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Helix Code Changes Name To Ximian
Ambrosius27 was one of a number of people who has sent the word that Helix Gnome is nada mas. It's now....Ximian - they've even got a name-change FAQ and everything.
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Bad move indeed, at a software company i used to work for, the PHB's decided to switch everything to M$ because "i read in the paper that borland went bankrupted or something, they got buyed by some company named Inside or something similar, and we won't get any support or new versions from a bankrupt company".
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Well, I'd like to have them named Crap Code, Inc. It will probably never cause trademark problems.
;-)
And no no no no no this is not because I think they suck, I use Helix Code all the time. It's just that I could see the humor of a "guaranteed trademark-free" name like Crap Code, Inc. and I think the name of Ximian is even more of an insult to the Good Stuff they write.
So H.C.: I'll give you 3 months time to pick up the name, with no response I might just start using it myself
It's... It's...
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
English is the the promiscuous Y chromosome of languages...all sorts of cruft accumulates in it... ;)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Gnome's
Now
Owned by
Monkey
Enthusiasts!
is there one guy out there, with some massive speech impediment who keeps coming up with these dumb-ass tech names:
Agilent
Itanium
Duron
Ximian
He must be stopped...
$ which ximian-update
ximian-update: Command not found
Ok, NOW what? :)
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
When you apply for your free COMDEX pass, put your job title down as Redshirt, grunt, slave, meathead, Anonymous Coward, Karma Whore, or Peon. There's something fun about walking around a convention with a badge that reads
Patrick Draper
IBM
Galley Slave/Rower
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Keeping
I thought that Solaris was going to put Helix Gnome as one of their main X window managers? Is that still on??? Will it now be "Solaris shipped with Ximian"???
Sarcasm is the recourse of a weak mind...
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Keeping
am i the only one asking how the hell do you pronounce that???
Assuming everyone else has read the FAQ, yes you are the only one.
Don't believe me? Read between the lines here:
See? No further proof needed.
Information is the catalyst for revolution
Ted Nancy was Jerry Seinfeld. How this is topical I know not.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
This is the kind of thing that happens when every damn domain name has been taken already.
Ximian. Great. Not be confused with the similarly spelled but equally meaningless Ximean, Ximeon, and Ximien. (quick, go grab those TLDs before some other bastard does).
We're really winning some "linux is easy" converts with that one.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Followed immediately by Cro-Mag-Gnome.
Don't bother booing. I just cut my own ears off to teach myself a lesson for that, and I won't be able to hear.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
From the FAQ...
Has anything else changed?
No
What they're saying is that they are a guaranteed source for verified, certified, known-good code. That is, to distinguish themselves from any potential forking going on. That's the business model.
Makes sense to me, regardless of how cool 'Helix Code' sounded and how dumb the new name sounds.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- Jeff
Still, "Ximian"? Yikes.
The chief spokes-monkey declared the official communications protocol of Ximian to be the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite. He then screeched, beat his chest and threatened to pelt feces at users of inferior protocols like SMTP.
It also allows the red ape to develop software for years without delivering a stable version.
It probably has something to do with Helix Educational Software.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Inprise.
Everybody remember when Borland changed their name to this? Everybody remember how stupid it was? What's their name now?
Yeah.
Let's hope this doesn't go the way of OpenSales after they changed their name to something strange (Zelerate).
I really wish they'd stop wasting time on ridiculous things like this, and update some of the packages that they originally released with helixcode.
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Uh. Helix Gnome has been the _only_ version of Gnome in Debian for months.
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Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
There seems to be a lot of sucky name changing going on lately. Ximian??? What's that? A monkey that knows how to run a photocopier? This is almost as bad as the one Andersen Consulting did. Now they're... umm... see? It's really bad and I can't even remember it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
they should pick a funky little symbol, and change their name to "The Gnome Previously Known As Helix"
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And when?
Apparently, it's "zimm-eee-ann". Accent on the ZIM.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Hmm... smartsand?
Poop. You know, I forgot about that. That's exactly the sort of shoddy fact-checking that's gonna get me fired one of these days.
(Actually, SKB/GSK is a huge employer of tech folks in this area of PA. I really should know this.)
Uh, no. GNOME 1.2 has been/is the version of GNOME in woody/sid. Helix GNOME is based on GNOME 1.2, hence your confusion.
Go to ebay.com . Click on the "Antiques" category, then the "economic fallout" subcategory, and click on "dotcom clearing house". There will be approximately 2,938,032,238 belly-up dotcoms there. Search for "open" AND "source" AND "helix" AND "code" AND "linux" and "GNOME" to narrow the choices down to approximately 2,300,323,232. From there, click on the "mascots" drop-down menu, scroll down through "jumping man" "happy runner" "skydiver" and so on, and about 281 scrolled pages through, between "monsters" and "gazelle" should be a selection titled "spidermonkey". Double click that, then click on the 543rd item on the following page. Here, you will be able to buy helixcode's old domain name and identification. Read the fine print, because in doing so you will learn that the only assets you gain are the domain name and company identification, and you will be assuming all of helixcode's tax burden for the year 2000.
...this just in: we've spoken Miguel de Icaza personally who has denied this vicuous hoax. Reportedly, Helix will continue to be the name, they didn't really mean it.
translation: the slashdot audience hates the name, we can just claim it a hoax and keep the old name.... keep thinking of a better one.
Or, is this just to compete with Xaero - upon startx the little monkey will do a backflip and shoot you with his rail gun....
- passion
Can we continually fork each release of Ximian and name it Helix again?
Not an individual, but a company called Lexicon, I quote from CNET (this was the first reference to them I could find)
They are the ones responsible for this weird name trend, I can't seem to find their website though, can anyone help me out?
"Me and my girl named bimbo . . . limbo . . . spam" - Captain Beefheart.
From the FAQ:
How do you say Ximian?
ZIM-ee-un, to rhyme with "simian."
This is incorrect. The correct pronunciation (read slowly):
St-oooooooo-pid.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
That's the stupidest name I ever heard. What genius thought of that?
(It's not flamebait; it's my opinion.)
signed,
a Helix Gnome user
I'm confiscating their crack pipes!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Nat and I arrived to the name "Helix Code" (which was the name under which we incorporated our "International GNOME Support" company) after much debate.
The project began By the end of the summer we were still using IGS as our name, and we had been talking to a lot of people about IGS. Although we did not like the name, and we started looking for a new one.
Nat had picked up the name Hopscotch, which I did not like. The name also had problems because some company owned the trademark for the name, so we had to look for another one. The debate for the name had created so many constraints that we were uncapable of agreeing to the suggestions that the other one did.
Eventually, we came up with two lists of suggestions, and Nat said `Ok, remove the ones you dont hate from my list, and I will do the same to yours'.
And we ended up with two empty lists.
So we were in this Evolution kind of mood (because of our product, and our recent interest in evolution), and Nat suggested finally `what about Code Helix?' and given our previous frustration, we quickly agreed on it. We later that day changed our minds, as we thought that Code Helix would make people think `They do developer tools' (I do not remember what was the thought process that followed here), but we changed the name to `Helix Code'.
Now, this was not a final name, it was just a temporary name that we would use to incorporate the company, and we would change it as soon as possible. Neither Nat nor I liked the name originally, so every time we told a friend "We are starting a company!" when the question about the name came in, we would explain for five minutes why it was not such a great name and so on.
We began the work to find a new name almost in march 2000, when we were told by our lawyers that it would be very hard to avoid other companies to produce Helix products (like this complete copy of Helix Code that is not associated with us: Helix Code UK).
A temporary name that Jacob liked was "Loolix Bode" which was what the ATT 411 service guessed when we called for information about the company once.
The process of the name change had been going for a number of months and many names were suggested. Both Nat and I experimented extreme frustration and lack of imagination after countless meetings to change the name. Jacob to this day calls the company "Loolix Bode 2000". And Ian still calls the company "Mr. Rupert's Quality Software Group" (mr rupert being the Helix mascot).
After a year, I am very attached to Helix Code, but the name and products we would produce would be pretty much unprotectable, and there would be no guarantee to customers that they were purchasing software or services from us. And too many companies already had Helix-prefixed products that were in similar domains.
There were a lot of nice sounding names, and various names we scanned from various countries, towns, cultures, languages, but most of the ones I liked were at least taken on the DNS.
There are even more details to the story, but they are quite boring.
The Ximian name fits nicely with our monkey logo and with our monkey culture and with the evolutionary theme that has been in the company since we started it.
Best wishes,
Miguel.
I mean, even if you haven't read the FAQ, it's pretty obvious that this is yet another pun on their favourite simian theme (cf bonobo etc).
And lastly, please Taco, take some lessons in Spanish, because that line was really embarassing.
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Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
In a related story, Siemens announced that it would be changing its name to Xiemens. Also, Smith-Kline-Beecham will become Xmith-Kline-Beecham, Sony will become Xony, and this reporter, formerly known by the name Sammy Baby, will become Xammy Baby. All of the aforementioned organizations also announced plans to introduce new logos with lowercase letters, sans-serif fonts, and neat swooshes, kinda like the Nike logo.
Probably western side / face is a more coherent translation, not that that makes any sense either when applied to Gnome....
Ximian -> naimiX -> Name Ex / X
It is a metareference to the fact that they had to change the name.
Or I read too much Internet.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Sure, it's a horrible name. But so are Pentium, Inspiron, Duron, Inprise, and all the m/.+ent$/ names.
BUT WE GET USED TO THEM and eventually we can say them and spell them without hardly thinking about it.
They'll do fine.
fyi, English is a Germanic language
God Fucking Damnit
Oddly enough, there's a well known naming corporation called A Hundred Monkeys. You have to wonder. Simian conspiracy?
On an unrelated note Ximian is a REALLY stupid name while Helix Code was actually kind of cool...
.technomancer
.technomancer
But could this change be the thing hodling the Debian project from including Helixcode Gnome in their Distro?? According to the list there was some copyright issues....
Gorkman