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Linux Journal Editors Choice Awards
An anonymous reader dropped a note in to say that the Linux Journal Editors Choice Awards have been announced. No real surprises in the list, except maybe giving RSS the award for best game.
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Even for Windows, Firefox is awesome... I left Netscape at version 6.0 (you know, the one with a ton of AOL bloat), and now it's the first time that I feel that a browser can compete with Explorer. It's fast, customizable, cute, compatible... and the extensions thing is just a greaaaaaat idea! Tabbed browsing is also the best thing since sliced bread...
:)
GG for the win!
I didn't checked the other awards, not being a Linux guy... (at least, not for now!)
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
I find that RSS is inconsistent and a constant challenge.
Yum, how many different implementations of RSS can YOU deal with? It is, in fact, a game.
[If you've never implemented a client, don't bother replying.]
RSS isn't a game. The best Linux game is Freeciv.. Period.
I've been using ClamAV now for a while, and it does a good job.
For my mail server, I use Qmail-Scanner, which does a very good job. Older versions had some issues with funky/broken MIME messages, but they seem to have been mostly resolved.
sure, i'm the primary author of ardour.
audacity is a soundfile editor, ardour is a digital audio workstation. you can do some of the same things in each - record audio, chop it up, apply FX and so forth - but they are not equivalent in a deeper sense.
ardour is modelled on proaudio apps like protools, nuendo and samplitude. its not intended to be used for simple editing tasks, but for complex multi-track, multi-channel audio work. we hope that its UI will evolve to make the simple stuff simple, but our initial goal has been to make sure we have an internal architecture that can do anything the high-end proprietary apps can do, and more.
if you don't know how the high-end tools work, ardour will seem very very complex (and the current lack of a manual won't help much with that). if you have used protools, ardour will seem relatively familiar to you, although we attempt to take best-of-breed features from all the other DAWs. otoh, DAWs have all pretty converged on the same core feature set, so the differences have more to do with GUI nuances than functionality.
Graphics Software: The GIMP
Is anybody else unhappy with some of the changes in GIMP2? For me, several useful things have disappeared (like ctrl-T to hide the layer's borders, now it's something else and I have to go in the menu), of the fact that the "anti" tool key modifier is now ALT and not SHIFT anymore (apart for the magnifier, go figure...) and so it creates problems with KDE, it doesn't save the tablet's device status,... the list is endless.
All in all, I wonder why they voted GIMP. It's become less good and less usable than GIMP1, and certainly less than Photoshop overall anyway.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The obvious choice... I mean, were there any other commercial games released this year for Linux?
Meh.
Yes! I have a Thinkpad T41, and it's what dreams are made of. I will never own another brand of laptop again.
The box runs linux great, there is a great thinkpad linux mailing list, the battery life is amazing and it's fast as hell.
Good choice linux journal...
cuban
Bull. There's nothing older; a friend invited me to join friendster, and my first comment to her was:
"Jesus Christ, it's high school, all over again."
It's an electronic popularity contest, with a little bit of recruitment thrown in. Most of us sit on the sidelines and watch as the really popular people amass a huge collection of friends.
Not surprisingly, a huge number of these young 20-somethings were from NYC, and almost all of them were exactly the type I can't stand- drunk-every-night clubbers. My personal favorite was some rich-bitch french girl who was almost completely naked in all of her shots on some beach. Her profile was truly a piece of work. Example: "Things I enjoy: Not having to work. Ever."
Friendster attracts the biggest concentration of intellectual-stuck-ups, prisses, and vanity-obsessed people I've seen in my life. Given Orkut is higher profile and more exclusive, I would imagine it's even worse.
Please help metamoderate.
RSS as in RSS 2.0 stands for Really Simple Syndication, while when the R in RSS stands for RDF, we're talking Semantic Web.
So, if you had mentioned the two in the wrong fora at the wrong points in time, it would invariably have set off a huge flamewar...
What resulted from the flamewar was a fork, and Atom was created. Now, it doesn't seem to me Atom is a Semantic Web application either, and I probably lost many points here....
There seems to be some peace possibilities though.
Anyway, the funny thing I meant to point out was that one could inadvertly spark a flamewar by just saying the wrong things yet meaning nothing bad about it...
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Congratulations to GnuCash on winning the "Desktop Software" category.
Nice to see some recognition for one of the most unglamorous and underappreciated of all the major free software projects. Originally a Quicken user, I started feeling disempowered by its mandatory activation/registration (in the Australian edition) and reports from other users that the next version displayed advertising (of Quicken's services). It made me angry enough to search for alternatives, and I was sufficently motivated to create a partition for GNU/Linux specifically so that I could use GnuCash once a week. Not something I'd expect Joe User to do, but experienced Windows tinkerers like myself can certainly handle it, and the experience will also make my eventual switch to Linux easier. I've seen where Windows and proprietary software is pushing the industry (toward DRM, software patents, more products needing activation, etc.) and I don't like it one bit. But I digress...
I would like to comment that GnuCash is frequently criticised as being too difficult for personal finances because of the "double-entry" system it uses. People who don't know better see the words "double entry" and the first thing they think (incorrectly) is "WTF, I have to enter each transaction TWICE?!". Please stop scaring people away with this FUD because, in a practical sense, GnuCash's double-entry foundation is of little consequence to former users of Quicken or similar programs. All it means is that everything that Quicken calls a "category" is an "account" instead. The power of the centuries old accounting practice is there if you need it, but in day to day use there's hardly a difference. Some people believe that GnuCash is more difficult to use than Quicken, but this has more to do with others things (perhaps its interface and the fact that it's also intended to cater to business users).
when did we start seeing LICENSE fanboys? /must be getting old
GPL instead of the BSD license
Funny how MySQL releases even the client libraries as GPL instead of LGPL.
That means you can't even ship your non-GPL product with MySQL support unless you buy a commercial license from MySQL AB. Commercial databases such as Oracle don't even have this restriction!
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
I'll offer this comment about Ardour; I'm the author of Postfish, Ogg and a regular contributor to Audacity. I've been hearing good thigns about Ardour for more than a year and have thus tried repeatedly to try it out.
a) No manual. No usable manual anyway. I know no one who uses it, so I have no 'live' manual to get me going either. Lots of apps don't have good manuals, but this goes along with b...
b) 'Angry fruit salad' user interface. Lots of functionality [apparently] brilliantly obfuscated by a million buttons in every imaginable color grouped randomly with no real UI intuitiveness to make up for the missing manual. I'm no newbie to pro audio; recording and mastering soundtrack CDs for local theatre groups is one of my pasttimes. But I cannot figure out how to even get started. I spend about an hour on step one every couple of months and have never succeeded in getting it to do anything with the 400G of raw digital audio sitting on my box.
The end result is that I've been unable to figure out how to find the most rudimentary starting-out functions. I already have all my audio; Ardour is too heavy to run on my portable recording boxes-- I have beaverphonic already doing my HD recording for the past several years-- so how do I do anything using Ardour with audio I already have? The manual's tutorials all begin with 'press the record button...' The FAQ says I can use it with my recordings, but the UI and manual conspire to convince me none of that functionality actually exists.
All this *is* a flame-- Ardour is supposedly good software but all it's done is waste my time and for that reason I'm annoyed-- but it's also a genuine request of the Ardour authors to help out all us poor folks that aren't Ardour hackers to get started. I'd love to see what this package can do and give it a fair shake.
Monty
second, there is no "MS world" here - the flagship DAWs all started life on the Mac. hell, 4 years ago, PT was only certified to run on a *single* intel-based system (from IBM).
third, DAWs have all pretty much converged on the exact same feature set. you could feel that in the air at NAMM this year - nobody knows where to go next (well, the ardour project does, but it will be a while before we do). ardour attempts to get the best ideas from all of them, so although our UI is structured roughly like PT, we include the new "editor-window-mixer-strip" that originated in SX and is now in Sonar as well.
I am a subscriber of the magazine and frankly found their choice of "game" abysmal since what they chose is not a game, no matter how they want to spin it.
I think Linux game developpers, that are fighting one of the most ungrateful tasks to make a Linux desktop a reality, should not be thrilled by being blantantly ignored by people that are suppossed to be knowledgable about Linux.
If the LJ editors do not use games, then the honorable choice would have been to either not to give an award or to delegate the selection on people knowledgable about this field.
Of all the possible choices they took the worst: to insult the intelligence of their readers and of Linux game developpers.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's a good reason why alot of user-application software happens first on systems like the Mac or Windows and comes to Linux second. It all has to do with what's a commodity and what isn't. The OS is a commodity (always was, actually, although people haven't realized that until lately). Text editors are a commodity. Web servers are a commodity. So are browsers. MP3 encoders are another.
;-)
...and this is _one_ of the places where Open Source steps into the picture naturally. When the DAW becomes a piece of commodity public infrastructure, OSS will come to offer the best choice: streamlined, debugged, interested in giving the user what they want rather than taking the user's money first, everything else is second. After all... the purpose of a company is to make money. "You don't need a product to make money... customers alone will do."
These are all things that, for the most part, people are no longer willing to pay money for. For that reason, you don't see big companies trying very hard to develop them (except for Windows/MS, and that's a special case for oh so many reasons. I expect the Mafia could make alot of money selling ice cubes to Eskimos too
DAWs have happened on commercial platforms first because there was money to be made on the hardware and there was money to be made on the software too. Open Source dogma aside, money *does* fuel innovation, and while a truly new and original application is working out the Right Way to do something for the first time, there's money to be made there... and while these software vendors are small and hungry, money does help the work get done faster.
With DAWs, Paul himself has said 'everyone has converged on the same feature set', an indication that all the innovation is more or less over, all the Big Problems mostly solved, and that this niche is about to commoditize. At that point the margins erode, the previously small fast hungry companies are now big, comfortable slow companies trying to hold onto what they've got and you see nothing really new appear--- although those big slow companies are desperately trying to cram new (mostly useless) 'features' into endless 'upgrades' to get people to keep spending money, be it on their software or their hardware.
Although OSS has driven and does drive innovation, don't overlook that one of its great roles is provide and maintain quality software in all those niches where Corporate America no longer feels like spending a great deal of its attention. Microsoft won the browser war, and hasn't released a new IE in years. Without Mozilla, we'd not have had a new browser in coming up on six years.
So accusing Ardour, or many other OSS workalikes of being clones isn't fair. They wouldn't exist if there was no need.
Monty