Most people will disagree, but I feel that the
more open a society becomes, the better.
If we had no privacy, then terrorists couldn't
hide. And if the government had no privacy,
we could trust them, too.
Secrets are the root of all evil. If we remove
all secrecy in the world, the world would be
either at peace--or at least we'd better
understand eachother.
So why are we passively waiting for the chips in our butts? Aren't there any alternative ideas for.Net and Microsoft Passport?
Conceptually at least? In the up-coming wireless revolution, he who controls universal authentication, etc, etc. (aka.Net) has more political influence than the Pope... In time, perhaps overwelming influence over governments.
This may sound "conspiratorial" and far-fetched, but it's really the natural path for mankind. Will anonymity be protectable? Only the diversity of the web can protect freedoms. Microsoft's attempt to transform it into a global multicasting system simply has got to have social and political consequences.
--Matthew
Read more about it in the June '94 issue of Discover magazine. There are many pages of content covering these discoveries.
It was shortly after the development of the 'bit' that goes into horses mouths, enabling them to pull carts over thousands of miles. This technology spurred the Aryan invasions all over the world, including Turkey where they became known as the Hitites--the first known to have invented steel. And northern India, where they eventually intermarried. The northerners are still known as "Aryans" in the south, as the upper classes are sometimes referred to as "Aryans" in the noth, if I am not mistaken.
Over two hundred such mummies were fund in a few sites by '94 (I think from '91 or '92?). Since there were accidental, it indicates that perhaps 100,000 may have actually there.
The Aryan Empire was very similar to the Viking Empire. In fact, I think the Vikings were their direct ancestors.
--Matthew
HTML and XML formats render well after checking
diffs. This whole concept has huge potential
for writing of all kinds--not just software.
Unfortunately, KWord is still WAY too unstable
and bugy to think about such a feature--although
I do believe I heard it discussed once or twice.
If Linux (Or BSD) is going to win the desktop, we
need new things that make a huge difference like
CVS support for KWord and StarOffice. The "too
technical for non-technicals" argument is made
by people completely lacking in vision. Look at
WebCVS and tell me would could go the extra mile
toward point-n-click user-friendly GUI
interfaces. This could be very useful for me as
well as many many different kinds of writers.
Journalists, Lawyers, Historians, Scientific
Writers, Educational, Business of all sorts..
If you were a technical person, you'd realize that there are an infinite number of ways that an ORDERLY merge can be made more efficient than the messy ones you see on highways today.
Putting cars on separate rails ENSURE ORDER for the merges.. You're not using your brain.
IBM decided not to make their own distro
because they were concerned that the community
might suspect them of "stealing Linux" as
the Gartner Group suggests is already happening. IBM could do this by becoming the de facto standard and then extending the standard with proprietary componants. The GPL doesn't allow such modifications to source code, but it does allow the addition of non-GPL componants as in tools and such. That's all it would take.
Besides, supporting multiple distros helps IBM market the product to fans of all the various distros, to join those companies in the IBM Partner Program, and to allow software for any of those distros to be easily ported from laptops to PC Servers, to Risc Boxes, to the AS/400 to the S/390. This helps them sell expensive hardware and keep old customers by having massive amounts of software for those systems.
Licensing schemes of IBM mainframes are annual payments for each software application or tool based on the CPU size of your mainframe. Therefore, UNIX competitors have been pulling away market share by writing applications to take over sub-tasks of the large mainframe applications, hence reducing the mainframe software licensing fees significantly. For example, a PKZIP utility for our OS/390 Mainframe costs $10,000 a year to use.
I love to write GPL'd code but don't tell
anything they "should be ashamed" for writing
commercial software. In the spirit of free
software, people should have the FREE CHOICE
of how to license and distribute their
software. It's generally good to Open Source
but it doesn't even always make sense.
Games for example--It's ok...but what benefit
does a company get by open sourcing a game?
Their labor is worth something and it can't
be made up on consulting services or support
for games. There are other examples and eve
exceptions for certain kinds of games but it
one good example. Freedom is the key--not
forced exploitation of labor!!
Subscription software can be rented for very low prices on a monthly basis that are sure to bring in a residual income that pays much better over the long run. The lack of a quick-restore CD will drive customers to this service only faster and make more for Microsoft.
Linux can't compete on the desktop with in its current state of rapid, dramatic change. Software is no longer compatible with any distrobution shortly after hitting the shelves at Best Buy. This can't work for commercial software vendors of desktop software at all. It's not economically or logistically viable.
Will OSS developers ever learn to maintain a downward-compatible API of any kind? That's the decisive question.
A number of movies have been computer animated
over the last few years, is there any fairly
easy to learn movie making software around?
If so, Open Sources movies would
be a cool idea... I'm more of a programmer, but have a lot of Artist friends (with whom I have
NOTHING in common with).
If Apple wants success they'd better just
get the thing ready for release--along with the
PC version. Microsoft's new OEM licenses are
likely to spur a lot of consumer interest in
alternatives. Linux won't compete well,
because commercial organizations can't sell
software that still works on updated versions
of Linux three months after product release.
The pace of change and lack of concern for
backward compatibility is killing Linux on the desktop.
We absolutely MUST make a desktop version of
UNIX before Microsoft moves much farther into
Server-land.
So long as the GUI is optional, why should it
bother you if you don't want to use one?
Keeping diversity alive for any and all software
depends on significantly diminishing Microsoft's
dominance of the Desktop. That's means it has
to be better (not mere as-good-as) Windows.
Let Diversity of Innovation Thrive!
--Matthew
KDE 2.0 already claims you can do anything from
the keyboard and the object model supports
scripting. Also, most KDE 2 applications even
allow you to use regular expressions every place
they might be useful--as an option (not a
necessity).
I absolutely agree that the philosophy of small
tools should be expanded to GUIs, but I think
KDE is doing this. The QT toolkit's signal and
slot philosophy is a near parallel and KDE
componant objects nearly complete the
requirement.
The old OS-9 operating system (used on CoCo's and
some M68000-based computers like Atari ST) also
had an interesting philosophy for GUIs.
You could pipe data in and out of every Window
and all kinds of GUI activity could be managed by
character streams all centered upon ASCII.
It was an excellent philosophy. Last I checked,
OS-9 was still marketed for embedded systems.
This is the OS-9 of Microware systems
corporation--not the MacOS 9
The only unethical thing I can imagine about
cloning is if you clone them when they have
aged--because the DNA aging persists in the
cloned creature.
Besides, as soon as Punker's get a hold of gene
therapy for things like, growing eagle wings on
their backs and a large rat's tail--human cloning
will look very conservative.
My wife has a Ph.D in New Media Technologies and I am her programmer. We experimented with an idea that has excellent promise for computer-based academic learning. We did a series of studies to validate the significantly improved effectiveness of recall, comprehension, and faster learning of the following method (and are developing our last one now):
EXPANDING HYPERTEXT
Imagine seeing your tutorial as a synopsis with, perhaps, only one sentece covering each major point. But each sentence is an "expanding hyperlink" that, when clicked, elaborates on the point. Under that elaboration, further hyperlinks may exist.
After clicking on everything that interests you, the text is molding into one tutorial crafted specifically for YOUR informational needs and interests. This means your attention is not lost reading mountains of B.S. in order to get to the point and it greatly increases the richness of content that is useful to you at what ever your current state of understanding of the topic is.
One major part of this technology is enabling the reader to adapt a text to his/her own needs. It employs a new kind of hyperlink--the expanding link, which inserts text into the current document rather than taking the reader to a separate page. The conventional hyperlink (we call it the "paged link") has a strong tendency to disorient readers. It's very effective for reference documentation but is significantly less effective for tutorials than is simply one long page of text (or one long series of pages, chronologically ordered (that we call "linear text")).
I did my previous versions of the test applications using Visual Basic, but I am now trying to workout a Javascript implementation.
--Matthew
Re:Strange things seem to happen with optimalizati
on
KDE 2.0.1 is out
·
· Score: 2
The Konqueror is excellent in general. It just needs a little fine tuning in a few small HTML rendering glitches and Java/Javascript support.
KOffice looks great, but is in very serious need of improvements functionally. The table's work very strangely--it's not user-friendly or practical. It doesn't import anything other than its native format and can't even export HTML or RTF. You think, being in an XML form on the most popular Webserving platform on Earth, it could at least export a web page.
But it has good infrustructure--I just don't see it as a complete product. It's not useful in any practical sense yet. When it is, it'll be worthwhile to start writing wizards.
--Matthew
My wife is a Ph.D student (just about to graduate) at the University of Florida. She studies the recall and comprehension effects of new media for the most part, but used some Health Communication issues like this as subject matter.
The most interesting effects were done on research pertaining to Florida's Anti-Tobacco Ad campaigns. She divided subjects into three groups of Risk-Takers based on a standard scale some of the more interesting findings were:
(1) We have a large number of rebelious-type risk takers among our youths and WHEN REBELIOUS-TYPE RISK TAKER'S PERCEIVE AN INTENDED EFFECT OF A CAMPAIGN, THEY TEND TO DO THE OPPOSITE.
(2) Parents who tell their kids not to smoke tend to provoke the opposite intended effect up to a point and then, suddenly become very effective. The stronger the emphasis the more the kids rebel up to a certain point. Kids of the very strongest parents' attitudes against smoking do tend to listen very much....Odd...but the result of the experiment was very clear on this.
(3) Using the scale she did, risk-taking tendencies was able to predict up to approx 80% of the decisions people made.
And that is by no means insignificant. Combine this with the predictive capabilities of other leading theories such as Cognitive Disonance and you're well over 100% predictability of human decision making.
(I think she might have published some of her studies on her site: http://grove.ufl.edu/~moon
Question: Doesn't the Proton Bomb (Or is it a Nutron Bomb?) have the ability of leaving no dangerous radioactivity a few days after an explosion? You know, the bomb that only destroys organic materials?
Mr. Bob Young,
Yes...It's good to keep problems in the open and converse about them. But two points:
(1) If your customers are saying they don't like something, you can't just say "you'd be wrong". Do you make the distrobution for your customers or for yourself? There are certainly a lot of common sense issues that Red Hat simply refuses to see the way their customers do (and I don't think I have to document them here--look for yourself ALL OVER THE WEB).
(2) When you Final Release a product, there is at least a basic amount of testing we should expect has been done. It is wrong to pass that off by claiming the Open Source method is too know about and work on these bugs together. If you'd simply just run the distro for a minimum of 3 weeks, then you'd have known. This is a no brainer and it's so obvious... And the other quality issues are poor in comparison with other distrobutions. We're talking about blatant negligence.
You can't just give excuses. When a product is Final Released it doesn't have to be perfect, but there has to be some basic level of assurances.
You've clearly gone below them with 7.0 and we certainly will not upgrade our servers from 6.2 until your next release--if you've learned something.
--Matthew
How often do you see KDE users flaming Gnome? Many of the posts have been more like, hey guys...catch up.....even--here, use some KDE code to catch up... But I hear a considerable amount of antagonism from Gnomers toward KDE. Worse yet, I hear them talking about its "obvious" superiority. It's becomes very tempting to enter the fray at this. KDE is better developed because it's been around longer....and it's much more stable and is developed faster because of the C++ and object architectures (DCOP and KParts). Gnome has the potential of being more light-weight and technologically superior in some respects. This is because it doesn't incur the overhead of C++ (though it's insignificant with proper designs) and because it's following KDE.. Gnomer's can learn from KDE. But I am seeing attacks on KDE with no reasoning behind them, as if Gnomer's just simply hate KDE. What is "obviously" superior about Gnome??? It crashes MUCH more than Windows 98...I know this is rapidly improving--but your antagonism and refusal to work together sure as hell isn't helping anything but degrade you. We have too much work to do for these kind of childish games....On the issue of Slashdot anouncing the Gnome improvements--I am with you full-heartedly. They should not neglect Gnome... But this Beta 3 release of KDE really is a HUGE milestone for Linux as a whole--as the new Gnome will hopefully be also. Anyway--you'll catch up pretty closely with Eazel and StarOffice. --Matthew
Some months ago I wrote up a design (not quite complete) for a Visual Shell Interface (VSI). Essentially, it allows for assembling of shell commands with pipes and redirection by means of icons representing them. When you select one of the icons, all its options appear like a properties dialog. Piping and redirection, however, are represented visually. The man page is also made available and you can create tools from these small tools either by drag 'n drop methods which creates the actual text representation on a line at the bottom of the windows--or vice-versa. I think KParts is an excellent innovation as well. And QT's mechanism for signals and slots also would fit this philosophy quite well. KParts--it is my understanding--allows you to basically drag 'n drop whole applications into a sigle window where each takes over the menu and status bar when it has the focus. I truelly believe that a UNIX desktop can be tremendously more powerful than Windows not by new inventions so much as by simply finding ways to implement the good old console capabilities in a GUI way. Being able to put componants together and saving the configuration of the Window is like codeless development of specialized applications. --Matthew C. Tedder matthew@tedder.com
Linux joined the UNIX fold by becoming like UNIX which helped Linux with the porting of many applications and gaining developers from the UNIX world to join in the cause..
Linux has thus unified UNIX and continues to do so as Solaris, AIX, and others are moving quickly toward greater Linux compatibility.
The next phase, which is only beginning now is to bring UNIX into the desktop world. KDE/GNOME are gaining serious momentum on Windows (just now passing it with XFree86 4.0, KDE2 & KOffice in my opinion) and now we are potentially leading the development of X12 for the whole of Unixdom.
AND--We've gained a large number of Windows developers with GNOME and KDE.. My project (gbasic.sourceforge.com) will hopefull bring over some of the ***MANY*** Visual Basic programmers longing for a tool they can use on Linux.
Also, Cygwin/tk I hear might be heading towards a potential KDE for Windows...I've only heard talk...but I do believe Linux will gradually eat up Windows one way or another.
Don't dispair...Standards are improving.. Personally I don't think a centralized binary registry is good at all...but perhaps some mechanism can interface with/etc,/proc, etc... If there's a real need...don't worry, it'll be there--agreeable to everybody, eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people will disagree, but I feel that the
more open a society becomes, the better.
If we had no privacy, then terrorists couldn't
hide. And if the government had no privacy,
we could trust them, too.
Secrets are the root of all evil. If we remove
all secrecy in the world, the world would be
either at peace--or at least we'd better
understand eachother.
In fact, it's a necessity for real democracy.
--Matthew
Consultants could offer this service to banks using gnuCash to its customers via the VNC Java client by web browser.
So, how easy is it to interface with other applications? Delimited, fixed-width, or XML file?
--Matthew
So why are we passively waiting for the chips in our butts? Aren't there any alternative ideas for .Net and Microsoft Passport?
Conceptually at least? In the up-coming wireless revolution, he who controls universal authentication, etc, etc. (aka .Net) has more political influence than the Pope... In time, perhaps overwelming influence over governments.
This may sound "conspiratorial" and far-fetched, but it's really the natural path for mankind. Will anonymity be protectable? Only the diversity of the web can protect freedoms. Microsoft's attempt to transform it into a global multicasting system simply has got to have social and political consequences.
--Matthew
Read more about it in the June '94 issue of Discover magazine. There are many pages of content covering these discoveries. It was shortly after the development of the 'bit' that goes into horses mouths, enabling them to pull carts over thousands of miles. This technology spurred the Aryan invasions all over the world, including Turkey where they became known as the Hitites--the first known to have invented steel. And northern India, where they eventually intermarried. The northerners are still known as "Aryans" in the south, as the upper classes are sometimes referred to as "Aryans" in the noth, if I am not mistaken. Over two hundred such mummies were fund in a few sites by '94 (I think from '91 or '92?). Since there were accidental, it indicates that perhaps 100,000 may have actually there. The Aryan Empire was very similar to the Viking Empire. In fact, I think the Vikings were their direct ancestors. --Matthew
HTML and XML formats render well after checking
diffs. This whole concept has huge potential
for writing of all kinds--not just software.
Unfortunately, KWord is still WAY too unstable
and bugy to think about such a feature--although
I do believe I heard it discussed once or twice.
If Linux (Or BSD) is going to win the desktop, we
need new things that make a huge difference like
CVS support for KWord and StarOffice. The "too
technical for non-technicals" argument is made
by people completely lacking in vision. Look at
WebCVS and tell me would could go the extra mile
toward point-n-click user-friendly GUI
interfaces. This could be very useful for me as
well as many many different kinds of writers.
Journalists, Lawyers, Historians, Scientific
Writers, Educational, Business of all sorts..
--Matthew
ooh.... Then again...opposites attrack!
A dot on your forhead or ring on your right hand? This must be the mark of the beast!! And the beast is....the computer??
If you were a technical person, you'd realize that there are an infinite number of ways that an ORDERLY merge can be made more efficient than the messy ones you see on highways today.
Putting cars on separate rails ENSURE ORDER for the merges.. You're not using your brain.
--Matthew
IBM decided not to make their own distro because they were concerned that the community might suspect them of "stealing Linux" as the Gartner Group suggests is already happening. IBM could do this by becoming the de facto standard and then extending the standard with proprietary componants. The GPL doesn't allow such modifications to source code, but it does allow the addition of non-GPL componants as in tools and such. That's all it would take.
Besides, supporting multiple distros helps IBM market the product to fans of all the various distros, to join those companies in the IBM Partner Program, and to allow software for any of those distros to be easily ported from laptops to PC Servers, to Risc Boxes, to the AS/400 to the S/390. This helps them sell expensive hardware and keep old customers by having massive amounts of software for those systems.
Licensing schemes of IBM mainframes are annual payments for each software application or tool based on the CPU size of your mainframe. Therefore, UNIX competitors have been pulling away market share by writing applications to take over sub-tasks of the large mainframe applications, hence reducing the mainframe software licensing fees significantly. For example, a PKZIP utility for our OS/390 Mainframe costs $10,000 a year to use.
--Matthew
I love to write GPL'd code but don't tell
anything they "should be ashamed" for writing
commercial software. In the spirit of free
software, people should have the FREE CHOICE
of how to license and distribute their
software. It's generally good to Open Source
but it doesn't even always make sense.
Games for example--It's ok...but what benefit
does a company get by open sourcing a game?
Their labor is worth something and it can't
be made up on consulting services or support
for games. There are other examples and eve
exceptions for certain kinds of games but it
one good example. Freedom is the key--not
forced exploitation of labor!!
--Matthew
Subscription software can be rented for very low prices on a monthly basis that are sure to bring in a residual income that pays much better over the long run. The lack of a quick-restore CD will drive customers to this service only faster and make more for Microsoft.
Linux can't compete on the desktop with in its current state of rapid, dramatic change. Software is no longer compatible with any distrobution shortly after hitting the shelves at Best Buy. This can't work for commercial software vendors of desktop software at all. It's not economically or logistically viable.
Will OSS developers ever learn to maintain a downward-compatible API of any kind? That's the decisive question.
-- Matthew C. Tedder
A number of movies have been computer animated over the last few years, is there any fairly easy to learn movie making software around?
If so, Open Sources movies would be a cool idea... I'm more of a programmer, but have a lot of Artist friends (with whom I have NOTHING in common with).
What could do more for Linux on the desktop?
-- Matthew C. Tedder
If Apple wants success they'd better just get the thing ready for release--along with the PC version. Microsoft's new OEM licenses are likely to spur a lot of consumer interest in alternatives. Linux won't compete well, because commercial organizations can't sell software that still works on updated versions of Linux three months after product release. The pace of change and lack of concern for backward compatibility is killing Linux on the desktop.
ALT-F2 gives you a line to type in a console
command from. It's pretty simple
Most of what the article is really talking about
already exists in KDE 2, but I hope it's only a
start.
--Matthew
We absolutely MUST make a desktop version of UNIX before Microsoft moves much farther into Server-land. So long as the GUI is optional, why should it bother you if you don't want to use one? Keeping diversity alive for any and all software depends on significantly diminishing Microsoft's dominance of the Desktop. That's means it has to be better (not mere as-good-as) Windows. Let Diversity of Innovation Thrive! --Matthew
KDE 2.0 already claims you can do anything from
the keyboard and the object model supports
scripting. Also, most KDE 2 applications even
allow you to use regular expressions every place
they might be useful--as an option (not a
necessity).
I absolutely agree that the philosophy of small
tools should be expanded to GUIs, but I think
KDE is doing this. The QT toolkit's signal and
slot philosophy is a near parallel and KDE
componant objects nearly complete the
requirement.
The old OS-9 operating system (used on CoCo's and
some M68000-based computers like Atari ST) also
had an interesting philosophy for GUIs.
You could pipe data in and out of every Window
and all kinds of GUI activity could be managed by
character streams all centered upon ASCII.
It was an excellent philosophy. Last I checked,
OS-9 was still marketed for embedded systems.
This is the OS-9 of Microware systems
corporation--not the MacOS 9
--Matthew
The only unethical thing I can imagine about cloning is if you clone them when they have aged--because the DNA aging persists in the cloned creature.
Besides, as soon as Punker's get a hold of gene therapy for things like, growing eagle wings on their backs and a large rat's tail--human cloning will look very conservative.
--Matthew
My wife has a Ph.D in New Media Technologies and I am her programmer. We experimented with an idea that has excellent promise for computer-based academic learning. We did a series of studies to validate the significantly improved effectiveness of recall, comprehension, and faster learning of the following method (and are developing our last one now): EXPANDING HYPERTEXT Imagine seeing your tutorial as a synopsis with, perhaps, only one sentece covering each major point. But each sentence is an "expanding hyperlink" that, when clicked, elaborates on the point. Under that elaboration, further hyperlinks may exist. After clicking on everything that interests you, the text is molding into one tutorial crafted specifically for YOUR informational needs and interests. This means your attention is not lost reading mountains of B.S. in order to get to the point and it greatly increases the richness of content that is useful to you at what ever your current state of understanding of the topic is. One major part of this technology is enabling the reader to adapt a text to his/her own needs. It employs a new kind of hyperlink--the expanding link, which inserts text into the current document rather than taking the reader to a separate page. The conventional hyperlink (we call it the "paged link") has a strong tendency to disorient readers. It's very effective for reference documentation but is significantly less effective for tutorials than is simply one long page of text (or one long series of pages, chronologically ordered (that we call "linear text")). I did my previous versions of the test applications using Visual Basic, but I am now trying to workout a Javascript implementation. --Matthew
The Konqueror is excellent in general. It just needs a little fine tuning in a few small HTML rendering glitches and Java/Javascript support. KOffice looks great, but is in very serious need of improvements functionally. The table's work very strangely--it's not user-friendly or practical. It doesn't import anything other than its native format and can't even export HTML or RTF. You think, being in an XML form on the most popular Webserving platform on Earth, it could at least export a web page. But it has good infrustructure--I just don't see it as a complete product. It's not useful in any practical sense yet. When it is, it'll be worthwhile to start writing wizards. --Matthew
My wife is a Ph.D student (just about to graduate) at the University of Florida. She studies the recall and comprehension effects of new media for the most part, but used some Health Communication issues like this as subject matter.
The most interesting effects were done on research pertaining to Florida's Anti-Tobacco Ad campaigns. She divided subjects into three groups of Risk-Takers based on a standard scale some of the more interesting findings were:
(1) We have a large number of rebelious-type risk takers among our youths and WHEN REBELIOUS-TYPE RISK TAKER'S PERCEIVE AN INTENDED EFFECT OF A CAMPAIGN, THEY TEND TO DO THE OPPOSITE.
(2) Parents who tell their kids not to smoke tend to provoke the opposite intended effect up to a point and then, suddenly become very effective. The stronger the emphasis the more the kids rebel up to a certain point. Kids of the very strongest parents' attitudes against smoking do tend to listen very much....Odd...but the result of the experiment was very clear on this.
(3) Using the scale she did, risk-taking tendencies was able to predict up to approx 80% of the decisions people made.
And that is by no means insignificant. Combine this with the predictive capabilities of other leading theories such as Cognitive Disonance and you're well over 100% predictability of human decision making.
(I think she might have published some of her studies on her site: http://grove.ufl.edu/~moon
Question: Doesn't the Proton Bomb (Or is it a Nutron Bomb?) have the ability of leaving no dangerous radioactivity a few days after an explosion? You know, the bomb that only destroys organic materials?
Mr. Bob Young, Yes...It's good to keep problems in the open and converse about them. But two points: (1) If your customers are saying they don't like something, you can't just say "you'd be wrong". Do you make the distrobution for your customers or for yourself? There are certainly a lot of common sense issues that Red Hat simply refuses to see the way their customers do (and I don't think I have to document them here--look for yourself ALL OVER THE WEB). (2) When you Final Release a product, there is at least a basic amount of testing we should expect has been done. It is wrong to pass that off by claiming the Open Source method is too know about and work on these bugs together. If you'd simply just run the distro for a minimum of 3 weeks, then you'd have known. This is a no brainer and it's so obvious... And the other quality issues are poor in comparison with other distrobutions. We're talking about blatant negligence. You can't just give excuses. When a product is Final Released it doesn't have to be perfect, but there has to be some basic level of assurances. You've clearly gone below them with 7.0 and we certainly will not upgrade our servers from 6.2 until your next release--if you've learned something. --Matthew
How often do you see KDE users flaming Gnome? Many of the posts have been more like, hey guys...catch up.....even--here, use some KDE code to catch up... But I hear a considerable amount of antagonism from Gnomers toward KDE. Worse yet, I hear them talking about its "obvious" superiority. It's becomes very tempting to enter the fray at this. KDE is better developed because it's been around longer....and it's much more stable and is developed faster because of the C++ and object architectures (DCOP and KParts). Gnome has the potential of being more light-weight and technologically superior in some respects. This is because it doesn't incur the overhead of C++ (though it's insignificant with proper designs) and because it's following KDE.. Gnomer's can learn from KDE. But I am seeing attacks on KDE with no reasoning behind them, as if Gnomer's just simply hate KDE. What is "obviously" superior about Gnome??? It crashes MUCH more than Windows 98...I know this is rapidly improving--but your antagonism and refusal to work together sure as hell isn't helping anything but degrade you. We have too much work to do for these kind of childish games....On the issue of Slashdot anouncing the Gnome improvements--I am with you full-heartedly. They should not neglect Gnome... But this Beta 3 release of KDE really is a HUGE milestone for Linux as a whole--as the new Gnome will hopefully be also. Anyway--you'll catch up pretty closely with Eazel and StarOffice. --Matthew
Some months ago I wrote up a design (not quite complete) for a Visual Shell Interface (VSI). Essentially, it allows for assembling of shell commands with pipes and redirection by means of icons representing them. When you select one of the icons, all its options appear like a properties dialog. Piping and redirection, however, are represented visually. The man page is also made available and you can create tools from these small tools either by drag 'n drop methods which creates the actual text representation on a line at the bottom of the windows--or vice-versa. I think KParts is an excellent innovation as well. And QT's mechanism for signals and slots also would fit this philosophy quite well. KParts--it is my understanding--allows you to basically drag 'n drop whole applications into a sigle window where each takes over the menu and status bar when it has the focus. I truelly believe that a UNIX desktop can be tremendously more powerful than Windows not by new inventions so much as by simply finding ways to implement the good old console capabilities in a GUI way. Being able to put componants together and saving the configuration of the Window is like codeless development of specialized applications. --Matthew C. Tedder matthew@tedder.com