Add another CD with packaged open-source goodies pre-compiled for Solaris/Intel...
Thinking of it, please do the same for the next release of Solaris/Sparc...
If you do that, you will get very happy customers... although may be they will be not so ready to spend money on some of yours over-priced software products
To teach concepts instead of 'how-to' you need fresh and flexible minds, i.e. young people minds. The school should do a better job teaching the basics of computers. I don't mean programming, although some simple exercise with Python or Basic could teach a lot about the nature of software. I mean the concepts which are behind every computer design in the last 25 years (because, marketing hype aside, computers aren't changed that much).
Once youngs are trained on the concepts, when they become adult they will have little difficulty in adapting to the 'GUI of the year'.
One-week requalification courses for middle-age empoyees which are forced to learn abut computers can hardly acomplish much more than reducing the fear or the hatred they feel for the 'beast'.
In a properly-functioning economy, you'd be charging for traffic (tiered or metered) since that drives your cost.
Right. Unfortunately, we are living and working in an economy that is more and more driven by the 'indirect payment' model. Take ads, broadcast TV, etc : all 'free' stuff payed by adding someting to the cost of the products we buy at supermarket. So that if I buy toilet paper, I'm also paying for some TV show that I've never seen.
The Internet is also at least partly built on these assumptions: this site for instance lives on advertisement.
... especially for newbie and especially for LInux, where you usually have a lot of choice to do the same thing.
They could even go further and remove altogether the indipended Application menu, structuring the main menu in a way like this:
I want to/write a document/with abiword
I want to/write a document/with openoffice
I want to/write a document/with openoffice
I want to/ listen to music/with xmms
I want to/listen to music/with whatever
Each application sould register itsel on the proper I want to. And of course there should be a easy way to make a default for each (las used, maybe?).
Re:What's the major diff between 1.4 & 2.x?
on
Gnome 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Go read Gnome techical docs. Gnome apps communicate among them using Bonobo, which is a sort of DOM(if you are used to Microsoft stuff) build over CORBA, an industrial standard distributed object-oriented infrastructure (mostly used in Unixland, though you can get some of it also living in Windowsland). OAF IIRC is a sort of 'corba-specific domain name server' : it tells to the different 'clients' which 'server' has implemented the required 'object' and thush can provide the required 'service'.
AFAIK, this was the case also for gnome 1.4 and maybe in gnome 1.2. The funny-looking file names maybe were placed in a different place: try looking in your ~/.gnome* directories.
The main difference between 1.4 and 2.x is IMO the
user target: 1.4 was a nice tool to hack a very customised desktop on your PC. With 2.x, they try to reach the standard computer users, hiding away most of the options and implementing the hints of some 'usability studies' they have done with Sun
(of which the 'Action' menu is I think a result).
... is that it swaps memory for CPU : SVG images (and in general vector-bassed images ) require less memory to be stored, but more CPU to be recreated.
It's not clear to me how this could result in a faster desktop, except that it should cause less swapping, and that modern CPUs have power in excess (but it could be the same for the RAM, except that desktop machines are often sold by default with inadeguate RAM supply, mostly for commercial reasons).
The real place where vector-based graphic would be useful is the Internet. Less memory would mean less bandwidth required to transmit the image,
and the greather CPU usage shouldn't be noticed, given that when you are surfing you don't care if
the other activities on your PC (if any) are a bit slower.
But I wonder if SVG would be much better than image compression in that sense.
Too difficult for PC users. They would forgot to put a limit to the number of versions, and fill the hard-disk without knowing why (because Explorer by default would only show them the latest version). Well, this is what happened to me when I was a VMS newbie around 15 years ago.
Instead, try 'Versioning File System for Linux' on Google. You might hit some interesting link.
Everybody knows that Gnome was the preferred desktop of RH, while SuSE, Mandrake and Caldera pushed KDE. But what has to do with Ximian Desktop and current story??
If you refer to the parent post complaining about how difficult is to update KDE wrt to Ximian Desktop, this is because the poster doesn't know about up2date (which, IIRC, is only offered to paying customers) or he does not like it. While Ximian (NOT RH, but Ximian) offers with their version of Gnome an installation GUI, which is definitively better that 'rpm -i'.
Trolltech has to be paid up-front to do non-GPL development with KDE, which I can't afford. I have no issue with rolling license costs in to any commercial sales in the future, but I can't buy licenses for initial prototyping because it's all spec work -- I have no guarantees I'll ever have a paying client for the work. (Don't get me wrong, Trolltech's licensing fees are very reasonable, I just don't have the cash to spare right now.)
I don't think you have to pay Trolltech until you _sell_ the product based on QT. You can do all internal prototype work with the GPL version of QT an only buy licences if/when you came out with a commercial product.
Apple is absolutely Linux's "friend" (in so far as a large company can be friends with a bunch of source files). I'd say rather "business associate". Apple stays with Linux & open-source as much and as long it is convenient for them, no more. Which may be a moderately good thing, but IMO something to always remember (BTW, the above sentence is valid if you substitute Apple with almost any of the companies that use open-source software in some degree).
For god's sake, it's Unix. On The Desktop. Ah, but Linux is not Unix. Neither is GNU.
I write software for a company that gets sub-contracts for the Eureopean space programs.
In the latest years, Linux-Intel platforms are slowly but increasingly replacing traditional Unix platforms (SUN/ex-HP/ex-Digital) in many fields (mostly ground support centers and testing facilities). The reason however is mostly the minor cost of the platform. Linux here is usually well accepted, because the engineers (software and not) are already used to Unix.
This might not been well received by SUN & co, since space programs have always been a fat niche market for them, but I think that they realise that if it wasn't Linux it would have been Windows (which also is gaining market share in this field, anyway), and they prefer Linux because they can still try to win back the customers.
Now, the space program money comes from tax-payers. I doubt free software programmers will see any of it, but companies like SuSE
are getting more work, and this is something. Also, experienced Linux programmers can more easily find a job in the field (if they can stand it).
I want a scriptable gamer engine, that I can program to reach all the high score I'm unable to reach with my eyes and fingers. In all the games that I care of.
I don't care about the webcam: it can directly read memory video, or take snapshots of windows and then parse the pixel matrix. But I want good pattern recognition, possibly learning by examples, automatic control over mouse keybord and a way to define/intercept game events.And of course a programming language to glue all toghether.
Re:Another Moronic Waste of Time....
on
Kazaa Fights Back
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You assume that what Kazaa people want is to "free music from the tiranny of the RIAA" or something like that.
Wrong. What they want is money. What they have initiated is a defensive action against someting they were expecting to come, since they have probably watched Napster go down and learned from it.
Say this action can keep them in activities for another six months, by spending $1000000 in legal costs. If in the same time they earn $2000000 by ads on their servers etc, they have won. Then they will happily close shop, having squeazed all the possible money from the situation.
The question is, who is paying all the money for the lawyers? Let's see.
Kazaa money comes mostly from ads; ads money comes from the companies selling the advertised goods, that will recover it by adding 2 cents to every product they sell to us.
RIAA money comes from the record companies, which recover it adding 2 cents for each CD they are selling to us.
In other words, you (and me) are paying lawyers to go against other lawyers also payed by you (and me). So, I hope you are enjoying the show.
I've had DSL for over a year and this is the first I hear about my modem even HAVING a password. For what?
You are not alone. They came in small box , they are called 'Modem', and they are connected to the phone line. So people thinks they are just more complex versions of the analogic modems. Few people realise that there is a real computer inside.
This whole system is funded by the money given to the government by the taxpayers. What, exactly, are you doing by having prisons? You are, in fact, paying to support people who have committed crimes. Is this fair? Of course. If you didn't pay for prisons, you would have dangerous murderers, rapists and potheads walking the streets and terrorizing the populace.
This could be fixed by adding to crime punishment a significant penalty in money. Say, if you steal X,
you pay 3X: 1.5X goes back to the victim, 1.5X is used to finance the law enforcement and justice system.
For crimes which are against people and not against possessions (like rape and murder), set arbitrary very high fees, topping with revoking for life the right to own anything (i.e. taking away all their possessions present and _future_).
With open-source software you have to go like this:
Find people/company that need to solve a problem and are willing to pay for it (or to co-work on it)
Look if someone had the same problem and did already some open-sourced work on it.
Solve the problem, investing only as little money/effort as needed. As a side-effect you have now some newly developed software (not much, and only as good as needed).
Release the software as open-source. You can do that because your software is not an 'investment': it already payed itself by solving the problem.In this way, you don't have to maintain the software alone.
See your little software grow and get better as other find it useful and contribute to it.
Start selling support for the software. Don't mount large-scale operations, but start local.
As your(and now others') software gets popular, enlarge the support area. If possible, stay away from the corporation model. A co-operations of coordinated small/medium companies (franchising-like) might be a better idea.
Of course, it only works if your idea and your software are good, and recognized as such by others.
MandrakeSoft, maybe, did not stick to this logic. In the hurry to bring Linux to the masses, they invested too much. But, not developing closed-source software, they cannot recover what they invested.
Er, I mean, the ones still worth reading are still in print.
No. There is not such a thing as a whortless idea. Anything which has been worth being written by someone is most likely worth reading for someone else. See how many people use the 'net to find out music that the big labels find worthless to publish.
The more ideas circulate, the more our society and each of us grows. Copyright laws manipulated by today big media harms the circulation of ideas. They should not be allowed to do this to the rest of us.
But if a corporate entity wants to keep that copyright past that point, it would have to pay a substantial fixed fee plus some small royalties to the government (i.e. a tax on profits).
That company money would be much better used producing more intellectual work, rater than buying the privilege of making money from old ones.
My reason against long copyrights is that they stiff creativity and progress, not that some author/company is profitting too much from them. If some intellectual work is so good that it can still make money after 80+years, then that work _MUST_ be released to public domain. No amount of money is making for the damage that would be done not realising that work in the public domain. Actually,some damage has been already done by keeping the work a 'property' for so long.
I still don't buy the "they cannot bundle" argument, but the EULA argument is compelling. I could find a copy of the Win95 handbook that came with my old laptop. On page 1 there is the EULA. It says:
If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, PC Manifacturer and Microsoft are unwilling to licence the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to you. In such event, you may not use or copy the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, and you should promptly contact PC Manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused product(s) for a refund.
Oh, I read everything about it, even admired people that did it. And you can say I'm one of the ones that would benefit from it, given that I boot
in my Win98 partition no more than once per year.
As a anti-Microsoft PR show-off, this refund thing is fine, for the little good these things produce. However, I can't agree with people holding that there is a legal basis for it. The OS is just a piece of a system: manifacturers are free to choose which pieces their system is made of. We customers make are pro/cons and cost/benefit analysis and then decide if to buy the system or go elsewhere.
Requiring a refund for the OS is for me on the par
with requiring a refund for the hard-disk.
Holding the copyright and selling the product are different things. Unless Sklykarov was actually selling the program personally and on the US soil (i.e. when he was at the conference ), he should be not accountable, if not according to the law at least according to common sense.
Even if he did it, it should depend on the terms on which he was granted entrance in the US. We European can shortcut the visa procedure by signing a visa waiver, that allows US administration and justice to handle us as they see fit. For instance, if a citizen of the Netherlands is found in possess of marjuana, it can be arrested in the US even though this is legal in the Netherlands.
If Sklyarov signed something like that and then violated the american law (even not knowing it), bad luck to him. But if he came in the US with a real visa, I believe that the only legal act for the US authorities was expulsion. Anything else, in a country less powerful than US, would have raised one hell of an international case.
Remember the computers shown in the movies, before script writers learned about GUI? You just
tell the computer what to do in plain english and the computer answers in the same way.Would you call that not user-friendly? (I'm not talking about being fast and productive, for which plain language may be cumbersome).
Even without all that AI, the command line could be made much more user-friendly. What is more user friendly : use the mouse (a most unintuitive device) to double-click (what?) on an icon (uh?) that try to represent an interconnected globe, or just type "Web Browser" ?
True, the *ix command-line tools are conceived for expert usage and in an epoch when not typing two or three extra characters was seen as a great advantage. However, with alias, scripts and maybe a user-oriented shell integrated in a graphical environnment, the command line could become a real friend for computer newbies.
GNU info is an abomination. The interface to it is just totally unusable and unwieldy.
Last time I checked, both Gnome and KDE Help systems where able to render info pages in an HTMLish way using info2html or something similar.
It makes the reading of info data much less painful.
A documentation standard for *ix would be nice. But consider that the way you present your information has to change according to the target audience.You can't use the same _semantic_ structure for a tutorial and a reference manual.
Slashdot Mirror
Thinking of it, please do the same for the next release of Solaris/Sparc ...
If you do that, you will get very happy customers ... although may be they will be not so ready to spend money on some of yours over-priced software products
The school should do a better job teaching the basics of computers. I don't mean programming, although some simple exercise with Python or Basic could teach a lot about the nature of software. I mean the concepts which are behind every computer design in the last 25 years (because, marketing hype aside, computers aren't changed that much).
Once youngs are trained on the concepts, when they become adult they will have little difficulty in adapting to the 'GUI of the year'.
One-week requalification courses for middle-age empoyees which are forced to learn abut computers can hardly acomplish much more than reducing the fear or the hatred they feel for the 'beast'.
Right. Unfortunately, we are living and working in an economy that is more and more driven by the 'indirect payment' model.
Take ads, broadcast TV, etc : all 'free' stuff payed by adding someting to the cost of the products we buy at supermarket. So that if I buy toilet paper, I'm also paying for some TV show that I've never seen.
The Internet is also at least partly built on these assumptions: this site for instance lives on advertisement.
They could even go further and remove altogether the indipended Application menu, structuring the main menu in a way like this:
I want to/write a document/with abiword
I want to/write a document/with openoffice
I want to/write a document/with openoffice
I want to/ listen to music/with xmms
I want to/listen to music/with whatever
Each application sould register itsel on the proper I want to. And of course there should be a easy way to make a default for each (las used, maybe?).
AFAIK, this was the case also for gnome 1.4 and maybe in gnome 1.2. The funny-looking file names maybe were placed in a different place: try looking in your ~/.gnome* directories.
The main difference between 1.4 and 2.x is IMO the user target: 1.4 was a nice tool to hack a very customised desktop on your PC. With 2.x, they try to reach the standard computer users, hiding away most of the options and implementing the hints of some 'usability studies' they have done with Sun (of which the 'Action' menu is I think a result).
It's not clear to me how this could result in a faster desktop, except that it should cause less swapping, and that modern CPUs have power in excess (but it could be the same for the RAM, except that desktop machines are often sold by default with inadeguate RAM supply, mostly for commercial reasons).
The real place where vector-based graphic would be useful is the Internet. Less memory would mean less bandwidth required to transmit the image, and the greather CPU usage shouldn't be noticed, given that when you are surfing you don't care if the other activities on your PC (if any) are a bit slower.
But I wonder if SVG would be much better than image compression in that sense.
Instead, try 'Versioning File System for Linux' on Google. You might hit some interesting link.
If you refer to the parent post complaining about how difficult is to update KDE wrt to Ximian Desktop, this is because the poster doesn't know about up2date (which, IIRC, is only offered to paying customers) or he does not like it. While Ximian (NOT RH, but Ximian) offers with their version of Gnome an installation GUI, which is definitively better that 'rpm -i'.
I don't think you have to pay Trolltech until you _sell_ the product based on QT. You can do all internal prototype work with the GPL version of QT an only buy licences if/when you came out with a commercial product.
Apple is absolutely Linux's "friend" (in so far as a large company can be friends with a bunch of source files).
I'd say rather "business associate". Apple stays with Linux & open-source as much and as long it is convenient for them, no more. Which may be a moderately good thing, but IMO something to always remember (BTW, the above sentence is valid if you substitute Apple with almost any of the companies that use open-source software in some degree).
For god's sake, it's Unix. On The Desktop.
Ah, but Linux is not Unix. Neither is GNU.
This might not been well received by SUN & co, since space programs have always been a fat niche market for them, but I think that they realise that if it wasn't Linux it would have been Windows (which also is gaining market share in this field, anyway), and they prefer Linux because they can still try to win back the customers.
Now, the space program money comes from tax-payers. I doubt free software programmers will see any of it, but companies like SuSE are getting more work, and this is something. Also, experienced Linux programmers can more easily find a job in the field (if they can stand it).
I don't care about the webcam: it can directly read memory video, or take snapshots of windows and then parse the pixel matrix. But I want good pattern recognition, possibly learning by examples, automatic control over mouse keybord and a way to define/intercept game events.And of course a programming language to glue all toghether.
Wrong. What they want is money. What they have initiated is a defensive action against someting they were expecting to come, since they have probably watched Napster go down and learned from it.
Say this action can keep them in activities for another six months, by spending $1000000 in legal costs. If in the same time they earn $2000000 by ads on their servers etc, they have won. Then they will happily close shop, having squeazed all the possible money from the situation.
The question is, who is paying all the money for the lawyers? Let's see.
- Kazaa money comes mostly from ads; ads money comes from the companies selling the advertised goods, that will recover it by adding 2 cents to every product they sell to us.
- RIAA money comes from the record companies, which recover it adding 2 cents for each CD they are selling to us.
In other words, you (and me) are paying lawyers to go against other lawyers also payed by you (and me). So, I hope you are enjoying the show.You are not alone. They came in small box , they are called 'Modem', and they are connected to the phone line. So people thinks they are just more complex versions of the analogic modems. Few people realise that there is a real computer inside.
This could be fixed by adding to crime punishment a significant penalty in money. Say, if you steal X, you pay 3X: 1.5X goes back to the victim, 1.5X is used to finance the law enforcement and justice system.
For crimes which are against people and not against possessions (like rape and murder), set arbitrary very high fees, topping with revoking for life the right to own anything (i.e. taking away all their possessions present and _future_).
- Have a nice idea that you think is useful
- Develop the software, spending loads of money
- Sell the software until the money is back.
- start profit
With open-source software you have to go like this:Of course, it only works if your idea and your software are good, and recognized as such by others.
MandrakeSoft, maybe, did not stick to this logic. In the hurry to bring Linux to the masses, they invested too much. But, not developing closed-source software, they cannot recover what they invested.
It allows up to 8 (!) characters per account. And with some extensions, you can have even more!!!
No. There is not such a thing as a whortless idea. Anything which has been worth being written by someone is most likely worth reading for someone else. See how many people use the 'net to find out music that the big labels find worthless to publish.
The more ideas circulate, the more our society and each of us grows. Copyright laws manipulated by today big media harms the circulation of ideas. They should not be allowed to do this to the rest of us.
That company money would be much better used producing more intellectual work, rater than buying the privilege of making money from old ones.
My reason against long copyrights is that they stiff creativity and progress, not that some author/company is profitting too much from them. If some intellectual work is so good that it can still make money after 80+years, then that work _MUST_ be released to public domain. No amount of money is making for the damage that would be done not realising that work in the public domain. Actually,some damage has been already done by keeping the work a 'property' for so long.
I still don't buy the "they cannot bundle" argument, but the EULA argument is compelling. I could find a copy of the Win95 handbook that came with my old laptop. On page 1 there is the EULA. It says:
So, they promised a refund. They should comply.
[Dell] Ok.
[Techie] Well, ok, I'll buy the bundle but them I'll send the licence that I don't need.
[MS] No! You can't! It is illegal!
[Techie] How so? I can sell a DVD/book/tape/Music CD that I own.
[MS] Well, I will write down in my EULA that you can't. Take it or leave it.
[Gov] Err ... you can't do that, you know ...
[MS] Oh, bother that, okay, I'll put an opt-out clause in the EULA, too (to themselves: nobody is going to use it, anyway)
[Gov] Ok then, go ahead
[Techie] Well, then I opt-out and want a refund
[MS & Dell] What !??!
As a anti-Microsoft PR show-off, this refund thing is fine, for the little good these things produce. However, I can't agree with people holding that there is a legal basis for it. The OS is just a piece of a system: manifacturers are free to choose which pieces their system is made of. We customers make are pro/cons and cost/benefit analysis and then decide if to buy the system or go elsewhere.
Requiring a refund for the OS is for me on the par with requiring a refund for the hard-disk.
Even if he did it, it should depend on the terms on which he was granted entrance in the US. We European can shortcut the visa procedure by signing a visa waiver, that allows US administration and justice to handle us as they see fit. For instance, if a citizen of the Netherlands is found in possess of marjuana, it can be arrested in the US even though this is legal in the Netherlands.
If Sklyarov signed something like that and then violated the american law (even not knowing it), bad luck to him. But if he came in the US with a real visa, I believe that the only legal act for the US authorities was expulsion. Anything else, in a country less powerful than US, would have raised one hell of an international case.
Even without all that AI, the command line could be made much more user-friendly. What is more user friendly : use the mouse (a most unintuitive device) to double-click (what?) on an icon (uh?) that try to represent an interconnected globe, or just type "Web Browser" ?
True, the *ix command-line tools are conceived for expert usage and in an epoch when not typing two or three extra characters was seen as a great advantage. However, with alias, scripts and maybe a user-oriented shell integrated in a graphical environnment, the command line could become a real friend for computer newbies.
Last time I checked, both Gnome and KDE Help systems where able to render info pages in an HTMLish way using info2html or something similar.
It makes the reading of info data much less painful.
A documentation standard for *ix would be nice. But consider that the way you present your information has to change according to the target audience.You can't use the same _semantic_ structure for a tutorial and a reference manual.