Is it just me, or have more and more stories been taking on a decidedly 'advertisatory' (to coin a word) tone in the past year?
While it is quite possible that/. gets money (or at least a contract for more ad) to publish some corporate-oriented stories, you should also notice that the sentence that upset you is part of a citation: the AC that submitted the story is reposting the press release (or whatever) of Rational on the matter.
Until there's usable stuff available, OSS is just a hobbyist toy platform for computer geeks.
Not so. I, and others, use it for work. It might not have what _you_ need (only you can judge that), but this does not mean than other cannot find it useful.
The point is that without Microsoft XP bundled in the PC can be a lot cheaper.
Almost $100 cheaper. I read somewehere Wallmart also sells near-identical PC with some Microsoft OS for $299.
Now, $100 may be nothing when you plan to spend $1000 or more for the new computer. But if you can/want only spent $400 (including a monitor in the price), then it starts to make a difference.
I also read somewhere (I think the Register) that WallMart asked Microsoft for a discount and they said no. Bad move. If the 'cheap PC' takes the flight (and I think it will), they might want to reconsider. Eaning $50 for each cheap PC is much better than earning $0. Not to speak of the fact that people may start to realize that a PC does not need a Microsoft OS to be useful.
I've been tried to explain this to would-be OSS users for years. The OSS developers would not care less for world domination. And they don't care for
users that don't understand that using OSS mean to be part of the development team, even though only by not whining, or by explaining how to use a piece of software to another would-be-user.
Sure, RH and Mandrake and SuSE sell products. If you buy their product and don't like them, you have the right to complain (with them) until you loose the voice or your fingers hurt. But it would have been better to evaluate the product before purchasing it, and not to buy it if does not suit your purpose.
Free software is something else, though. It is developers _and_ users working toghether. They are in it for a lot of different and sometime conflicting reasons: to reach a common goal, for the fun of it, to make the world better, to achieve a deeper understanding of some computer-related field of knowledge, you name it.
You may decide to ignore them: fine. You may decide to join them: even better, but then you are
in it _with_ them, you are not their customer.
And, believe or not, this kind of approach has given us some really great software, and I hope it will continue to do so in the future.
To change the configuration of Program X simply use your favourite text editor and add the line "-option [-adst] [--h] refnumber columnnum -g --system"
Actually, it is less bad than you make it sound. Configuration files are fine, perfectly usable by anyone that can read text and type on a keyboard.
What is often missing is:
an understandable syntax : often config files are structured to benefit programs rather than users
an automatic check when the user finish to change it, with clear message errors.
Well-done configuration files are often much better than navigating through one hundred options distributed in a dozen different tabs (even see the 'option' multi-tab dialog of Word?).
So I actually bought a CD burner from E-bay for the sole purpose of burning the new debian-woody-pgi ISO to a CD so I could install debian.
Woah! you don't like simple paths, do you? Ever thought that you could have bought directly debian CD on E-bay [ or ask any LUG and get them almost free ] ?
Here you contradict yourself. How can useability be great if the learning curve for a new user is high? Usability is about reducing that learning curve by making the interface intuitive (among other things).
It depends on your target. Take computer languages : they are usable, but neither intuitive nor with a low learning curve (not most of them, at least).
I'd say a good Man-Machine Interface (which might not be necessarly a GUI) shold not make things unnecessarly complex: simple tasks should be simple to accomplish. Complex tasks, however, should not be semplified too much, or they loose most of their utility.
I might agree that open source software, made by computer experts for their own needs, often fails to meet the first requirement. (but sometime succeeds in unexpected way). OTOH, commercial software, especially from a famous^H^H^Higerate Redmond-based company, even more often fails to meet the second requirement.
I might agree that the money spent on ISS is not well spent. I work as programmer in aerospace (Europe). From my low point-of-view, I have seen examples of money spent in programs that, to me, had more to do with politics and power control rather than with science.
However, I _do_ think that low orbit is important for several reasons:
It provided up to now the only _useful_ and _remunerative_ applications for space : communications and, more recently, earth observation
As someone as said, we need to study how space affects human life. Unless you want to kill austronauts in attempts to make long space-trips, until one of them survives to tell us what it takes.
I believe that if we will ever send a ship to other planets of beyond, it will be built in space. So we need to learn how to assembly structures in space.
What I wanted to point out is that is much a matter of words. A well integrated operating system (much more than today OS, maybe much more than it is realistic to expect) would look to many people as a single "application".
On the other hand, we know that today
operating systems actually are composed of many components, that are not so much different from applications ( even monolithic OS like Linux have things like modules and kernel threads).
Re:In market forces I trust
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...it is going to have to compete not only with Linux and friends, but also with W2k and XP.
What if:
Microsoft discontinues W2k and XP: new PCs will come installed only with the new OS
software and media companies release DVD, CD & such so that only works with the new OS ( because of the equation "no freedoom == no piracy")
Market works when there _is_ strong competition, the same competition that Microsoft killed in the last 20 years.Otherwise, market laws always reward the strongest, and guess who is it?
Is that a new idea ?
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I believe there is already a program that run everything on my computer : it is called "Operating System". It just happens to use modules, called "applications" to perform the different tasks I want to do with my PC.
Kidding aside, the idea of hiding to the final user the application layer may be a good one. If this was done openly (i.e. documenting the API that each class of applications should have and allowing administrators to switch one application with another, from a different vendor, without troubles), could be a good step to make computers easier to use.
Fun may mean many things. Sometime it means doing something that is cool and hyper-technical. Sometime doing something that is useful, and having people (all people, not only peers) come back and say "thank you". Because this shows that you have Done It Right.
Free software developers _wants_ users, lots of them.Its their way to keep scores. The only things they ask to their users is not to bitch (or to bitch in an intelligent way, at least).
The second customer suggests an improvement to simplify a complex series of dialog boxes in the mail-merge routine. She also points out a few misspellings and confusing grammatical errors elsewhere in the interface. The developer is annoyed. The interface makes perfect sense. Why is this idiot wasting his time with this trivial crap?
Have you actually tried that?
I'm subscribed to several -devel lists, and my experience is that free software developers _do_ care for the user base. It is part of the reason they do free software: they _want_ users.As long as the users understand that what they get is a gift.
If simpler dialogs mean simpler code, and they usually do, the developer will listen. If the new dialogs mean more users, or happier users, the developers will implement it.
And if you fix mispelling in free software, and you send patches that fix them, you'll probably be asked to do more and more of it.
Probably because like most of Europe it is far cheaper to put up cell towers than to have wires run everywhere. Americans tend to forget how subsidized our wired telephone system was.
Not so. Cellular phones are used in addition to normal phones, not as alternative. In urban areas, which are fully wired, you also find full coverage for cellular phones by all the competing companies. Rural areas, which might be less wired (but they are, because the phone company was owned by the government up to 10 years ago and did not care of making profit ), are covered only by one or two of the largest companies, and not so well.
Why cellular phones are so much used here? It is a cultural thing. We like to stay in touch, chat
and ear each other voice. Take a plane in Italy: as soon as the plane is landed, everybody is calling home. People stuck in a trafic jam chatter with wives/husbands from the cars. Kids now get their first cellular at 14, os sooner.Also, cellular phones are now a status symbol for many, like sport cars or nice houses.
By common sense I mean NOT going to suspicious sites (you can usually tell by the URL.. something that has "geocities" or ends with ".cz" is probably going to be more dangerous than amazon.com for instance).
The best thing of the Web is that every day you have the possibility some interesting new places, often outside the corporate-sponsored channels. Sometime you stumble in bad taste, oscenity, or simply boredoom, but occasionally you find a new pearl.
Take this away, and you'll make the Web just just like TV.
BTW, isn't.cz the national domain of the Czthec republic? I expect there are a lot of good sites in that domain, also (although probably not in english).
And sincerly to all these Windows fans. Why do you don't take the guts and ask M$ to create a similar site? It would be much better than playing this stupid psychological war inside an OSS forum. I even may suggest a name for it - "Start Button"...
I'd like them to stay. Talking with like-minded people is good for your ego, but talking with people with different views is good for your mind.
Do you think that having 15 computers running 5 significantly different sets of software is useful in grade school?
It might be not such a bad idea. Schools should not teach the use of a particular software. They should teach ideas and concepts. Showing two computers with the same hardware but different OSes could make a great class about what an operating system _is_. Students could be encouraged to point out similarities and differnces between the design of the OSes.
The result of this would be that when these students will face for the first time Windows2020 or KDE9.4, having understood the basic concepts behind any software design, they would not be scared by the different look&feel and they will need little or no training to use the new tools.
It is so sad that many in the linux community are so obsessed with "eye candy"
Not me... as I tried to say in the post, I like PicoGUI for some of the underlying ides, not for eye-candy
and the latest experimental GUI.
Definitly yes. I look at free software as a wold-wide laboratory of computer science, where multiple and alternative ideas can be developed in parallel.
For me, this is much more important than coming with 'consistent' products.
qu apps in gtk was almost done, as I recall (the armony project attempted that).
I agree that the widget layout would be a big problem, especially with toolkits that let the applications impose their whish in this matter. But gtk+ does not, so it could be less of a problem.
Probably a complete replacement could never be done, (compatibility layers are never-ending projects, as wine teach us) but maybe some applications could be 'ported' this way.
Since picoGUI protocol is almost at toolkit level, what do you think of writing a dynamic library that substitutes, say, libgtk.so and that translates GTK GUI calls into messages to the server? In this way, gtk+ applications could run transparently with picoGUI and also enjoy picoGUI benefits.
I know, it is not so easy, but what would be the stumble points?
picoGUI follows the road of the Berlin Project: the client-server protocol is at an higher level that X-protocol. It is at the level of a GUI toolkit, almost.
To explain:
with X protocol, in order to draw, say, a pushbutton, the client says to the server things like : make a rectangle filled with color X, draw a line, etc... (the application programmers don't see this because this is what the GUI toolkits are for)
with picoGUI, the client only says: draw a button. It's the server that take cares of details, according to the currently loaded theme.
This brings a couple of advantages:
low-bandwith protocol
uniqueness of look-and-feel among applications.
To come to your point, no, picoGUI cannont embed the X protocol (it would be against its basic approach). But il could be possible (though not easy) to make 'compatible library' that traslates GTK+ API (or QT API) into the picoGUI API/protocol.
Cases in point - graphical installers for Mandrake 8 and Redhat 8, both autoconfigured X well enough to run the installer beautifully, at the right screen resolution and bit-depth.
Are you sure? Last time I checked (Mandrake 7.x, I believe) the installer used the 'standard svga' mode, which is to say 640x480 at 256 colors. Which works on - almost - all the graphic cards.
But yes, it should be offered as option for a 'safe minimal configuration', so that the users are always set in in a graphical environment at the end of installation.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is quite possible that
Not so. I, and others, use it for work. It might not have what _you_ need (only you can judge that), but this does not mean than other cannot find it useful.
Almost $100 cheaper. I read somewehere Wallmart also sells near-identical PC with some Microsoft OS for $299.
Now, $100 may be nothing when you plan to spend $1000 or more for the new computer. But if you can/want only spent $400 (including a monitor in the price), then it starts to make a difference.
I also read somewhere (I think the Register) that WallMart asked Microsoft for a discount and they said no. Bad move. If the 'cheap PC' takes the flight (and I think it will), they might want to reconsider. Eaning $50 for each cheap PC is much better than earning $0. Not to speak of the fact that people may start to realize that a PC does not need a Microsoft OS to be useful.
Sure, RH and Mandrake and SuSE sell products. If you buy their product and don't like them, you have the right to complain (with them) until you loose the voice or your fingers hurt. But it would have been better to evaluate the product before purchasing it, and not to buy it if does not suit your purpose.
Free software is something else, though. It is developers _and_ users working toghether. They are in it for a lot of different and sometime conflicting reasons: to reach a common goal, for the fun of it, to make the world better, to achieve a deeper understanding of some computer-related field of knowledge, you name it. You may decide to ignore them: fine. You may decide to join them: even better, but then you are in it _with_ them, you are not their customer.
And, believe or not, this kind of approach has given us some really great software, and I hope it will continue to do so in the future.
Disclaimer: I don't write free software.
Good night.
If you want a feel of real alternative but higly usable [for power users] 'window management', try Ion.
Actually, it is less bad than you make it sound. Configuration files are fine, perfectly usable by anyone that can read text and type on a keyboard.
What is often missing is:
- an understandable syntax : often config files are structured to benefit programs rather than users
- an automatic check when the user finish to change it, with clear message errors.
Well-done configuration files are often much better than navigating through one hundred options distributed in a dozen different tabs (even see the 'option' multi-tab dialog of Word?).Woah! you don't like simple paths, do you? Ever thought that you could have bought directly debian CD on E-bay [ or ask any LUG and get them almost free ] ?
It depends on your target. Take computer languages : they are usable, but neither intuitive nor with a low learning curve (not most of them, at least).
I'd say a good Man-Machine Interface (which might not be necessarly a GUI) shold not make things unnecessarly complex: simple tasks should be simple to accomplish. Complex tasks, however, should not be semplified too much, or they loose most of their utility.
I might agree that open source software, made by computer experts for their own needs, often fails to meet the first requirement. (but sometime succeeds in unexpected way). OTOH, commercial software, especially from a famous^H^H^Higerate Redmond-based company, even more often fails to meet the second requirement.
However, I _do_ think that low orbit is important for several reasons:
On the other hand, we know that today operating systems actually are composed of many components, that are not so much different from applications ( even monolithic OS like Linux have things like modules and kernel threads).
What if :
- Microsoft discontinues W2k and XP: new PCs will come installed only with the new OS
- software and media companies release DVD, CD & such so that only works with the new OS ( because of the equation "no freedoom == no piracy")
Market works when there _is_ strong competition, the same competition that Microsoft killed in the last 20 years.Otherwise, market laws always reward the strongest, and guess who is it?Kidding aside, the idea of hiding to the final user the application layer may be a good one. If this was done openly (i.e. documenting the API that each class of applications should have and allowing administrators to switch one application with another, from a different vendor, without troubles), could be a good step to make computers easier to use.
Knowing Microsoft, however ...
Free software developers _wants_ users, lots of them.Its their way to keep scores. The only things they ask to their users is not to bitch (or to bitch in an intelligent way, at least).
Have you actually tried that?
I'm subscribed to several -devel lists, and my experience is that free software developers _do_ care for the user base. It is part of the reason they do free software: they _want_ users.As long as the users understand that what they get is a gift.
If simpler dialogs mean simpler code, and they usually do, the developer will listen. If the new dialogs mean more users, or happier users, the developers will implement it.
And if you fix mispelling in free software, and you send patches that fix them, you'll probably be asked to do more and more of it.
Not so. Cellular phones are used in addition to normal phones, not as alternative. In urban areas, which are fully wired, you also find full coverage for cellular phones by all the competing companies. Rural areas, which might be less wired (but they are, because the phone company was owned by the government up to 10 years ago and did not care of making profit ), are covered only by one or two of the largest companies, and not so well.
Why cellular phones are so much used here? It is a cultural thing. We like to stay in touch, chat and ear each other voice. Take a plane in Italy: as soon as the plane is landed, everybody is calling home. People stuck in a trafic jam chatter with wives/husbands from the cars. Kids now get their first cellular at 14, os sooner.Also, cellular phones are now a status symbol for many, like sport cars or nice houses.
The best thing of the Web is that every day you have the possibility some interesting new places, often outside the corporate-sponsored channels. Sometime you stumble in bad taste, oscenity, or simply boredoom, but occasionally you find a new pearl.
Take this away, and you'll make the Web just just like TV.
BTW, isn't .cz the national domain of the Czthec republic? I expect there are a lot of good sites in that domain, also (although probably not in english).
I'd like them to stay. Talking with like-minded people is good for your ego, but talking with people with different views is good for your mind.
It might be not such a bad idea. Schools should not teach the use of a particular software. They should teach ideas and concepts. Showing two computers with the same hardware but different OSes could make a great class about what an operating system _is_. Students could be encouraged to point out similarities and differnces between the design of the OSes.
The result of this would be that when these students will face for the first time Windows2020 or KDE9.4, having understood the basic concepts behind any software design, they would not be scared by the different look&feel and they will need little or no training to use the new tools.
Not me ... as I tried to say in the post, I like PicoGUI for some of the underlying ides, not for eye-candy
and the latest experimental GUI.
Definitly yes. I look at free software as a wold-wide laboratory of computer science, where multiple and alternative ideas can be developed in parallel.
For me, this is much more important than coming with 'consistent' products.
I agree that the widget layout would be a big problem, especially with toolkits that let the applications impose their whish in this matter. But gtk+ does not, so it could be less of a problem.
Probably a complete replacement could never be done, (compatibility layers are never-ending projects, as wine teach us) but maybe some applications could be 'ported' this way.
I know, it is not so easy, but what would be the stumble points?
To explain:
- with X protocol, in order to draw, say, a pushbutton, the client says to the server things like : make a rectangle filled with color X, draw a line, etc... (the application programmers don't see this because this is what the GUI toolkits are for)
- with picoGUI, the client only says: draw a button. It's the server that take cares of details, according to the currently loaded theme.
This brings a couple of advantages:To come to your point, no, picoGUI cannont embed the X protocol (it would be against its basic approach). But il could be possible (though not easy) to make 'compatible library' that traslates GTK+ API (or QT API) into the picoGUI API/protocol.
/. is a Microsoft place, now ... haven't you read that >50% prefers windows?
Are you sure? Last time I checked (Mandrake 7.x, I believe) the installer used the 'standard svga' mode, which is to say 640x480 at 256 colors. Which works on - almost - all the graphic cards.
But yes, it should be offered as option for a 'safe minimal configuration', so that the users are always set in in a graphical environment at the end of installation.