Slashdot Mirror

Apple Blocking Opera on the Iphone
http://www.osnews.com/comments/20455

(blocking legit apps on the iphone is one of the stupidest things Apple has done in a long time)

http://osnews.com/permalink?226219
http://osnews.com/permalink?226313
http://osnews.com/permalink?226315

They're old but still mostly valid.

http://osnews.com/permalink?226219
http://osnews.com/permalink?226313
http://osnews.com/permalink?226315

They're old but still mostly valid.

http://osnews.com/permalink?226219
http://osnews.com/permalink?226313
http://osnews.com/permalink?226315

They're old but still mostly valid.

The Nexenta project provides an Ubuntu userland to opensolaris, including apt/dpkg.

http://www.osnews.com/story/20280/Nexenta_Ubuntu_Server_with_ZFS_goodness

I wrote an article for osnews that talks about Devzones we're using with the Nexenta project. Basically, we have a machine setup and give out normal user accounts. The user can login and run 'devzone_create' and a virtual instance of the OS is created (take a couple seconds) and the user can enter it as root and do anything (even rm -rf). Once he's done using the zone, he can run devzone_free and the virtual OS vanishes.

We have around 8 instances running right now, used by various developers. The article is here.

Please. Just take a look at the case with ACPI: http://www.osnews.com/story/17689 Microsoft has more than enough weight to throw around and make it hard to implement hardware standards.

Those wanting the latest versions of the Android SDK instead of a buggy load of old crap have to sign an NDA that prohibits talking about it, publishing screen shots, or sharing code fragments.

http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/112945
http://osnews.com/thread?323230
http://www.newmobilecomputing.com/comments/20069

Google are a bunch of dollar-hungry corporate arseholes just like Apple and MS, but at least you know where you stand with the latter two, neither of whom are pretending their SDKs are FOSS while behaving in ways that are the antithesis of the openness that's a central tenet of the movement.

Alexandre Julliard: We try to implement the bugs, or at least the ones that applications depend on. The only reason for implementing the Win32 API is to run all the applications written to it, there is no point in trying to improve on it if it breaks compatibility. If you want to design a good API, Win32 is the last thing you want to start from (actually Win32 is probably a good example of how *not* to design an API ;-)

News feeds:

IE Blog - for keeping track of what MS is up to on the browser front
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/atom.xml

Standards Blog - not as many posts now days, was very important during the height of the ooxml/odf war
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/backend/geeklog.rss

I keep OSNews for completeness, but it is pretty useless - software news
http://osnews.com/files/recent.xml

Anandtech - hardware news and reviews
http://www.anandtech.com/rss/articlefeed.aspx

Ars Technica - tech news and commentary
http://arstechnica.com/index.rssx

Phoronix - linux graphics news and info
http://www.phoronix.com/rss.php

Linux Weekly News
http://lwn.net/headlines/rss

KDE announcements
http://www.kde.org/dotkdeorg.rdf

Open Source Software Planets:

http://planet.debian.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.fedoraproject.org/atom.xml

http://planet.ubuntu.com/rss20.xml

http://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml

http://planetkde.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.freedesktop.org/rss20.xml

http://planet.mozilla.org/atom.xml

http://planet.jabber.org/atom.xml

mostly software releases and XEP updates
http://planet.jabber.org/news/atom.xml

http://maemo.org/news/planet-maemo/atom.xml

environment feeds:

Good Pacific Northwest environmental news
http://www.sightline.org/daily_score/rss

Best environmental news and discussion on the web
http://www.worldchanging.com/index.xml

I keep Treehugger for completeness, but I mark 90% of their posts as read without looking at them.
Really too "light green/consumer green" for me
http://www.treehugger.com/index.xml

other feeds:

Dive into Mark - not what once was, but good enough to keep around
http://diveintomark.org/feed/

Loooong posts on software
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Bruce Scheier knows Alice and Bob's shared secret
http://www.schneier.com/blog/index.rdf

The intersection of Science (especially Evolution), Liberalism, Atheism, and Squid
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/index.xml

"Your comment has too few characters per line" - what a load of bull. Taco, I know this and the timer are supposed to cut down on spam, but I think they annoy legitimate posters more than they reduce spam. You should really reconsider these "features".

Look at some of Open Source's so called success projects - Apache, it sucks to get locked down and requires a lot of technical knowledge to get properly setup.

Another one...OpenOffice.org. This one also sucks big time. After almost a decade in development, guys in the OSS wprld have not figured how to get the beast fast, and beautiful enough to grab one's attention.

I am happy to say that the KDE folks appear to get it with KDE 4.0. For the first time, I am happy to note that I will abandon Gnome for KDE after all, even staunch GNOME fan boys have pointed out that Gnome is living in an age of decadence.

Here's another way to test the quality of code ...

http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

This was the feature I was waiting for, was hoping to hear more about it when Fedora 9 was released.

The article (or snippit) says Fedora 9 has kernel based mode setting..

http://www.osnews.com/story/19661/A_Preview_of_Kernel-Based_Mode-Setting

Anyone test it yet?

I know some will probably tag this as a troll or a flamebait, however IMHO this is exactly why Linux will never be able to really replace either Windows or Mac OS X for desktop usage.

I feel it's inappropriate to assume that statement is entirely true because of one example. A good example of what I mean is how Beryl forked from Compiz for 3D desktop features in Linux. Beryl ended up with much more eye candy, but was considered less stable by many. Now, however, Beryl merged back in with Compiz to form Compiz Fusion, which provides most of the eye candy from Beryl and the stability of Compiz Fusion. Ultimately, I feel it provided the perfect mix of what users want vs. what users need.

You need to unite your efforts, not work against each others.

The beauty of open source and the example I provided with Beryl and Compiz, is that competition like this can create an end result of the two parties helping eachother. If a party does not wish to bend to the wills of other users, then you end up with a truly free "market" where the best product(s) win.

The whole KDE vs Gnome debate is one of the things that keeps Windows on PCs.

Again, I beg to differ here. The biggest reasons why Windows remains the strongest in the market is: 1. it's what most people are familiar with, and presently what the overwhelming majority of software has been written for, and 2. OEM vendors don't generally offer viable alternatives (this appears to have been changing recently, however). Also, KDE and GNOME are supposed to co-host their "flagship conferences" in 2009. ^_^

What I think is most important to note here is that the egos of individuals should have no relevance what-so-ever in making decisions such as this. A pissing contest between individuals is certainly of no interest to me (though I admittedly don't know how much of what's going on in this instance) or any end-user. What is relevant is the demand of users, which will most likely allow the best product/fork to win in the end, or result in the best result/feature-set to be merged in with the originating project.

The last I checked in with the Nexenta project they were in violation of the GPL because the Sun license IP conflicts directly with the letter of GPL. When I asked on list, I got no response. Huh. Imagine that.

Here's a link to somewhat inflamatory summary of their license issues. Look for the comment titled "Nexenta devs = liars and thieves" http://www.osnews.com/comments/12569

I know one person who runs a mainframe at home, and I'm sure there are more.

Emulated.

Hercules

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercules_emulator
http://www.jaymoseley.com/hercules/
http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Emulators/IBM_Mainframe/Hercules/
http://www.osnews.com/story/3015

From what I can tell, MKV is better and cleaner than Ogg. But either one would be preferable to AVI, MOV, or WMV.

Theora simply isn't as good as h.264, and h.264 has hardware decoders and good open source decoders -- and is even supported in Flash, now. The only possible reason you could have for preferring Theora is freedom from patent issues.

Oh, and this comes to mind as well. Opera's biggest enemy is not IE, it's Firefox.

shamelessly hijacking this thread, but Haiku is not far from self-hosting now http://www.osnews.com/story/19325

I am aware of Professional Audio editors that use Linux as their primary machines, not experienced personally, but my boss showed me a heap of neat tools and I must say I was impressed. You can do some awesome stuff with Jack-D as well from what I recall. http://www.osnews.com/story/1511
Have used Sony DVD Architect before, didn't like Vegas though. Depends what your doing with that. http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3 looks interesting.

This website may also come in handy http://www.linuxalt.com/

Back to my point, your initial statement is still incorrect, you have deep ingrained Windows requirements, that happens, till you have the time/willingness to learn new apps (or the Proprietary apps you need release linux versions) that's how it'll be and you will continue to fork out the $$ for the privilege, but you are not a Grandmother, nor are your requirements that of the average user. The average user will get a long quite well and will find for the most part your average Desktop aimed Distro to cater for their every need.

If you are quite happy to stay on the tread mill or don't have the time to change, that is your choice. If you want to explore what's out there, you have to be prepared to research and find the best tool for the job.

Interesting discussion here. Along with a couple low-temp flame-squabbles.

From an article I wrote in 2006

http://www.osnews.com/story/16543/A_Very_Critical_Look_at_OS_Re-creation_Projects/page3/

"Whenever the matter of reviving OS/2 is brought up, I find myself asking - why? It is difficult to see which of the technologies that existed in OS/2 and could be brought back to life within a modern implementation. Many of the features, such as industry-leading DOS support, which gave OS/2 its edge, are simply no longer relevant.
"

"However, the very features which made OS/2 the OS of choice for so many have faded in importance. It is with a heavy heart that many of OS/2 former users (myself included) have to admit that they don't really want to go back to OS/2 anymore than they would trade in their broadband Internet connection for dial-up ANSI BBS access and 320x200 VGA games with ad-lib music. Perhaps IBM could have kept OS/2 relevant but they didn't make any serious efforts to develop it beyond about 1996.

What features, for example, does the kernel offer that modern operating systems do not? For that matter, does anyone really want to use an OS that uses drive letters?

In conclusion, in my opinion, recreating OS/2 would be more work than starting an OS from scratch, considerably more work than improving another OS and ultimately, produce a less useful result than either. "

"the effects are very slow and drop frames, there are remnants everywhere, you name it. This is annoying, but acceptable, seeing this is the first official release of the new KWin, and you cannot expect the developers to reach the same level of stability and performance of OS X' Quartz Extreme, Vista's Desktop Window Manager" http://osnews.com/story/19159/KDE_4.0.0:_Sweet_Follows_Sour

I think the summary at OSNews had it right. KDE 4.0 is not KDE 4 per-se, this release represents the technology backend release (the middleware) to developers all over the world. It is from now on that developers should get attention to KDE 4.0 and start porting or writing applications for it.

If anything's to be fixed, then statistics on what's going wrong, where, and how are needed. If they can't be produced, then there's likely nothing wrong (although I admit this doesn't apply in all cases). Profiling and hard facts describe reality.

Comparing GTK+ 2 apps to GTK+ 1 apps is typically a faux pas, as the GTK+ 2 apps have much more functionality, as they've had years more development than the old GTK+ 1 versions. I admit that GTK+ 2 itself is probably a little slower than GTK+ 1, but again, that's due to extra functionality. I've looked around for some figures, and haven't been able to find any actual figures, but I've got an interview with Owen Taylor shortly after the release of GTK+ 2.0, and then a mailing list post about Ethereal performance a month or so later. The second one gives a more rosy view, and since optimisations and improvements have been made since (see Federico's 2005 presentation on optimising GNOME for an example), I'd be fairly confident that GTK+ 2 is OK.

You've been working with it for seven years, and yet every comment of yours on GNOME and GTK+ on Slashdot in the last year has been slagging it off quite badly. It makes one wonder why you continue to code with such a "steaming pile of crap written by developers whose egos are bigger than their brains". If by "interfaces" you mean library APIs then you're dead wrong. GTK+, Glib and all the other core libraries of GNOME have had complete API and ABI stability since the first 2.x release. We're more than happy to fix problems if they're pointed out to us, or if we find them ourselves. I personally get quite annoyed, however, when someone waves their hands in the air and says "it's common knowledge that Gnome has problems", without a scrap of proof or supporting data.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php/11506/Windows-Ext23-Filesystem-Driver/
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/filterdrv/default.mspx
http://www.fs-driver.org/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ffsdrv/

That write up was taken nearly word-for-word from an OSNews posting earlier today:
http://osnews.com/story.php/18874/Do-It-Yourself-CPU-Demod-Running-Minix

Here's a better summary of things to come in Hardy, linked from an OS News posting.

Oh, that's not true. You can always run AmigaOS 4.0 on it.

I thought this was a joke and then looked it up and it's actually true: The post-Vista version of Windows in development has been dubbed "Windows 7. So it's really true -- the Windows OS is finally catching up to that revolutionary MacOS from 1991, System 7. Windows users will finally be able to take advantage of such innovations as QuickDraw and Balloon Help Congratulations Microsoft!!

I can back up this opinion as someone who deals with text processing 8 hours a day.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226315

And this is still not a full list. For example, one thing not mentioned there is that Word allows me to continue working while it autosaves. Writer does not, it just interrupts me suddenly and locks out of my work for this time. It wouldn't be a problem for me if saving were fast, but when the file in question is a moderately large DOC or RTF, saving may take several seconds. That annoys the hell out of me.

I can back up this opinion as someone who deals with text processing 8 hours a day.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226315

And this is still not a full list. For example, one thing not mentioned there is that Word allows me to continue working while it autosaves. Writer does not, it just interrupts me suddenly and locks out of my work for this time. It wouldn't be a problem for me if saving were fast, but when the file in question is a moderately large DOC or RTF, saving may take several seconds. That annoys the hell out of me.

I can back up this opinion as someone who deals with text processing 8 hours a day.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226315

And this is still not a full list. For example, one thing not mentioned there is that Word allows me to continue working while it autosaves. Writer does not, it just interrupts me suddenly and locks out of my work for this time. It wouldn't be a problem for me if saving were fast, but when the file in question is a moderately large DOC or RTF, saving may take several seconds. That annoys the hell out of me.

The problem is that WU cannot check if a system needs updates if the WU client software is out of sync with the WU server software.

Now, let's say that WU is set to "download but not auto-install" or to merely "check for available updates". And let's say that when WU checks with the WU server, it sees that WU software itself needs to be updated. At this point it can either update the components and then proceed to check for available updates; or it can notify the user that WU itself needs to be updated before it can check for available updates. Slashdotters seem to prefer the latter (mainly because MS chose the former; had MS chose the latter, then slashdotters would argue for the former, but I digress). The problem with the latter choice is that the user is unaware of what security updates are available behind the WU update, and might be tempted to reject updating WU over and over, month by month, unaware that more and more real security updates are being queued up behind the WU update that the user is rejecting.

I think this osnews post covers the issues well:
http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=18617&comment_id=271599

Okey dokey here you go.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226315

Okey dokey here you go.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226315

Okey dokey here you go.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comment_id=226315

The story: http://www.osnews.com/story.php/18102/Plan-9-Running-on-Blue-GeneL
Reason why: http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/hare.index.htmlReason
One of developers: http://www.graverobber.org/

So does Windows NT. That's the same argument that Microsoft used to claim NT was POSIX compliant. Real Windows applications did not use the POSIX API, they used Microsoft's proprietary API. Virtually all real .NET applications, even written under Mono, are going to be written to Microsoft's APIs... not open ones... because damn few people are going to write Mono apps if they don't plan on them being portable to Windows.

NT's POSIX compatibility is indeed just a marketing gimmick--nobody uses it. But Mono/Gtk# has lots of actual users. Here is a lost of Mono/Gtk# applications from 2 years ago; many more have been added, and several ship standard with Ubuntu and Debian.

Set your environment variables, start up a Mono app, it doesn't see them because it's running in the same background VM as the one you started three hours ago as a side effect of running some other Mono app for some unrelated purpose.


$ uname -a
Linux box 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Fri Aug 31 00:55:27 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
$ cat test.cs
using System;
public class Test {
        public static void Main() {
                Console.WriteLine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariab le("foo"));
        }
}
$ mcs test.cs
$ foo=a test.exe
a
$ foo=b test.exe
b
$


I don't have any significant Mono projects right now (although I hope to in the future), but I use several Mono programs on Linux (all of them Gtk#-based) and it's a good platform that a lot of people have invested a lot of their time in. Neither the Mono developers nor end users like myself deserve to be hurt by BSD or Apple fanboy propaganda and lies, so cut it out.

Actually, they will. And I'm not sure why this story also isn't on /. since this is much bigger news!

AMD To Open up Graphics Specifications
"A quick report from the kernel summit: AMD's representative at the summit has announced that the company has made a decision to enable the development of open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward. There will be specifications available and a skeleton driver as well; a free 2D driver is anticipated by the end of the year. The rest will have to be written; freeing of the existing binary-only driver is not in the cards, and 'that is better for everybody'. Things are looking good on this front. More in the kernel summit report to come."

http://www.osnews.com/story.php/18573/AMD-To-Open- up-Graphics-Specifications/

You don't even need that
Windows Services for Unix 3.5 is free to Windows XP and 2003 users.
Included by default in 2003 Server R2 and all Vista editions.

WSU allows a windows machine to run perl, bash and ruby programs much the same way as
Cygwin.
WSU supports native mounting unix NFS shares also
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/5751/Review-of-Win dows-Services-for-UNIX-3.5/

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx? FamilyID=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778&Disp layLang=en

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219 [osnews.com]
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313 [osnews.com]
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315 [osnews.com]

Note that format compatibility is rarely mentioned here if at all. It's the features, big and small, that make you productive or just allow you to get the job done.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219 [osnews.com]
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313 [osnews.com]
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315 [osnews.com]

Note that format compatibility is rarely mentioned here if at all. It's the features, big and small, that make you productive or just allow you to get the job done.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219 [osnews.com]
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313 [osnews.com]
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315 [osnews.com]

Note that format compatibility is rarely mentioned here if at all. It's the features, big and small, that make you productive or just allow you to get the job done.

I'm afraid it will take a little bit more than just a spellchecker.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315

This is not specifically about students, but many points raised here apply to students as well.

I'm afraid it will take a little bit more than just a spellchecker.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315

This is not specifically about students, but many points raised here apply to students as well.

I'm afraid it will take a little bit more than just a spellchecker.

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315

This is not specifically about students, but many points raised here apply to students as well.

Apparently they didn't think over the feasibility of their initial migration to OpenOffice.org. Hopefully this taught them the lesson that free as in beer and free as in speech may not be enough.

I hate to say it, but for an awful lot of people not dealing with the simplest documents OOo is still far from being viable. Moreover, MS compatibility is only a part of the problem, and probably even not the largest one. For example, a good list of what a professional such as a technical writer or translator misses in OOo Writer can be found here:

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315

Apparently they didn't think over the feasibility of their initial migration to OpenOffice.org. Hopefully this taught them the lesson that free as in beer and free as in speech may not be enough.

I hate to say it, but for an awful lot of people not dealing with the simplest documents OOo is still far from being viable. Moreover, MS compatibility is only a part of the problem, and probably even not the largest one. For example, a good list of what a professional such as a technical writer or translator misses in OOo Writer can be found here:

http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226219
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226313
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=17593&comm ent_id=226315