I personally don't mind about that kind of utility, but that's a good thing since it is one piece of the puzzle for linux acceptance on the desktop
This said, I fear that (apart good import filters), the biggest thing that still has to be done to make Linux accepted on desktops is a unified interface à la MS-Office.
A word processor, a spreadsheet, a SGDB, a Quicken, etc. That's good. An unified interface for all those desktop apps would make them killer apps.
There are efforts to unify desktops (a must for the average user), but is there an effort to unify all those desktop apps ? If not, shouldn't it be done ?
One year ago, I bought a Psion IIImx. It was a cool PDA, with a 28-Mhz processor, backlight, it didn't eat batteries to quickly.
It was a very cool toy. But the lack of this kind of synch-tool killed it. I've resold it.
It let me a bitter taste in the mouth. The utility given with the package "PsiWin 2.2", not only was Windows(or MacOS)-only, but was buggy as hell !
I never was able to make a real synch. Some tests were, but a real-life synch was nearly impossible.
And, worse, there was no synch utility for Linux at that time ! Just some less-than-alpha-file-tranfer utilities.
So, now, my appointments are back, as before, in the safest location I could imagine : my memory !;)
Stéphane
A common interface is a must for the average Joe !
on
Making Linux Beautiful
·
· Score: 3
There are two trends fighting here : those who think nothing has to be elected as a standard interface , those who think it has to.
It's quite simple, though : if the goal is to make Linux only accessible to the happy few who know how to use a computer, and how this computer works internaly, choice is a good thing, no wonder about that.
But if the target audience is (as it tends to be these days) the non-computers-professionnal, the lawyer, the doctor, the student, with their precise needs, a common interface is a must !
I used to work in a netcafé during my holidays. The OS used there was Win9x. One day, a member of the staff decided to move the icon for IE some pixels at the right. A lots of customers complained because it was "impossible to surf the net anymore !".
Most non-computer-litterate users are lost when you slighlty move an icon, what happens if there's a different desktop on every computer ?
Then again, that only applies for those who want Linux to become a popular, widespread OS for the average Joe.
It just looks like a pure marketing move... a complete new distro just for some new lines in the kernel and the "ABIT PerMon(TM) Tool Set " ? Mmmh... contributing some code to the standard kernel and releasing their tools as a standard GNU tool would be a far better solution, but it surely wouldn't have the bells and whistles of a "new distro". I'd prefer to see a motherboard company offering a Debian, RedHat, Slackware, Mandrake, etc. distro (even a 1-CD edition) with some specific (and GNU) tools on a floppy (which would be availaible by FTP too, of course)... THAT would be a very cool gesture for Linux users. But I'm sceptic about that Yet Another Cool Distribution thing.
I thought that the big leap with Mozilla was something about standards respects, stability, compact code, etc.
Not a word about Mozilla's merits in terms of good programming, just about a lot of stuff we don't really need.
I know there will be a Netscape 6 (!) AND a Mozilla whatever-they-call-the-final-release, but Netscape 6 will inherit these merits from Mozilla, right ? I think there should be a little paragraph to mention it in this article.
If this idea spreads, it could take the Net and the Web to completely new levels
That's true... in the US, where the local phone calls are free.
Here in Europe, an Internet connexion is still very expensive, much more than the computer itself. *DSL and cable are only experimental technologies and the good old PSTN modem is still the only way to surf the net for most of us.
What I wanted to point out is the fact that here, the Internet will make a giant leap when the connexion costs will be affordable by everybody... and not before!:/
I've noticed that problem with Weird Al's latest (not trying to copy, but just using DAE to play it since I have no audio cable), however the point at which it screws up is past where the final track *should* have ended (and indeed does end on a conventional CD player). Do yours fail during the music itself?
I've just tested it a little more and indeed, it seems to fail just at the end of the track, making most DAE utilities fails. I think that I've worked something out by tweaking CDParanoia III, though.
It could be, but there's always the possibility that there was a bug in whatever produced the CDs. Remember, "Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity".
Alas, it seems it can be explained by stupidity. But stupidity works like a charm when it comes to do stupid things, like protecting an audio-CD.;)
Pardon me if this question seems a bit naive, but is this really the first case of a CDDA protection scheme attempt ?
Before the 80 minutes blank CDs, weren't some CD's purposely extended (by adding unnecessary extra-tracks for instant) to more than 74 minutes to prevent them to be duplicated (mp3 weren't well known at that time) ?
Some special CDDA+Data formats seem to prevent in some way digital audio extraction. In order to listen to them in my car (so a legal copy), I've tried to make copy of two of David Bowie's back catalogue remastered CDs published by EMI in the late 1999. On these two CDs, I got a SCSI error while extracting the last track (tried with three CD readers and different DAE utilities). Isn't that some kind of copy-protection too ?
That not the first time an ISO image is available on an FTP (and its mirrors) before the official announcement. Sometimes it is the real thing, sometimes it is not.
I'll wait one or two days for an official announcement on http://www.linuxmandrake.com before downloading it. Safest.
Bowie is reported to be a net junkie. I once read that he wakes up very early in the morning, just to have his 4-hours/day quota of being online. I wouldn't be surprised if he was idleing on IRC (under a false identity, of course) all this time, while downloading mp3's (another things he seems to be in, these days).
For the ISP, I'd say he's on Bowienet, that seems a good guess;).
And finally, I believe David is a mac freak. I've read it somewhere a long time ago, but maybe he ch-ch-changed since.
I'm as big a Bowie fan as you and I think that Bowie's sudden interest in business affairs (an ISP, now a bank,...) is some kind of revenge with his past.
As I suppose you know, in his pre-Ziggy, Ziggy, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs days, he showed a remarkable inability to manage himself and had no sense of money. He had delegated every financial aspect of his career to his manager, Tony Defries, and lost lots of money because of this complete desinterest in money. His only goal, at the time, was to become a rock star (and he became the greatest rock star, IMHO).
So, I think that before asking whos he trying to turn on with this?, we should ask what has David to prove ?
Of course, the classical Mick Rock picture of Bowie (in his Ziggy days) simulating a fellatio on Mick Ronson's guitar ! (You can view it somewhere on Mick Rock's web site)
This picture was an icon of the 70's. Wouldn't it be cool if it became the icon of the OO's ?;)
For me, the responsibility comes more from the system administrator or even the individual who chooses a non-safe {OS - Server app - Client app} than from the software designer, open source or not.
IMO, the software designer can sell or distribute, freely or not, any program, even if it is full of security holes. The license of any program (commercial AND GPL'd) has a clause which says that the software designer is not accountable for bugs their application may contain. That's really the job of a good system administrator to secure its system and to choose the right solution. That's a matter of choice and these clauses in MS EULA-like licenses protecting the software designer against legal attacks seem a Good Thing (TM) to me.
Of course, theses views apply less easily to the home user, but the user who don't protect himself against macroviruses or security holes in his mail client is responsible from his own negligence. There is enough talk about Melissa & others in the mainstream press for the average user to know theses problems.
Don't ever forget that the perfect, bug free, 100% secure software is a myth. Legal actions against software designers have no real effect against big software vendors, but would hurt little companies/individuals, resulting in less choice, since only big companies would be able to "take the risk" to publish software ! It must be harder to write software with the constant fear of a legal action if you make a mistake somewhere in your code.
With my reasoning, no double standard problem : the system administrator / the user is the first person to be accountable for his poor choices.
Hotmail is down and everyone in the world seems to be annoyed. I think it's quite sad that slowly but surely, webmail replaces pop3/imap mail.
Five years ago, when I began using the Internet, only pop3 mail was available. These pop3 accounts were quite costy, but they worked. My university "gave" me my first pop3 mail for free, though.
Then, several companies began to give pop3 accounts for free, in exchange of some data for their files. They were slightly slower than those costy accounts (the bandwith was very weak), but, hey... that was free.
Then came Hotmail & Co. Banners, ads, mail stored only on the servers, poor functionality (filters, and all 'advanced' functions of any pop3 mail client are missing). But above all, a phenomenal waste of bandwith due to the ads, the fact that everytime you want to consult a mail or your address book, the data must be reloaded, etc. I hate wasting bandwith. I hate when my mother checks her webmail on my computer !;) With pop3 mail, sending a mail takes 3 or 4 KB for the entire process. How many KB does it take with webmail ?
Now, it's more or less impossible to find free pop3 accounts. Even Internet access provider begin to give webmail instead of real mail to their customers. Does it mean that, in a few years, every mail account will be a webmail account ?
P.S. : I can't understand why so many people believe that webmail is easier to use than pop3/imap mail. When traveling, it's so easy to use a simple telnet (every dumb Win95+ machine has a telnet client which works well with pine) or, even easier, a web gateway like Endymion MailMan. Same layout than hotmail, without the ads !
Actually, very few of these printers are winprinters. The HP Deskjet series have nothing to do with winprinters. They are by far the most usual printer you'll find on a desktop.
But in 99% of the cases, those HP's are driven by Windows drivers which use them as if they were winprinters.
But I can't agree with you. There's no real comparison between winmodems (which suck) and winprinters. The printer, by a rational definition, IS a printing head and a carriage system. Ask Gutenberg !
Moreover, the Windows model of transmitting a pre-processed bitmap to the printer works far better than the Linux (or un*x) model of transmitting a pre-processed postcript to an emulator which... transmits a bitmap to the printer !!! Remember real postscript systems are rare, expensive, and reserved to high-end systems.
Just look at the print quality you can achieve with a simple $100 printer with windows drivers and compare with the garbage Ghostscript usually produces. The Windows approach works better !
I think that Linux enthousiasts (I'm one of them) should stop slamming a technology just because it was Microsoft's choice and not Linux's.
You're touching a very important problem here. When Linux was considered as a server-only OS (something it IS excellent for), the Post/Ghost-script model was OK.
The Y2K goal for Linux seems to be the desktop. For that purpose, I'm not sure that the Post/Ghost-script model is OK : most desktop users use low-end printers, that aren't Postscript compatible.
Moreover, with Ghostscript, the applications (say the Gimp) are not aware of the limitations and abilities of the printer. Think about the paper borders, for instance. That's hard to print a precise job when your printer and your app can't communicate in both directions. Worse, only through an emulation:/
If desktop printers were Postscript-compatible, there would be no problem with it (for instance, Postscript does an excellent job in high-end Macintosh (pre-)press systems). But using an emulated mono-directional language, just doesn't make it for this purpose, IMHO.
Since companies (HP, Epson, Canon, Lexmark,...) don't seem to be ready to develop Linux drivers, we should encourage the projects to develop performant Linux printer drivers, not based on Postscript emulation anymore, but in a Windows-like approach, in other words in a bitmap approach. (I'm not trolling here, but the Windows approach is better for the desktop printers).
As far as I know, there are three major dhcp clients for linux: pump, dhcpcd and dhclient (those two names are not very imaginative and often confused, as stated in dhclient documentation). I was never able to obtain ANY information from my cable modem with pump or dhcpcd. I've tried tweaking the configuration files and the command-line without success.
Then I found dhclient. It worked instantly like a charm ! No configuration file needed, no command-line: I've just started it from the command-line and it worked. I'd recommend it to anybody.
AFAIK, most (but not all) distributions come with pump or dhcpcd. I suspect this is an obscure licensing problem (dhclient is free and open-source, but not GNU, I think).
Slashdot Mirror
Damn ! Bowie did invent so many new musical trends, and so he invented a networking protocol too ?
What a genius !
Now, no need to wonder anymore why he is running is own IPS ! So strange it's called "BowieNet" and uses that TCP/IP thing !
Stéphane
Aiming at the office suite...
Hello,
I personally don't mind about that kind of utility, but that's a good thing since it is one piece of the puzzle for linux acceptance on the desktop
This said, I fear that (apart good import filters), the biggest thing that still has to be done to make Linux accepted on desktops is a unified interface à la MS-Office.
A word processor, a spreadsheet, a SGDB, a Quicken, etc. That's good. An unified interface for all those desktop apps would make them killer apps.
There are efforts to unify desktops (a must for the average user), but is there an effort to unify all those desktop apps ? If not, shouldn't it be done ?
Just some thoughts...
Stéphane
One year ago, I bought a Psion IIImx. It was a cool PDA, with a 28-Mhz processor, backlight, it didn't eat batteries to quickly.
;)
It was a very cool toy. But the lack of this kind of synch-tool killed it. I've resold it.
It let me a bitter taste in the mouth. The utility given with the package "PsiWin 2.2", not only was Windows(or MacOS)-only, but was buggy as hell !
I never was able to make a real synch. Some tests were, but a real-life synch was nearly impossible.
And, worse, there was no synch utility for Linux at that time ! Just some less-than-alpha-file-tranfer utilities.
So, now, my appointments are back, as before, in the safest location I could imagine : my memory !
Stéphane
There are two trends fighting here : those who think nothing has to be elected as a standard interface , those who think it has to.
It's quite simple, though : if the goal is to make Linux only accessible to the happy few who know how to use a computer, and how this computer works internaly, choice is a good thing, no wonder about that.
But if the target audience is (as it tends to be these days) the non-computers-professionnal, the lawyer, the doctor, the student, with their precise needs, a common interface is a must !
I used to work in a netcafé during my holidays. The OS used there was Win9x. One day, a member of the staff decided to move the icon for IE some pixels at the right. A lots of customers complained because it was "impossible to surf the net anymore !".
Most non-computer-litterate users are lost when you slighlty move an icon, what happens if there's a different desktop on every computer ?
Then again, that only applies for those who want Linux to become a popular, widespread OS for the average Joe.
Stéphane
It just looks like a pure marketing move... a complete new distro just for some new lines in the kernel and the "ABIT PerMon(TM) Tool Set " ?
Mmmh... contributing some code to the standard kernel and releasing their tools as a standard GNU tool would be a far better solution, but it surely wouldn't have the bells and whistles of a "new distro".
I'd prefer to see a motherboard company offering a Debian, RedHat, Slackware, Mandrake, etc. distro (even a 1-CD edition) with some specific (and GNU) tools on a floppy (which would be availaible by FTP too, of course)... THAT would be a very cool gesture for Linux users.
But I'm sceptic about that Yet Another Cool Distribution thing.
Stéphane
Hi,
I've just discovered Stampede's homepage, I had never heard about them before. From what I read, it seems to be a very nice & clean project.
There's just one thing that bugs me : they say, in their slogan, that they are "The First PGCC/Glibc Distribution Optimized for Speed!".
Isn't that precisely what Mandrake does (and does quite well IMHO) for monthes, if not years ?
No flame intended, I just want to open a thread about a Stampede/Mandrake comparison, discussing their respective merits. Oh well...
Stéphane
Blah Blah, Bloat, Bloat, AOL, IM, Communication suite, Bloat, Bloat, Blah, Blah, market shares, Blah, Bloat, AOL, Blah, Blah (repeat and fade).
I thought that the big leap with Mozilla was something about standards respects, stability, compact code, etc.
Not a word about Mozilla's merits in terms of good programming, just about a lot of stuff we don't really need.
I know there will be a Netscape 6 (!) AND a Mozilla whatever-they-call-the-final-release, but Netscape 6 will inherit these merits from Mozilla, right ? I think there should be a little paragraph to mention it in this article.
Stéphane
Err, did I miss something ? Why 6 ? Just to have an higher number version than MS IE 5.5 ?
I have read somewhere that they planned to name it Netscape 2001, which sounded quite cool. But 6 ? Strange
Stéphane
If this idea spreads, it could take the Net and the Web to completely new levels
:/
That's true... in the US, where the local phone calls are free.
Here in Europe, an Internet connexion is still very expensive, much more than the computer itself. *DSL and cable are only experimental technologies and the good old PSTN modem is still the only way to surf the net for most of us.
What I wanted to point out is the fact that here, the Internet will make a giant leap when the connexion costs will be affordable by everybody... and not before!
Stéphane
I've noticed that problem with Weird Al's latest (not trying to copy, but just using DAE to play it since I have no audio cable), however the point at which it screws up is past where the final track *should* have ended (and indeed does end on a conventional CD player). Do yours fail during the music itself?
;)
I've just tested it a little more and indeed, it seems to fail just at the end of the track, making most DAE utilities fails. I think that I've worked something out by tweaking CDParanoia III, though.
It could be, but there's always the possibility that there was a bug in whatever produced the CDs. Remember, "Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity".
Alas, it seems it can be explained by stupidity. But stupidity works like a charm when it comes to do stupid things, like protecting an audio-CD.
Stéphane
Pardon me if this question seems a bit naive, but is this really the first case of a CDDA protection scheme attempt ?
Before the 80 minutes blank CDs, weren't some CD's purposely extended (by adding unnecessary extra-tracks for instant) to more than 74 minutes to prevent them to be duplicated (mp3 weren't well known at that time) ?
Some special CDDA+Data formats seem to prevent in some way digital audio extraction. In order to listen to them in my car (so a legal copy), I've tried to make copy of two of David Bowie's back catalogue remastered CDs published by EMI in the late 1999. On these two CDs, I got a SCSI error while extracting the last track (tried with three CD readers and different DAE utilities). Isn't that some kind of copy-protection too ?
Stéphane
AFAIK, Mandrake was an improved version of Red Hat 5.x, when it came out more or less one year ago.
But in the meantime, they became quite independant from Red Hat, in terms of contents as in terms of version number.
IIRC, Mandrake 6.1 was available long before RH 6.1
Stéphane
That not the first time an ISO image is available on an FTP (and its mirrors) before the official announcement. Sometimes it is the real thing, sometimes it is not.
I'll wait one or two days for an official announcement on http://www.linuxmandrake.com before downloading it. Safest.
Stéphane
Bowie is reported to be a net junkie. I once read that he wakes up very early in the morning, just to have his 4-hours/day quota of being online. I wouldn't be surprised if he was idleing on IRC (under a false identity, of course) all this time, while downloading mp3's (another things he seems to be in, these days).
;).
For the ISP, I'd say he's on Bowienet, that seems a good guess
And finally, I believe David is a mac freak. I've read it somewhere a long time ago, but maybe he ch-ch-changed since.
Stéphane
I'm as big a Bowie fan as you and I think that Bowie's sudden interest in business affairs (an ISP, now a bank,...) is some kind of revenge with his past.
As I suppose you know, in his pre-Ziggy, Ziggy, Aladdin Sane and Diamond Dogs days, he showed a remarkable inability to manage himself and had no sense of money. He had delegated every financial aspect of his career to his manager, Tony Defries, and lost lots of money because of this complete desinterest in money. His only goal, at the time, was to become a rock star (and he became the greatest rock star, IMHO).
So, I think that before asking whos he trying to turn on with this?, we should ask what has David to prove ?
Stéphane
Of course, the classical Mick Rock picture of Bowie (in his Ziggy days) simulating a fellatio on Mick Ronson's guitar ! (You can view it somewhere on Mick Rock's web site)
;)
This picture was an icon of the 70's. Wouldn't it be cool if it became the icon of the OO's ?
Stéphane.
For me, the responsibility comes more from the system administrator or even the individual who chooses a non-safe {OS - Server app - Client app} than from the software designer, open source or not.
IMO, the software designer can sell or distribute, freely or not, any program, even if it is full of security holes. The license of any program (commercial AND GPL'd) has a clause which says that the software designer is not accountable for bugs their application may contain. That's really the job of a good system administrator to secure its system and to choose the right solution. That's a matter of choice and these clauses in MS EULA-like licenses protecting the software designer against legal attacks seem a Good Thing (TM) to me.
Of course, theses views apply less easily to the home user, but the user who don't protect himself against macroviruses or security holes in his mail client is responsible from his own negligence. There is enough talk about Melissa & others in the mainstream press for the average user to know theses problems.
Don't ever forget that the perfect, bug free, 100% secure software is a myth. Legal actions against software designers have no real effect against big software vendors, but would hurt little companies/individuals, resulting in less choice, since only big companies would be able to "take the risk" to publish software ! It must be harder to write software with the constant fear of a legal action if you make a mistake somewhere in your code.
With my reasoning, no double standard problem : the system administrator / the user is the first person to be accountable for his poor choices.
Just my thoughts,
Stéphane
Hotmail is down and everyone in the world seems to be annoyed. I think it's quite sad that slowly but surely, webmail replaces pop3/imap mail.
;)
Five years ago, when I began using the Internet, only pop3 mail was available. These pop3 accounts were quite costy, but they worked. My university "gave" me my first pop3 mail for free, though.
Then, several companies began to give pop3 accounts for free, in exchange of some data for their files. They were slightly slower than those costy accounts (the bandwith was very weak), but, hey... that was free.
Then came Hotmail & Co. Banners, ads, mail stored only on the servers, poor functionality (filters, and all 'advanced' functions of any pop3 mail client are missing). But above all, a phenomenal waste of bandwith due to the ads, the fact that everytime you want to consult a mail or your address book, the data must be reloaded, etc. I hate wasting bandwith. I hate when my mother checks her webmail on my computer !
With pop3 mail, sending a mail takes 3 or 4 KB for the entire process. How many KB does it take with webmail ?
Now, it's more or less impossible to find free pop3 accounts. Even Internet access provider begin to give webmail instead of real mail to their customers. Does it mean that, in a few years, every mail account will be a webmail account ?
P.S. : I can't understand why so many people believe that webmail is easier to use than pop3/imap mail. When traveling, it's so easy to use a simple telnet (every dumb Win95+ machine has a telnet client which works well with pine) or, even easier, a web gateway like Endymion MailMan. Same layout than hotmail, without the ads !
Stéphane
Actually, very few of these printers are winprinters. The HP Deskjet series have nothing to do with winprinters. They are by far the most usual printer you'll find on a desktop.
But in 99% of the cases, those HP's are driven by Windows drivers which use them as if they were winprinters.
But I can't agree with you. There's no real comparison between winmodems (which suck) and winprinters. The printer, by a rational definition, IS a printing head and a carriage system. Ask Gutenberg !
Moreover, the Windows model of transmitting a pre-processed bitmap to the printer works far better than the Linux (or un*x) model of transmitting a pre-processed postcript to an emulator which... transmits a bitmap to the printer !!! Remember real postscript systems are rare, expensive, and reserved to high-end systems.
Just look at the print quality you can achieve with a simple $100 printer with windows drivers and compare with the garbage Ghostscript usually produces. The Windows approach works better !
I think that Linux enthousiasts (I'm one of them) should stop slamming a technology just because it was Microsoft's choice and not Linux's.
Stéphane
You're touching a very important problem here. When Linux was considered as a server-only OS (something it IS excellent for), the Post/Ghost-script model was OK.
:/
The Y2K goal for Linux seems to be the desktop. For that purpose, I'm not sure that the Post/Ghost-script model is OK : most desktop users use low-end printers, that aren't Postscript compatible.
Moreover, with Ghostscript, the applications (say the Gimp) are not aware of the limitations and abilities of the printer. Think about the paper borders, for instance. That's hard to print a precise job when your printer and your app can't communicate in both directions. Worse, only through an emulation
If desktop printers were Postscript-compatible, there would be no problem with it (for instance, Postscript does an excellent job in high-end Macintosh (pre-)press systems). But using an emulated mono-directional language, just doesn't make it for this purpose, IMHO.
Since companies (HP, Epson, Canon, Lexmark,...) don't seem to be ready to develop Linux drivers, we should encourage the projects to develop performant Linux printer drivers, not based on Postscript emulation anymore, but in a Windows-like approach, in other words in a bitmap approach. (I'm not trolling here, but the Windows approach is better for the desktop printers).
Stéphane
As far as I know, there are three major dhcp clients for linux: pump, dhcpcd and dhclient (those two names are not very imaginative and often confused, as stated in dhclient documentation).
I was never able to obtain ANY information from my cable modem with pump or dhcpcd. I've tried tweaking the configuration files and the command-line without success.
Then I found dhclient. It worked instantly like a charm ! No configuration file needed, no command-line: I've just started it from the command-line and it worked. I'd recommend it to anybody.
AFAIK, most (but not all) distributions come with pump or dhcpcd. I suspect this is an obscure licensing problem (dhclient is free and open-source, but not GNU, I think).
You can get dhclient from http://www.isc.org/products/DHCP/dhcp-v2.html. It should fix your problems instantly !
Stéphane