a steeper learning curve, but pretending that other systems do not have a learning curve at all is unfair and ridiculous.

This whole article - as well as the other OSNews article she refers to - looks to me like being written on a morning with a bad mood and/or a bad hangover. And believe me, I am a hangover specialist...

Everything which if commercial is better in her little world. Freedom means nothing.

In her world GCC sucks because ICL6 optimizes better and VC++ has a pretty editor bundled (never mind that those are c and/or c++ only and VC can't even compile my code!).

Everything sucks especially when compared to BeOS (something about moving windows around which isn't 'smooth' enough or whatever under any other OS).

Valgrind is 'better than nothing', but a mere toy compared with PurifyPlus (closed source and only $4800 for a unix license!) because... well, her husband who happenes to use PurifyPlus said so (guess there's no reason to think he'd rationalize it's superiority, especially if he paid $4800 for a license :-).

I'm amazed her opinions gets so much attention, they mostly seem skin deep to me.

They repeatedly take a little piece of news, and try to infer some big story out of it.

A few years ago they posted a story that Microsoft had decided to cancel the Windows98 Second Edition project only a month or two before it's release.

What had actually happened was Microsoft had moved some of their programmers from the Win98 team to the Windows 2000 team.

Everyone else reported the programmers being moved, TheReg reported that Win98SE was cancelled.

They do this kind of thing all the time. Also they rarely list their sources, so when a story from TheReg is repeated at Slashdot or OSNews or wherever, it makes it impossible to check the authenticity of the story.

They are a tabloid. I wish everyone would just ignore them, or take everything they post with the pinch of salt it requires.

Next thing you know Slashdot will post links to stories in The Sun.

Here is the message you get when trying to install SP1 on a "pirated" system (well one of the systems with that one cd key that is used in over 90% of the pirated XP's out there).

The only real "feature" this would prevent all you "pirates" out there from getting would be the middleware-removal thingy. You can still download the previous updates (security, bug fixes, etc.) fine.

Just to note, you have to be sure to wear your eye patch and parrot on the shoulder during the install, or SP1 might not recognize you as a "pirate."

One thing that bothers me about most filesystems is limited metadata support. BFS is a notable exception. One hopes that KDE and GNOME developers could use this to improve on the primitive file handling tools desktop users are currently stuck with.

If you took a look at the URL, you'd see that that's a document from Apple's Siggraph 2002 presentation. Do you think Apple would put all the pure technical detail (heavy sarcasm) in that PDF on their website where the Mac users go? They don't even tell you what kind of sound card the machines you're buying comes with! If you still don't believe me, the the article is on OSNews.

Staroffice? StarOffice may be good, but I have yet to find a single MSFT Word file that Staroffice 6 for Linux can open. (Yes, I have version 6.) Even the simplest file where you open Word 97, type a sentence and then try to open it in StarOffice will cause SO6 to crash and burn. I cannot find any exceptions.

It is a good Office Suite I think when you are using it without interchanging between MSFT Office, but I still would have preferred GobeProductive. I downloaded the demo and very much liked its table support. Does anyone have news about when the GPL version will be available for download? I am really interested in exploring switching fully to Gobe!

• Osnews
  
• MacIntouch
  
• Zdnet
  
• Macworld
  
• MacCentral

Try here, here and here

Some sites may be a little slow right now, obviously!

This is true, but I would rather have small, fast, solid base system that can be easily added to. Something like Gentoo with an installer.

>That'S what RPMs are for. Despite Win32 installation program, RPM keeps track of dependencies. Windows can't do that out of the box

RPM's have problems too. I think Linux would gain by moving away from package systems and moving to using an installer. There are plenty of Linux apps out there that do come with installers like Netscape, OOo, SO, Kylix, Loki. All of these installed beautify on my system. I don't know how well any of those installers would work for other applications, but maybe some sort of functional universal installer would go a long way. IMHO, this is one of the two largest problems facing Linux. The other major problem is that the RH limbo beta 2 C++ binaries will not run on the beta 3 system. I do realize there has been major changes to GCC recently, but I think this sets a new record for lack of backwards compatibility. These two things are playing the biggest part in holding Linux back from the desktop space. I had many of my windows apps replaced, but many of the apps I used are broken after I updated to QT3 and GCC 3. This is an important issue as major Linux releases usually come more frequent than windows and it hinders commercial support.

I think if Linux does hit desktop space there will have to be LSB support for an /apps directory or similar. LSB does not really address desktop needs to the extent that it should, I have 20 or so text editors and word processors, most of them in separate locations, /apps/textedit would be nice.

>kDevelop, Kylix, only to name the two most professional ones. For Windows there MSVC++, which is actually a neat DevIDE, but it costs quite much and has issues of its own.

I have used Kylix a few times but mostly for little stuff. It is probably the closest thing Linux has to VS.NET, too bad more people don't use it. Delphi has never really gotten the credit it deserves, and Borland only recently added C++ support, maybe it will pick up in popularity soon.

>Linux can be a pain in the ass. Setting up a system is, for a (technical skilled) newbie much more difficult than setting up a Win32 box. Trying to make Linux do something can be quite some (research) work, and during that time you may say 'Oh what a crap system, nothing works.', but once you figured out how to do it right, Linux will rarely fail at its new job.

I think the initial install is something Linux has improved on, I actually like Mandrake's DrakeX more than Windows' installer.

>WinXP, on the other hand, is the best piece of code that left MS for a few years. It's stable, clearly multimedia-orientated, has a neat UI-design and runs everything you want. But it can be as much as pain in the butt as Linux, when your apps start crashing because you uninstalled a small shareware tool which removed a crucial DLL. Let a newbie figure that out... :o

I find when I am in Windows I miss many of the command Line functions of Linux, and when I am in Linux I miss many of the multimedia apps and GUI of Windows. I liked 2K more than XP, and don't get crashes because I am picky about the code I run on my system. I have had 2 crashes on my XP system; the first was when I killed some services the system needed to boot, the second was when I was using tweakXP with WindowBlinds. My stratagy for keeping windows stable is to run as little code as possible when it boots. It leaves a much smaller footprint in memory and is much less likely to crash. I also usually gut windows pretty thoroughly and make extensive changes to the default install before building on it. A few of the changes I make to my system can be found here and here.

This was covered by OSNews in this article as well as this one a few days ago. The EULA on these fonts allow redistribution of them in unmodified form, so they can be downloaded from http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/. The important thing to learn however is that Linux should stop relying on Microsoft for TrueType fonts.

This was covered by OSNews in this article as well as this one a few days ago. The EULA on these fonts allow redistribution of them in unmodified form, so they can be downloaded from http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/. The important thing to learn however is that Linux should stop relying on Microsoft for TrueType fonts.

It's very noble of Gobe to release the source after the product's financial demise, rather than sell it on for a pittance. Hopefully the clean and bloat-free source will live on.

See osnews for a comment by one of Gobe's developers Tom Hoke.

Should give Lindows a run for its money. Who says Linux is dead on the desktop? ;-)"
Only the KDE Nay-saysers

The August 2002 update for MSDN contains the Windows Services for Unix 3.0, adding the Interix technology into Windows. Heres the blurb: Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX 3.0 provides a full range of cross-platform services geared towards customers wanting to integrate Windows into their existing UNIX environments. With the addition of the Interix subsystem technology, SFU 3.0 now provides platform interoperability and application migration components in one fully integrated and supported product from Microsoft. Key Distinguishing Feature from SFU 2.0 The most significant feature of SFU 3.0 is the integration of the Interix subsystem technology. The Interix technology provides over 1900 UNIX APIs and migration tools such as: make, rcs, yacc, lex, cc, c89, nm, strip, gbd, as well as the gcc, g++, and g77 compilers.

So it looks like someone may finally have found a way to make money of GPL software - sell a posix-compatability layer for Windows along with gpl applications. [guess when we see this on the slashdot frontpage?]

Interestingly enough, they list as a benefit... "Optimize existing investments in UNIX applications by reusing code, which you can now run on Windows. Plus, update old code with COM and .NET technology to get new value from your UNIX applications."

I guess Left Hand forgot to tell Right Hand that GPL is evil and can't be used with .Net

Uh, no you're the fucking moron. If you would pull your head out of your ass, you would have heard Steve Jobs himself say that he would consider moving OS X to x86 in the future. Now don't you feel smarter? Dumbass.

You should probably read this interview with Mr. Dillon of FreeBSD VM fame.

For me, I work on the BSD's for political reasons as much as I do for the technical.
I want nothing to do with GNU, I'd prefer to eliminate all GPL/LGPL software from the BSDs; but us developers got more important things to deal with at this moment in time.
By FreeBSD 7.0 I'd hope to have replaced the GNU toolchain; Dillon has great experience with compiler construction too (see DICE compiler), but it isn't his main interest these days.

Okay, I may be wrong in this (too lazy to check the article which I read yesterday), but I think the original article merely talks about moving away from Motorola.

The implication, of course, is a move to OS X, but I think it's much more likely that Apple will turn to IBM's PPC chips instead. IBM (the other part of the AIM triumverate) has been a supplier of Apple's chips for a while, and they're poised to release the processor's Apple needs well before Motorola (which can't seem to get their act together.

Try http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=1357 or the Thursday, 7/11 update here.

Microsoft to Exit Mac Market If Sales Continue to Lag

I've just read the OSNews article on KDE3.1. The article isn't too bad, though much of the criticisms the author levels are things that I would classify as personal preference and not really fundamental design issues.

What really surprised me about that article was the user comments afterwards! The level of ignorance and arrogance shown by some of the users of the OSNews site is staggering and makes an average /. comment seem well balanced and informed by comparison.

They seem to have definitely had more than their quota of do-what-*I*-like users.. you know the kind; they never actually contribute to any project, not even so much as a bug report, yet they demand that all the developers should drop what they're doing and make the 'improvements' they suggest, which normally boil down to 'make it like whatever I'm already using, because I'm too lazy to learn something new!'.

I especially like this comment. It's another one of those X-is-crap(for reasons I'm not too sure about)-and-someone-should -do-something-better(though not me, obviously, because I know fuck all about what I'm talking about) comments. I'm not saying that X shouldn't be superceeded some day, but people that keep repeating this should really take the time to find out just how big and powerful(thus complex) X is, and maybe ask themselves why a community of so many good programmers has not replaced it, if it's such a simple and desirable thing to do?

Here's to Linux forging it's own path, and not trying to emulate everything that's already out there.

Incidentally, I'm a FVWM2 user, so I don't support either KDE or Gnome more than the other.

I've just read the OSNews article on KDE3.1. The article isn't too bad, though much of the criticisms the author levels are things that I would classify as personal preference and not really fundamental design issues.

What really surprised me about that article was the user comments afterwards! The level of ignorance and arrogance shown by some of the users of the OSNews site is staggering and makes an average /. comment seem well balanced and informed by comparison.

They seem to have definitely had more than their quota of do-what-*I*-like users.. you know the kind; they never actually contribute to any project, not even so much as a bug report, yet they demand that all the developers should drop what they're doing and make the 'improvements' they suggest, which normally boil down to 'make it like whatever I'm already using, because I'm too lazy to learn something new!'.

I especially like this comment. It's another one of those X-is-crap(for reasons I'm not too sure about)-and-someone-should -do-something-better(though not me, obviously, because I know fuck all about what I'm talking about) comments. I'm not saying that X shouldn't be superceeded some day, but people that keep repeating this should really take the time to find out just how big and powerful(thus complex) X is, and maybe ask themselves why a community of so many good programmers has not replaced it, if it's such a simple and desirable thing to do?

Here's to Linux forging it's own path, and not trying to emulate everything that's already out there.

Incidentally, I'm a FVWM2 user, so I don't support either KDE or Gnome more than the other.

That would be the job of an 'official' management structure. But since you know, can you send me a link to where I can go to view these problems and help out then? Read my question again if you have to, yes they work great as small groups, but what methods do they have to raise issues. AFAIK this is the only way to present information. If there is a community dedicated to the collection and discussion of these and similar issues, I would love to go be a part of it.

linux orbit
linux journal
OSNews.com
The Linux Game Tome

On an unrelated note, the main XFree86 guy says in an interview today that nothing really great is going on with XFree 5, while he avoids some of the questions...

Right off, the reviewer complains:

The Gnome menu panel now resembles a bit of MacOS. It sits on the top of the desktop, and no matter what I tried, I can't change its position.

OK, I missed your earlier reply that linked to some discussion regarding this. The best comments are this and which seem to leave quite a bit of abiguity regarding the whole issue. I don't think that you can make the blanket statement that they prohibit the GPL, I believe that rather the license raises some issues WRT the GPL and the issue needs further clarification, unfortunately, given Microsoft's attitude toward the GPL, clarification may have to be at the end of a court battle.

OK, I missed your earlier reply that linked to some discussion regarding this. The best comments are this and which seem to leave quite a bit of abiguity regarding the whole issue. I don't think that you can make the blanket statement that they prohibit the GPL, I believe that rather the license raises some issues WRT the GPL and the issue needs further clarification, unfortunately, given Microsoft's attitude toward the GPL, clarification may have to be at the end of a court battle.

Visual studio .NET restrictions on what licence you can release software under

CNET quotes the OneStat survey from earlier this Spring showing about 97% market share for all MSIE versions combined. This is an unreliable survey, and by citing it CNET shows a bias towards Microsoft. Read the OSNews coverage of the OneStat survey. There are some insightful comments in that thread.

Here are some more trustworthy numbers. 93.5% for MSIE is about as high as you can safely estimate. You can also check out Google's graphs, which suggest that any estimate of more than a 93% share for all versions of MSIE would be innacurate.

"Scott Robert Ladd has updated his GCC versus Intel C++ compiler benchmarks. This time round he includes updated results of the recently released GCC 3.1. The new version of GCC seems to be much better than its 3.0.4 predecessor, and GCC 3.1 even wins some benchmarks it lost previously over ICC. Overall, ICC remains a much faster C/C++ compiler, but GCC has successfully narrowed the gap. Read Scott's interesting conclusion at the end of the article too."

Just consider: the GNU Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece. The GNU Project says, "Please give our project equal mention," but Linus says, "Don't give them a share of the credit; call the whole thing after my name alone!"

What have you been smoking, RMS? AFAIK, Torvalds doesn't fucking care what you call the OS.

> amazing. a first post by submitter

Yes, weird, isn't it? I mean, I loaded Slashdot just before I go to bed tonight, and the story had just come up.. :o

At OSNews I have already written 2-3 book reviews about MacOSX programming. I am new into MacOSX myself, I only got this G4 450 Mhz Cube some weeks ago, but I started reading about Carbon and Cocoa since January, because I was seriously thinking of getting a Mac anyway.

So, here is a review, a second one, and I also recommend this book as well. Please come back soon on OSNews, because I will be reviewing another Carbon book soon, which (so far) seems to be the best of the lot.

(I have the whole OSX book series here, all the latest MacOSX programming books can be found in the shelf behind me. :D )

> amazing. a first post by submitter

Yes, weird, isn't it? I mean, I loaded Slashdot just before I go to bed tonight, and the story had just come up.. :o

At OSNews I have already written 2-3 book reviews about MacOSX programming. I am new into MacOSX myself, I only got this G4 450 Mhz Cube some weeks ago, but I started reading about Carbon and Cocoa since January, because I was seriously thinking of getting a Mac anyway.

So, here is a review, a second one, and I also recommend this book as well. Please come back soon on OSNews, because I will be reviewing another Carbon book soon, which (so far) seems to be the best of the lot.

(I have the whole OSX book series here, all the latest MacOSX programming books can be found in the shelf behind me. :D )

> amazing. a first post by submitter

Yes, weird, isn't it? I mean, I loaded Slashdot just before I go to bed tonight, and the story had just come up.. :o

At OSNews I have already written 2-3 book reviews about MacOSX programming. I am new into MacOSX myself, I only got this G4 450 Mhz Cube some weeks ago, but I started reading about Carbon and Cocoa since January, because I was seriously thinking of getting a Mac anyway.

So, here is a review, a second one, and I also recommend this book as well. Please come back soon on OSNews, because I will be reviewing another Carbon book soon, which (so far) seems to be the best of the lot.

(I have the whole OSX book series here, all the latest MacOSX programming books can be found in the shelf behind me. :D )

Applelinks had a preview a few months ago, and it's worth noting the differences between that review's projected features and the ones revealed in today's review.

But even more important than that is to remember that this Office suite isn't only aimed at Linux. It's also aimed squarely at the MacOSX crowd, which could help expand its market penetration. (Businesses that are slow to adopt Linux on the desktop are often less tentative about permitting MacOSX installations.)

On the other hand, this guy seems to feel that the combination of Windows-style extensions and MacOS-style application binding leaves the OS X user with the worst of both worlds!

much better

GNU HURD is nearly ready for a production release.
Debian finally moves to a 2.4 kernel.
Hell freezes over.

click here to read the article without supporting the capitalist pigdogs. no ads. one page. printable, baybee, printable.

You can find some interesting comments regarding the Tao ADK and AmigaDE here on OSNews.

The Japanese are far ahead with their gardets. Did you know DoCoMo offered internet access for PDAs in Japan as well?

Please go to BeNews and read the explanation for these two BlueOS screenshots. The second shot uses a "dummy" content for its windows.

Also, click here to read the Interview with the BlueOS project leader at OSNews.

Except for the parts that would DAMANGE THE OPERATING SYSTEM.

If removing it would damage the operating system, then it's no longer part of the application. It's a system resource.

This whole fiasco is a lot like saying "In order to remove the radio from a car, you have to take out the car battery, and that would hurt the operation of the car, so we can't remove the radio." This analogy was developed at length in this article almost 4 years ago, but it's still true.

When you talk about removing apps, you can't fairly talk about removing all the libraries they depend on. They're not part of the application, any more than libc is.