Until very recently I hated KDE like the plague - and then we installed RH 7.1 here, along with the KDE pack. I fell in love with the system! GNOME has a lot of very *good* features, and *good* applications, but KDE is so much more mature. Konquerer is great for browsing - the cookie warning, while a little thing, is still important to me.
But I haven't given up on GNOME yet. Galeon works very well for the important stuff - it'll load a/. comment page in the 'blink of an eye.'
(And Hemos, I think we all know Konquerer is your favorite!)
See, I thought Outlook was more viral in that as soon as some jackass executive gets it in his head that it's the best thing ever to happen to scheduling it's suddenly on everyone's desktop...
...and immediately afterward the computer starts bleeding from the mouth and rectum...
I'm curious - if GNOME is right now at 1.4, just barely, why is bonobo-izing the whole project by 2.0 an insurmountable goal? If GNOME follows the usual release schedule, shouldn't it go 1.5-unstable, 1.6-stable, 1.7-unstable, 1.8-stable, 1.9-unstable, and then finally 2.0? Or is there going to be a huge jump from 1.4 to 2.0?
Does GTK follow this similar 1.4->2.0 jump?
(Was it Slackware that did this with some wry comments on the web site?)
The original Tom Swift, imo, weren't all that great. It wasn't until his son, the New Tom Swift, written by the fictious "Victor Appleton Jr." that I really started enjoying them... I'd pick them up and go through two a week when I was in fourth grade or so. I still even have my collection.
As a note, I just took my first CS class at my university. I expressed in the evaluations that I enjoyed the class a great deal - the prof did convey the difference between Computer Programming and Computer Science, or at least his view. Anyway - our first project was creating a Visualization for Windows Media Player. This is a 200-level class, in C++, and our first project was a visualization - not a text munger, not an encrypter, nothing like that. We went right for the whizz-bang, and honestly, I hated it. I wanted to do something interesting, not pretty.
For the second project, we were instructed to repeat the first project - but with an Object Oriented approach. Ugh. My group did an alternative project to that.
Altogether, I agree with you. Assembler is something I intend to learn (some day) because I feel I need that understanding. But, at the same time, it's easy to see the benefits from not turning away everyone but the best and the brightest - if all the lazy programmers went away... It goes both ways, I suppose.
The only disadvantage of the Visual Studio IDE(or any other) is the capabilities of the editor.
...and VIM is available as an editor in Visual Studio!
Although, I must say I agree with the posters who advised against an IDE. Emacs in development mode is great, although I must admit I prefer VIM with a terminal window open when I am developing Python under Linux - under windows, the pseudo-IDE PythonWin works great for me. C++ gets done in editor/shell mode.
I remember when he showed my B90 class this at nwu last year. He did a series of very interesting lectures - evidently based on a series he did at princeton - about a HUGE variety of topics. Godel, Number Theory, discrepancies in time measurement...
One of the most interesting things he showed us was how to find Pi from a game of pool - no tricks! I forget the exact method, but I think you took two balls of equal mass, hit them together, and looked for how many times the second would hit the wall before stopping. And then you changed the mass ratio to 10-1, then 100-1, and so on.
From reading the article, I wonder just how much effort McNealy put into it. It's short, barely touches on the subject, and does so with broad examples that hardly assay concerns.
(Just as an aside, I doubt that the people who don't want their movie preferences revealed are the same people who want a computer to suggest new movies!)
The article reads like a sidebar. McNealy glazes over the real issues. By what standard are medical records going to be selectively revealed? Are they going to be given out to every Dr. Nick? Are we allowed to decide?
One of the biggest problems, however, is that Napster, for the majority of users, is like a 'free' version of that NOW compilation we've seen top the charts for a few years now. The people the RIAA really wants to target aren't educated consumers like you, or me, or most of the Slashdot community, but the people who just want 'that song from the radio.'
The RIAA makes a great deal of profit off of one-hit-wonders, and artists that don't precisely put out full albums of good music. They don't give the proverbial shit about people downloading Frank Zappa; they're concerned about people downloading La Vida Loca and then not needing to buy the CD.
I agree with you - Napster is a great tool for 'getting into' artists. Because I got the wrong song when I searched for 'Without You' I ended up buying the entire Stevie Ray Vaughan catalog. I agree that napster is a powerful tool.
We aren't the ones they're after.
(Unless I've horribly misjudged the slashdot crowd and they're actually all into J.Lo and Eagle Eye Cherry!)
A mob-like attitude is horrible. It encourages ignorance, irrational thought, and prejudice.
Perhaps my editorial quotes around my statement earlier weren't obvious to you. I don't believe we should allow any injustice to occur - especially in the realm of freedom. I strongly believe we should make judgments from an intelligent perspective; and what he did encouraged neither thought or intelligence, but merely judgment.
I see. And by that token Flight SImulators make me a pilot, SimCity makes me a qualified mayor, and Transport Tycoon has made me a millionaire. Oh, and Black and White makes me GOD.
The difference you fail to notice is that the skills you claim come from other games are in fact learned skills; something that requires a great deal of time, energy, and investment. From the standpoint of violence in schools and so forth, we aren't talking about highly-trained mercenary killers, but kids that grabbed guns - and thus the apples/oranges relationship between Transport Tycoon and whatever shoot 'em up this was designed to restrict.
This doesn't mean I agree with the bill - but I do highly believe that comments like what you posted only encourage a mob-attitude that rallies against whatever 'threatens our freedom.' Just because you disagree with it doesn't mean you're right to be demeaning, insulting, or riddled with fallacies.
wxWindows, along with its various bindings (wxPython, wxPerl, etc...) is actually a very good cross-platform system. It's an entirely abstracted system for developing GUI applications using an OS'es native framework.
I honestly love writing all the apps I need for a windows system under FreeBSD, and only rebooting for debugging. There are a huge number of Device Contexts, Managed Windows, all the widgets you'll ever need... wxWindows is a dream. I swear by wxPython for GUI building.
"Well, crying isn't gonna bring him back, unless your tears smell like dog food. So you can either sit there crying and eating can after can of dog food until your tears smell enough like dog food to make your dog come back -- or you can go out there and find your dog."
Eazel was always the company I was glad to look at and say, you know, these guys might make it. They had a great staff - hell, they had the ultimate staff - some great ideas, even good funding.
Then Nautilus was released. It was good, even great. I like it - even though it does more than I really want, I recognize that it's the file manager for new users. And now Eazel is dead, or will be soon.
However, there is a bright side. The GPL is here to save the day again. We, the community, have been given the code - we have the assurance that the code will never go away.
I bet within the next, oh, month or so, an article will show up on Slashdot proclaiming that Eazel development has been moved to sourceforge, that a dedicated group of volunteers has taken hold, and that soon enough OpenNautilus will be on its way toward becoming a reality.
(OpenNautilus being a farcical term, since the code is already open.)
One thing from this article, and others that gripe about the GPL, is the basic fact that GPL'ed code doesn't go where it isn't wanted. Microsoft clearly isn't speaking about its own business practices when they warn against the GPL - they've obviously been staying away from it so far. What they're doing is using their weight, their influence, to warn companies away from supporting the GPL.
The GPL is very easily avoided. Yes, it's viral - if a license can be considered 'viral.' It does 'infect' the derivative works. That's what it's for. Microsoft is right when it says that this makes it more difficult to sell products - and certainly if a product can't be sold, it could be viewed as 'removing incentive.' (Odd that such a phrase, commonly used to argue against higher taxes, would be used to argue against reducing the so-called "software tax.")
But, as others have touched on, GPL'ed code isn't forcing itself down the throats of commercial developers. No one is forcing anyone to take the metaphorical hypodermic full of GPL. Think you can make a better grep, and sell it? Fine. Provde it. But don't use GNU grep code without giving back.
More importantly, it should be noticed that Microsoft objects to GNU software because it takes a price - a price that is paid to the community at large, not to a specific individual or company. GNU software may not charge for anything besides the distribution costs (not that it couldn't!) but it does charge you with the responsibility to give back.
These are things we all know. Microsoft isn't willing to pay that price. The so-called Shared Source is an attempt to appease the desires whetted by the OSS movement. No one is allowed to give back to the community once they look at this source code.
The biggest shame in this whole situation is that Slashdot may be the most public place for OSS and Free Software advocates to respond to these nonsenses.
I'm pretty sure the emphasis on this story was the actual figures. This is a significant investment, and now we know that IBM is definitely taking something of a gamble with it.
With just about any V4L device you can do it. I would personally recommend checking out a couple different places to figure out what the best one is; I use a Creative WebCam III under FreeBSD as a pure webcam, not a security cam, and I don't recall if V4L is set up yet.
This freshmeat query should get you started. There are four different projects that come up. GNU.PhantomSecurity seems pretty promising.
Just before Python moved away, I remember being in #python on openprojects.net and somebody who claimed to be a VP of BeOpen was talking to me. He needed help on where to upload a CGI script (python based, of course) to the BeOpen web site. Anyway, at one point I mentioned that I was doing work in Python at my job - he immediately tried to get me to outsource to GvR and a few of the other people.
My response, of course, was that doing so would put me out of a job.
And come to think of it, he promised me a t-shirt for walking him through the ftp thing. Rotten BeOpen.com.;-)
For a moment let's consider what Linux 'is all about.' The major purpose behind people using it, right now - in my experience - is not a hatred of Microsoft (I hope!) but rather the idea that things can be done better.
Now let's propose that OS X does come along, and frankly waxes the floor with Linux. It's based on BSD, has a central source repository, a team of dedicated developers skilled in UI concerns, and is easy for new users. What if, in one fell swoop, Apple creates a new operating system that is stable, beautiful and easy all in one go?
If OS X really is what it's cracked up to be, wouldn't lamenting Linux's demise be comparable to whining about the phasing out of VHS for DVD's? (CSS concerns aside)
As of right now, Linux has a few major strong points in its favor. Linux is Free Software. Darwin may be an attempt at free, but it isn't Free as defined by the FSF. People will probably have to pay for OS X in its glory, even though Darwin can be downloaded freely.
OS X may be the Next Big Thing (more likely than "Ginger"!) but that may or may not be bad for Linux. Even if it is bad for Linux, it might be better for the end user. Don't forget that the end user ultimately is the victor in any battle like this - it's not us geeks. We can fend for ourselves, so to speak, in dangerous terrain. The End User is who we're fighting for, right? That's what I'll tell my kids, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
Until very recently I hated KDE like the plague - and then we installed RH 7.1 here, along with the KDE pack. I fell in love with the system! GNOME has a lot of very *good* features, and *good* applications, but KDE is so much more mature. Konquerer is great for browsing - the cookie warning, while a little thing, is still important to me.
/. comment page in the 'blink of an eye.'
But I haven't given up on GNOME yet. Galeon works very well for the important stuff - it'll load a
(And Hemos, I think we all know Konquerer is your favorite!)
See, I thought Outlook was more viral in that as soon as some jackass executive gets it in his head that it's the best thing ever to happen to scheduling it's suddenly on everyone's desktop...
...and immediately afterward the computer starts bleeding from the mouth and rectum...
I'm curious - if GNOME is right now at 1.4, just barely, why is bonobo-izing the whole project by 2.0 an insurmountable goal? If GNOME follows the usual release schedule, shouldn't it go 1.5-unstable, 1.6-stable, 1.7-unstable, 1.8-stable, 1.9-unstable, and then finally 2.0? Or is there going to be a huge jump from 1.4 to 2.0?
Does GTK follow this similar 1.4->2.0 jump?
(Was it Slackware that did this with some wry comments on the web site?)
The original Tom Swift, imo, weren't all that great. It wasn't until his son, the New Tom Swift, written by the fictious "Victor Appleton Jr." that I really started enjoying them... I'd pick them up and go through two a week when I was in fourth grade or so. I still even have my collection.
Wait, what does this have to do with Perl 6?
As a note, I just took my first CS class at my university. I expressed in the evaluations that I enjoyed the class a great deal - the prof did convey the difference between Computer Programming and Computer Science, or at least his view. Anyway - our first project was creating a Visualization for Windows Media Player. This is a 200-level class, in C++, and our first project was a visualization - not a text munger, not an encrypter, nothing like that. We went right for the whizz-bang, and honestly, I hated it. I wanted to do something interesting, not pretty.
For the second project, we were instructed to repeat the first project - but with an Object Oriented approach. Ugh. My group did an alternative project to that.
Altogether, I agree with you. Assembler is something I intend to learn (some day) because I feel I need that understanding. But, at the same time, it's easy to see the benefits from not turning away everyone but the best and the brightest - if all the lazy programmers went away... It goes both ways, I suppose.
The only disadvantage of the Visual Studio IDE(or any other) is the capabilities of the editor.
...and VIM is available as an editor in Visual Studio!
Although, I must say I agree with the posters who advised against an IDE. Emacs in development mode is great, although I must admit I prefer VIM with a terminal window open when I am developing Python under Linux - under windows, the pseudo-IDE PythonWin works great for me. C++ gets done in editor/shell mode.
I remember when he showed my B90 class this at nwu last year. He did a series of very interesting lectures - evidently based on a series he did at princeton - about a HUGE variety of topics. Godel, Number Theory, discrepancies in time measurement...
One of the most interesting things he showed us was how to find Pi from a game of pool - no tricks! I forget the exact method, but I think you took two balls of equal mass, hit them together, and looked for how many times the second would hit the wall before stopping. And then you changed the mass ratio to 10-1, then 100-1, and so on.
Does anybody have a copy of the questions forwarded to reporters by Microsoft? I'm curious - since eWeek alludes to them - what they contain.
From reading the article, I wonder just how much effort McNealy put into it. It's short, barely touches on the subject, and does so with broad examples that hardly assay concerns.
(Just as an aside, I doubt that the people who don't want their movie preferences revealed are the same people who want a computer to suggest new movies!)
The article reads like a sidebar. McNealy glazes over the real issues. By what standard are medical records going to be selectively revealed? Are they going to be given out to every Dr. Nick? Are we allowed to decide?
The article is highly disappointing.
One of the biggest problems, however, is that Napster, for the majority of users, is like a 'free' version of that NOW compilation we've seen top the charts for a few years now. The people the RIAA really wants to target aren't educated consumers like you, or me, or most of the Slashdot community, but the people who just want 'that song from the radio.'
The RIAA makes a great deal of profit off of one-hit-wonders, and artists that don't precisely put out full albums of good music. They don't give the proverbial shit about people downloading Frank Zappa; they're concerned about people downloading La Vida Loca and then not needing to buy the CD.
I agree with you - Napster is a great tool for 'getting into' artists. Because I got the wrong song when I searched for 'Without You' I ended up buying the entire Stevie Ray Vaughan catalog. I agree that napster is a powerful tool.
We aren't the ones they're after.
(Unless I've horribly misjudged the slashdot crowd and they're actually all into J.Lo and Eagle Eye Cherry!)
A mob-like attitude is horrible. It encourages ignorance, irrational thought, and prejudice.
Perhaps my editorial quotes around my statement earlier weren't obvious to you. I don't believe we should allow any injustice to occur - especially in the realm of freedom. I strongly believe we should make judgments from an intelligent perspective; and what he did encouraged neither thought or intelligence, but merely judgment.
I see. And by that token Flight SImulators make me a pilot, SimCity makes me a qualified mayor, and Transport Tycoon has made me a millionaire. Oh, and Black and White makes me GOD.
The difference you fail to notice is that the skills you claim come from other games are in fact learned skills; something that requires a great deal of time, energy, and investment. From the standpoint of violence in schools and so forth, we aren't talking about highly-trained mercenary killers, but kids that grabbed guns - and thus the apples/oranges relationship between Transport Tycoon and whatever shoot 'em up this was designed to restrict.
This doesn't mean I agree with the bill - but I do highly believe that comments like what you posted only encourage a mob-attitude that rallies against whatever 'threatens our freedom.' Just because you disagree with it doesn't mean you're right to be demeaning, insulting, or riddled with fallacies.
Whoops, LGPL does mean Library GPL. My bad.
Every program ever written under linux would be a derivative work of the kernel, which is GPL.
Not true. Linus himself has included in the kernel sources a disclaimer allowing for linking to the standard libraries.
In fact, dynamic linking is what the LGPL is all about - and is why it's commonly (mistakenly) called the "Library" GPL.
wxWindows, along with its various bindings (wxPython, wxPerl, etc...) is actually a very good cross-platform system. It's an entirely abstracted system for developing GUI applications using an OS'es native framework.
I honestly love writing all the apps I need for a windows system under FreeBSD, and only rebooting for debugging. There are a huge number of Device Contexts, Managed Windows, all the widgets you'll ever need... wxWindows is a dream. I swear by wxPython for GUI building.
"Well, crying isn't gonna bring him back, unless your tears smell like dog food. So you can either sit there crying and eating can after can of dog food until your tears smell enough like dog food to make your dog come back -- or you can go out there and find your dog."
"You're right! I'll do it."
"Rats. I almost had him eating dog food!"
I swear by Abook for my address book needs. Haven't found any good calendar apps for console, so I use calendar.yahoo.com.
;-)
Abook even has hooks for mutt searching...
((And can anybody find any decent X11 apps? I never found one that made the grade.))
Oh yeah. I wouldn't recommend learning Emacs just for this... Driving a tack with a sledge-hammer.
Eazel was always the company I was glad to look at and say, you know, these guys might make it. They had a great staff - hell, they had the ultimate staff - some great ideas, even good funding.
Then Nautilus was released. It was good, even great. I like it - even though it does more than I really want, I recognize that it's the file manager for new users. And now Eazel is dead, or will be soon.
However, there is a bright side. The GPL is here to save the day again. We, the community, have been given the code - we have the assurance that the code will never go away.
I bet within the next, oh, month or so, an article will show up on Slashdot proclaiming that Eazel development has been moved to sourceforge, that a dedicated group of volunteers has taken hold, and that soon enough OpenNautilus will be on its way toward becoming a reality.
(OpenNautilus being a farcical term, since the code is already open.)
Companies come and go - but code remains forever.
One thing from this article, and others that gripe about the GPL, is the basic fact that GPL'ed code doesn't go where it isn't wanted. Microsoft clearly isn't speaking about its own business practices when they warn against the GPL - they've obviously been staying away from it so far. What they're doing is using their weight, their influence, to warn companies away from supporting the GPL.
The GPL is very easily avoided. Yes, it's viral - if a license can be considered 'viral.' It does 'infect' the derivative works. That's what it's for. Microsoft is right when it says that this makes it more difficult to sell products - and certainly if a product can't be sold, it could be viewed as 'removing incentive.' (Odd that such a phrase, commonly used to argue against higher taxes, would be used to argue against reducing the so-called "software tax.")
But, as others have touched on, GPL'ed code isn't forcing itself down the throats of commercial developers. No one is forcing anyone to take the metaphorical hypodermic full of GPL. Think you can make a better grep, and sell it? Fine. Provde it. But don't use GNU grep code without giving back.
More importantly, it should be noticed that Microsoft objects to GNU software because it takes a price - a price that is paid to the community at large, not to a specific individual or company. GNU software may not charge for anything besides the distribution costs (not that it couldn't!) but it does charge you with the responsibility to give back.
These are things we all know. Microsoft isn't willing to pay that price. The so-called Shared Source is an attempt to appease the desires whetted by the OSS movement. No one is allowed to give back to the community once they look at this source code.
The biggest shame in this whole situation is that Slashdot may be the most public place for OSS and Free Software advocates to respond to these nonsenses.
I'm pretty sure the emphasis on this story was the actual figures. This is a significant investment, and now we know that IBM is definitely taking something of a gamble with it.
With just about any V4L device you can do it. I would personally recommend checking out a couple different places to figure out what the best one is; I use a Creative WebCam III under FreeBSD as a pure webcam, not a security cam, and I don't recall if V4L is set up yet.
This freshmeat query should get you started. There are four different projects that come up. GNU.PhantomSecurity seems pretty promising.
Just before Python moved away, I remember being in #python on openprojects.net and somebody who claimed to be a VP of BeOpen was talking to me. He needed help on where to upload a CGI script (python based, of course) to the BeOpen web site. Anyway, at one point I mentioned that I was doing work in Python at my job - he immediately tried to get me to outsource to GvR and a few of the other people.
;-)
My response, of course, was that doing so would put me out of a job.
And come to think of it, he promised me a t-shirt for walking him through the ftp thing. Rotten BeOpen.com.
Art needs three things.
Frankly (haha), I agree with him.
For a moment let's consider what Linux 'is all about.' The major purpose behind people using it, right now - in my experience - is not a hatred of Microsoft (I hope!) but rather the idea that things can be done better.
Now let's propose that OS X does come along, and frankly waxes the floor with Linux. It's based on BSD, has a central source repository, a team of dedicated developers skilled in UI concerns, and is easy for new users. What if, in one fell swoop, Apple creates a new operating system that is stable, beautiful and easy all in one go?
If OS X really is what it's cracked up to be, wouldn't lamenting Linux's demise be comparable to whining about the phasing out of VHS for DVD's? (CSS concerns aside)
As of right now, Linux has a few major strong points in its favor. Linux is Free Software. Darwin may be an attempt at free, but it isn't Free as defined by the FSF. People will probably have to pay for OS X in its glory, even though Darwin can be downloaded freely.
OS X may be the Next Big Thing (more likely than "Ginger"!) but that may or may not be bad for Linux. Even if it is bad for Linux, it might be better for the end user. Don't forget that the end user ultimately is the victor in any battle like this - it's not us geeks. We can fend for ourselves, so to speak, in dangerous terrain. The End User is who we're fighting for, right? That's what I'll tell my kids, at least.