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Interview with David Faure of Mandrake & KDE
JigSaw writes: "OSNews features an interesting interview with David Faure, the french KDE developer who works for Mandrake Software. His code can be found on Konqueror, KFM, KWord and he is also the main bug hunter for KDE. David talks about KDE 3's enhancements and speed improvements, the future of KWord, the debugging tools under Linux, and even Gnome2, .NET, MacOSX and Mozilla."
...between GNOME and KDE. Despite what some Windows fans may claim, I don't think it's detrimental to have two leading desktop managers for Linux. As I see it, the competition is really pushing the two development teams to outdo themselves. Healthy competition -- as long as it does not translate into flame wars on the Internet -- is a good thing, and we're all the better for it. I mean, look at how the UI for Windows has evolved in the past five years (and I'm not talking about eye-candy here - yes, alpha channels are cool, but it does not add any kind of usability)...It seems obvious to me that MS could use a little competition on the desktop before its GUI stagnates further.
(Hmm..."stagnate further"...is that an oxymoron?)
Reminder: find a new sig
I think that the print side of Linux is still very very lacking in ease of use and setup. Theres really no reason for this, especially when I can install Mandrake and have a nice wysiwyg gui ask me a bunch of questions and things just work (for the most part). CUPS should just come with something this powerful itself (and yes, im aware of the web interface, but it lacks.. bad).
Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln
I can see it now, all the best open source including KDE 3.0, Mozilla 1.0, Open office 1.0, and Xfree86 5.0 :). Plus its fast and much better than a broken window :)
Hey you've linked to so many interesting stories on osnews lately that I've changed my lynx homepage from slashdot to osnews.
Don't worry, though, I'll still open slashdot every day to *not* read the Jon Katz articles
- Derwen
http://fsfeurope.org/
How come that the very first beta of KDE 3 was so nice, and all the following betas are so unstable? :-)
KDE 3: The Windows Killer
nice karma whoring.....
Reproduction of stories by OSNews is granted only by explicitly asking authorization from OSNews and if credit is given to OSNews.com.
Here is an interview that he with linux.org. A little outdated but still interesting.
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=586
read this...
oops... well, that was a mistake...
i did give credit though...
I prefer to use Windows simply because the windowing system works at a sensible speed.
Okay, the Microsoft "Windowing system" is hardly full featured, but it works quickly, and it seems to fit well together.
I'm not aware of the details, but it seems objprelink is rather a "hack", i.e. a quick change that doesn't address the whole issue.
I undesrtand what he tried to explain, but I think it gives a negative conotation to term "hack", which already has a bad reputation of meaning "crack" (thanks mainly to the mainstream press).
Given the fact that the audience of the site is not yout typical Joe-AOL dude, the author could have ommitted that i.e. explanation without compromising his answer...
"KDE 3 comes out soon. What is the best new advancement/feature found in KDE 3 in your opinion?"
:-P
Heheh, screw functionality and "the greatly improved Javascript and DHTML support in Konqueror". What users REALLY want is translucent window backgrounds.
Seriously though, it does look might sweet.
--I hate big sigs.
but what's preventing many people from switching to Linux is the lack of more specialized applications. For instance, 3D modelling, audio/video editing, advanced scientific apps, accountancy apps...
This is very true. People talk about Linux 'taking over the desktop' which is good, but there is much more immediate niches to fill in other areas. They are good spot for Linux because the people doing that need a complete system, but don't need it to work with every other computer out there, and aren't worried about being able to buy the latest games etc. Printing is another one which he didn't mention but someone here did. Linux needs a better print system, and whoever is in a position to do it could probably even take a look at MacOS X for some very good ideas. 3D is getting the royal treatment and is a very good place for linux right now with XFS, ReiserFS, PRman, BMRT, Mental Ray, Maya, Shake, Softimage XSI 2.0, Houdini, and all sorts of high end graphics stuff, no 3D production studio is locked into windows or SGI anymore. Video and audio on the other hand, really need work. The video toaster ran on an Amiga for fucks sake, that should be proof that ultimate compatibility isn't needed and a self reliant system can do the job well. This is where I really see Linux taking off, is with distributions specifically made for different niches. They could come with all the libraries needed for the different programs you might run, and of course have all the free ones already installed. It will take a few startups to do something like this, however, and startups aren't in a good position right now.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
Mr Quick, :(
if you can, PLEASE edit OUT the copy/paste you did on Slashdot of the OSNews article. The bandwidth problems we have is mostly when we have MANY and BIG images on our articles, NOT on articles like this. Please edit out our article from the Slashdot forum. It is a violation of our copyright. You should have asked us first...
Thank you,
Eugenia
Kind of funny that you have an account here but didn't know that.
-- Dan
Thank you! Your letter will be duly added to the archives at ChillingEffects.org, the internet's Cease & Desist letter repository!
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
If everyone gets upset when someone "caches" a web site on /. in case it get's /.'ed, then my karma whoring days are over. :(
It's funny. Laugh.
Please edit out our article from the Slashdot forum. It is a violation of our copyright. You should have asked us first..
I'm sorry, but there's just a fine line here. If half the people out there can't read the article because it's Slashdotted, how can you benefit? Would you rather Slashdot not link you at all?
I don't know how many times I've had to read an article from a post because the site gets railed. Frankly, I'm glad there are people like Mr. Quick out there - otherwise I'd miss half the articles on this site.
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
----- rL
Oviously the KDE developers don't think so.
If half the people out there can't read the article because it's Slashdotted, how can you benefit? Would you rather Slashdot not link you at all?
/. tell
/. weenie to tell me what
Gotta love it when dipshits on
people how to run their business.
Me, I'd trust a
I want any day of the week. But I wouldn't
presume to try to convince anyone that
what I thought they needed was actually what
they needed.
You must be a consultant.
I recently set up a epson stylus c60 for my g/f. It works great, but... She is on redhat 7.2, and I used printtool with the latest packages from the redhat site to configure everything.
It looks like when I print plaintext, the printer does a great job, printing using the black cartridge and doing it very fast.
For ANYTHING postscript (ie, web pages from mozilla, or text from abiword), the printer makes black by mixing color, even if there is NO COLOR on the page (hell, even if there is, if the text is black, print it with black ink, dammit!!! (it did this with the redhat postscript test page too). Is there a way around this stupid behavior short of creating a 'black-only' print queue?? Never mind that solution too, since many times I want color, but I want anything black to print using BLACK!
I am using the stp driver for the Stylus 760, since there wasn't a C60 specific driver listed. Would switching over to cups solve my problem? Is there a way to get this working with the current LPRng supplied with redhat?
How is it a gift horse? Posting the entire article here robs the publisher of his/her rightful traffic. That they are currently overloaded (an assertion which I find no evidence to support) is scarcely an excuse. That's like saying you have a right to copy books all over the place because the bookstore is temporarily out of stock.
>I'm sorry, but there's just a fine line here.
Indeed.
>If half the people out there can't read the article because it's Slashdotted.
This is the fine line. OSNews is *NOT* Slashdotted. Slashdot has linked us over *25 times* the last few months, and we were never down because of it. We are always prepared for Slashdot. We have the bandwidth needed for Slashdot's links and we delivered accordingly.
Each time I put a bigger article online, I calculate what we can handle and what not. If our bandwidth can't handle something, I just do not put it online, or I use one of our 4 mirrors (OSNews uses some mirrors for some of its images).
So, your excuse does not hold. At least in this case.
Slashdot has removed copyrighted content in the past. I'm reminded of a chapter out of the Scientology book that was once posted here.
This is the fine line. OSNews is *NOT* Slashdotted.
I used the link. It worked. I read the article on your site. I wouldn't even know OSNews.com existed if it weren't for Slashdot.
If a site is down, I *immediately* check the posts to see if there's a copy there, which I then read. This is probably what most people do.
If a site *IS* Slashdotted, only a few thousand people have it in their cache to post before its gone for 10-12 hours or more. He thought you wouldn't have the capacity, so he posted it WITH FULL CREDIT. Unlike most rubes who are probably just karma whoring, he actually had a reasonable reason - even though he was wrong.
I'm defending him because I often use posted articles - because I don't have some "Slashdot was just updated with an article!" indicator. I can't beat those people - by the time I check out a site sometimes, it's down. But I only check the posted version of an article if the original is down. If the site doesn't go down, the post is usually modded down and disappears.
The truth of the matter is that Slashdot is a forum where anything goes for as long as Slashdot exists. The DeCSS code is here, along with other copyrighted materials. If you don't want to be linked on Slashdot (and most likely have your article copied by anyone, even though it is illegal), then tell the maintainers and I'm sure they won't link you
There's always going to be someone that will post your story to Slashdot. People can post anything to Slashdot. It's a crime and it sucks, but it's the truth - and it's permanent.
----- rL
The attention is the gift horse - free traffic. Without Slashdot there would be no traffic and half of us wouldn't have heard of OSNews.com.
It's like celebrities bitching about being famous and not having any privacy. You take the good attention with the bad attention.
I'm not justifying the copying, I'm saying that when attention comes, not everything is good and merry. Sometimes people take your article because they want to read it - especially those in the "everything on the 'Net is free" mindset. This happens to the big boys too and you hardly see them posting to Slashdot, discouraged.
Most people use the site link. I did. Big deal if the article is posted, who the heck browses at 0?? Am I the only one here who actually trusts moderators to do a good job?
----- rL
There is nothing wrong with competition. Its great that you can go and choose from all the different types of cars you can buy. However, incompatibility is bad. It's not like buying a Ford will limit you to using certain roads. Case in point. KDevelop is a far better IDE than Anjuta. Yet, Evolution is nicer than KMail. What to do? I'm not sadistic enough to run apps from both desktops (too un-asthetic), so I put up with Anjuta just to stay with GTK. The KDE/GNOME application landscape is rife with such choices. The base of GOOD Linux desktop applications is too slim to be divided up among multiple desktops. While I doubt there is anything that can be done about these multiple projects, but its a bad state of affairs nonetheless. Of course, none of this would be a problem if the desktop was in the X server, where ALL apps could use the same set of services, but apparently, nobody had heard of dynamic loading (to make the desktop a plug-in to the X server) when X was designed.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Gee you can get all of these things right now if you'd just get a Mac, and now you even get a Unix-like foundation under the OS. Computers are a too, choose the right tool for the job. How come only in operating systems do people have to be so rigid in their religion? The major auto companies are not exactly angels, nor are the soft drink companies, etc., but few choose what is obviously an inferior choice because of religion.
or its GUI will continue to stagnate.
will be trapped in stasis?
will keeps on sucking?
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
The KDE developers are GNOME-badmouthing idiots. This guy was going off about how GNOME needs to be object oriented, falsely claimed that GNOME was moving to .NET.
Miguel avoided insulting KDE at all when he was interviewed, so why do the KDE people have to be so immature?
I don't understand why people can't deal with printing under Linux. I've used and set up both lpr and lprng and it was a piece of cake, once I managed to avoid running out of memory all the time on the ancient Postscript printer I was using (which is an issue that would come up on Windows or the MacOS as well).
CUPS is supposed to be easy-to-use, unlike lpr and lprng (which is why people are willing to use a piece of non-free software...ease of use). But all I hear about on Slashdot is how people can't get CUPS set up properly. I've come to the conclusion that either CUPS doesn't deserve its ease of use reputation or everyone setting up their printers simply doesn't understand Linux in the least.
I find lpr and lprng to be much easier to troubleshoot than the Windows printing system...we have some plotters and CAD stuff at work, and troubleshooting them is a complete and utter pain. You have no idea what's going on in them.
Subscribe to the mandrake club.
Alot of people claim to support open source but only a few thousand seem to be putting their money where their mouth is. Theres mandrake club, theres transgaming, and plenty of other ways to fund development of open source.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
ummmmm... why don't you just cry about it then?
Yes, of course. Miguel is a stunning example of maturity.
I for one, will visit OSNews when it's not Slashdotted and re-read the article and comments that are posted to it. So I guess I'm a gift-horse.
And the moral thing to do is to respect the wishes of the author. End of story. There is no "technical out", "legal arguement" or "that's life" to it.
If you want to behave in an immoral fashion, go ahead - you'll likely get away with it throughout your life. But don't try to justify... a quick "fuck you" to the author is more polite by simply being more concise, and states your position to all those around you.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
It's clever, though.
This is a line of text.
a quick "fuck you" to the author is more polite by simply being more concise, and states your position to all those around you.
I think you misread my post - go read it again. It was less of a "fuck you" and more like a "that's life on the Internet".
If you don't like the game, don't play it. I love the people and businesses that start using an open medium and then try to close it up and wonder why people won't accept it. *I'm* going to accept an author's wishes, but a heck of a lot of other people aren't simply because the Internet does not enforce such behaviour. I am not justifying their behaviour, I'm explaining WHY it exists.
OSNews.com could format their news in a dead-tree magazine and probably not have to worry as much about people stealing, because it's more time-consuming than just making a digital copy and it reaches less people, so it's not worth it. Web sites have to understand that while they have a legal right to their content, the morals of Internet users (and the rules of the sites people read, like Slashdot) aren't forced to coincide with legal rules. If they did, the Internet (and the sites it contains) would likely be less popular.
People like the Internet as a free medium. Don't be surprised when there's a backlash against anything that tries to take away that freedom.
----- rL
In the end, we're all free to do whatever we want - we just pay the penalties. That runs the gamut from murder to posting an article on Slashdot (yes, I said "runs the gamut", I'm not making a comparison). In things like ignoring authors wishes, it's unlikely that anybody will ever suffer legal action except in the rarest of cases. But the penalty is that if and when you author something, you've contributed to a culture that dosen't give a damn about your wishes.
Respect is lacking on the internet now. Has been for a little over a decade (interestingly, about the same time that Spam and commercial intrests have been in here).
People like the Internet as a free medium. Don't be surprised when there's a backlash against anything that tries to take away that freedom.
A freedom does not have to be used in all cases. Freedom of speech is an utterly vital concept, but the simple act of being polite and the property of respect seems to be getting lost in the rabid defense of "Information must be free".
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Respect is lacking on the internet now. Has been for a little over a decade (interestingly, about the same time that Spam and commercial intrests have been in here).
I don't think it's any co-incidence that commercial interest in the Internet sparked lack of respect. Like I said before, content makers were trying to make an insecure system secure, and only ended up alienating an audience that liked the "free exchange of information on the the Internet" idea.
So people disrespected companies who were new guys coming along and saying "ok, this is how the game is going to be played on the Internet now because we want to make money". No wonder people don't respect them - the companies haven't earned it if they act like that.
As the Internet flooded with more people, we (humanity) lost focus as to the purpose of the 'Net: an information source, not a commercial venue where you can buy ideal real estate in a domain name and sell books at close to cost price.
Of course, we have to justify the expense of all of this architecture. Governments and companies would not invest so heavily in the Internet if it was merely a free-for-all and had no commercial value. And we too take the good for the bad here: improvement in the network in exchange for pop-up, pop-under and pop-to-the-side ads and sites that require registration, more strict enforcement of copyrights (like, I can't copy you even if I do give credit).
But it would be nice if all of these commercial guys kept that in perspective when they use the Net to make money (or even to break even). There were always be a small population that will resist - if only because they can - to subtly spread freedom about the land. Robin Hoods of the Net, if you will.
I will not participate, but I agree with many of their points - and only wished there was a more constructive way to "fight back" against the commercialization of the Internet.
----- rL