Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Galeon, Forgent, Platformation
Who said what now? bratgrrl writes "eWeek's "Red Hat: Next Redmond?"article was quietly and without comment altered- they deleted the crucial "Red Hat backlash" quote from the original article. No retraction, no explanation, just an Orwellian revision. Thank goodness for Google, which cached the original article.
I suspect the original quote never happened."
Because not everyone needs Chatzilla. Mozilla gets a lot of attention around here -- after all, it is the giant lizard of the open source browser world. But to the question "What about Galeon?", Nachtjäger writes: "The answer: LOTS is happening to Galeon. Given the length of time since the last release, we decided to write up an update on how things are going on Galeon2. Check it out here"
I hope certain aspects of Galeon (tab-name shortening and color coding, for two) are soon rolled back into Mozilla.
OK, now you can have it. Esekla writes "Slashdot did an article about the announcement of Kylix 3 (the first Kylix to support C++ code), but at the time it was not actually available for download. Now both Open and Enterprise Trial editions finally can be downloaded."
Now you can assemble your yard-sale cluster. Speaking of things now really available, BJH writes: "The site featured in last week's Dreamcast BBA story is now accepting orders! The good news is, they're only $US80 each. The bad news is, they're not accepting orders from outside Japan ;) (If there's enough interest, perhaps someone could be convinced to do a bulk buy and ship to people overseas...)"
Anyone who offers something interesting enough in trade can have my Dreamcast for mucking about ;)
When you trace things back far enough ... Dennis writes: "Although Chris has a valid point about the catch 22 between Win2K, SP3 and HIPAA, his example is not accurate because medical records that are related to students are protected by FERPA regulations and not by HIPAA. Here's a reference link with more info."
The fat ladies are still warming up. john82 writes "With all the hoopla still swirling about MP3s, there is fresh information in the JPEG saga. Dateline Berlin: Algovision-Luratech GmbH says that Forgent's patent claim (4,698,672) is all wet. Technical experts have laid out the technical and legal arguments against the claim. And they intend to air the dirty laundry at a meeting Sept 4. The announcement by Forgent earlier this year caused quite a stir here. Wonder if Sony can get their money back?"
Of especial interest to iBook owners. Earlier this month, Slashdot posted the news that rather than wiping your Mac's OS to put on a GNU/Linux system, you could order Yellow Dog Linux preinstalled on Apple hardware. Ray Sanders of Qli Tech Linux Computers writes: "We also are selling Apple Systems with Linux installed, however, Terrasoft is only installing Yellow Dog Linux, we offer Gentoo PPC, Debian PPC, Mandrake PPC, and SuSE PPC. We also have full working sound and video on the iBook and Powerbook with XFree86, whereas YDL Does not yet support the mobile Radeon chipset found on those two units."
Competition is good.
I wonder if the behavior of organizations like eWeek will eventually change, as it becomes clear that when some questionable behavior is noticed and discussed publicly, that said organization can't just get away with quietly trying to hide the original problem?
I think a big part of the behavior of execs at these companies - aside from the fact that they're businessmen, not journalists, and wouldn't know a journalistic ethic if it bit them in the MBA - is that the execs don't "feel" the criticism, because they don't participate in online forums, so at best, hear about it secondhand, and certainly don't feel threatened by it - they don't perceive it as "real".
Before you scoff, I have an example. It was reported on TV the other day that Jeff Skilling, ex-CEO of Enron, currently hangs out at some chic club in Houston, essentially crying in his beer and asking people if they believe his claims of being innocent of wrongdoing.
Regardless of Skilling's innocence or guilt, he clearly feels a great deal of shame (or is doing a decent job of pretending that). This guy's a Harvard-educated MBA, he's taught essentially that ethics are secondary to profit, and how to put that into practice, so why the shame?
Because he has been publicly attacked and judged, in venues that he and his peers understand and participate in themselves - in this case, the major media, especially TV and print.
When we have executives who've grown up IM'ing their buddies from their bedrooms, who have a feel for online media, will they be as averse to being excoriated in those media, as current execs are to the old media? Are we simply seeing a bunch of tired old companies trying to hide their heads in the sand and pretend that no-one sees what they're doing? When it's finally realized that this doesn't work, will it stop?
Oh wait. This is the real world, and I'm talking about interminably idiotic human beings. Please ignore everything I've just said.
Mozilla is two things, and many people get them confused. First, there's the browser that most Slashdotters know and some love.
However, more fundamentally, there's the development platform which presents an XUL interface for developers to write their own applications. Mozilla the browser is one such application (the reference app, you might say), but so is Galeon. For that matter so are Netscape, Komodo (not a browser, but an IDE!) and at some point, presumably AOL's UI.
When we compare these apps to Mozilla, it's kind of like comparing XFree86 to the MIT reference server. Yes, there's some value in the comparison, but let us not forget that the one is built on top of the other, and here's to hoping that Galeon (in which I'm writing this) becomes as mature and feature-rich as XFree86!
[NOTE: Yes, it's only a loose comparison, since XFree has re-written much of the internals of the MIT refernce server, where Galeon is pretty much layered right atop the Mozilla framework. Still, it's the best comparison I can think of right now]
The rendering is generally pretty snappy, though I have hit a few pages that make it take a long pause, I assume to shuffle doument elements around the screen (The business section of cnn.com is particularly bad for this.)
All in all it's a great browser. You don't realize how much you come to depend on its features until you're stuck using another one, too. The Dev team did an excellent job; kudos to them.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
MP3 has a right to do anything they want with their patent; we have Ogg so if Thompson gets to be too nasty about enforcing MP3, we can simply switch over (as RedHat is doing). Remember: Thompson has never hid the fact that they had a patent on MP3; the people who made MP3 a popular format for pirating music in fact broke Thompson license agreements and copyrights. I seriously doubt that they will go after the XMMS developers (free MP3 decoder for Linux); they aren't even going after the Lame developers (Free MP3 encoder for Linux). They make a good deal from money from MP3 hardware players and from commercial MP3 encoders/decoders for Windows (money they deserve to earn); they won't go after anything free for Linux because that will just make for less MP3 users and more OGG users.
Forgent, on the other hand, has no right to JPEG. This is simply a case of some greedy corporate types who saw that their company was going down the tubes--this happens to companies which do not provide goods and services of value for people any more. Instead of providing something of value, they went through their patent profile and found something that looked like a patent on JPEG. In their greed, they blackmailed some large Japanese corporations, some of whom gave in easily--I guess giving money to shady organizations is an accepted norm in their culture.
Naturally, once their actions became public, the reaction was outrage. And well it should have been--Forgent did nothing to help invent JPEG or make the JPEG image format a reality. All they did was make a different motion video format which had some similarities to JPEG--simply because the cutting edge of image compression at the time was based on DCTs and run-length encoding. Any similarities their format has to JPEG is because both JPEG and Forgent's thingy used the same previously invented principles. If Forgent did, in fact, invent JPEG, and never hid the fact it was patented, we would be in a different situtation. Since Forgent did neither, they do not have a chance of winning a court case.
If I were Sony, I would sue Forgent for making false patnet claims or some such.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
You didnt think BSD was 'Unixy' enough for you!!? My god man, BSD unix comes from the original unix code by AT&T. Its over twenty years old. It IS unix. If anything, I think that Linux doesn't feel 'unixy' enough. After spending time using and administering both FreeBSD and Linux, I can't, can't, can't understand why linux has become so popular when it is so fiddly and inconsistent. If anyone out there is serious in trying a real unix, have a look at any of the BSDs. (My favourite is FreeBSD).
The single most important feature that makes me use Galeon over Mozilla is the option to open popups in a new tab. I consider this better than completely banning unrequested popups, because some sites use the popups for stuff other than ads. I think every browser with tabs should have this option and I have only seen it in Galeon. (Does Konqueror have it? I don't have a recent enough version.)
-jfedor
Of course, I'm not everyone, so I'll ask: Is there any really compelling reason to go to a Linux distro left?
Here's a good one: Speed.
OS X is a fairly well engineered Unix but at its core is Mach, and Mach-based systems don't have a good reputation for performance. Darwin is better than most Mach-based systems but it's still a traditional message-passing nanokernel and there is a performance hit associated with that, compared to a monolithic kernel (of which Linux is an excellent example) or newer approaches to microkernel design like L4 (which the HURD, currently based on Mach, is gradually porting to).
If you're developing POSIXy software on Apple hardware, the seconds you save on your compiles using Linux can very quickly add up into minutes, hours and days. This is especially true on SMP hardware - which of course, every PowerMac is now - where Linux currently scales better than anyone else, at least on systems up to about 8 processors.
Similarly, if you're using the machine exclusively as a server (an area Apple is trying to push into), the extra speed of Linux may come in useful.
In any case, if you're going to use the machine largely as a GNOME workstation, why not run it on Linux, where it runs fastest (insert rant by FreeBSD users) and has the least rough edges? You're obviously familiar with Unixes, and you use fink so you must be comfortable with apt-get. Why not use Debian where you use the same tools but have a far far larger package selection?
You see, it depends on what you use your Mac for. If you absolutely must have some Cocoa-based apps, then yes, OS X is the better solution. If you want an idiot-proof interface, then yes, OS X is better. But if all your MacOS apps are Classic or Carbon then Mac-on-Linux works fine. Audio apps don't work so well, but then they don't under Classic on OS X and there's not much of a rush to make them run native on OS X, so either way it's a reboot into OS 9.
Personally I think KDE is beginning to outclass OS X eye-candy wise (Keramik is drop-dead gorgeous and the Crystal icons are excellent too) so at the very least this is less of a factor than it used to be.
Put simply: if you want Unix, well, OS X is a good Unix. But Linux is just better at it.
(Score:-1, Wrong)
Where do you draw the line between a correction and altering truth? Is it okay to correct a mistyped date? How about a "mistyped" quote? There's really no good way to determine what is a correction and when you are covering up something.