Okay, let's forget about.NET's tainted past and pretend like it's just another ECMA standard. There are still a boatload of questions that need answered here.
Is this a unilateral declaration from Miguel, or has this.NET direction been discussed and agreed upon by the GNOME hacker community and the GNOME foundation? Obviously Miguel is the founder, maintainer and chief architect of GNOME. But at this stage too many players have a stake in GNOME to allow Miguel to take the project flying off in a new direction at his whim, particularly when the whim just happens to have potential commerical benefits for the company he founded and runs.
Ximian's business plan is to get companies to pay for their distribution of open source products because they're nicely packaged, maintained and supported. That's all well and good, but we've already seen one instance with Evolution where Ximian has developed open source software and then decided to charge for an extension to support Microsoft's proprietary protocols (Evolution's Exchange connector).
Building GNOME on.NET puts Ximian in a position to do the same thing with GNOME. Okay, the free version works with all those ECMA standard API's but if you want it to work with those Microsoft proprietary API's (and you know they'll appear) you've got to pay up for the Ximian version.
In short - Miguel has far too much of a conflict of interest to make a unilateral decision on this. There are too many questions that need answered with something other than Miguel's "It's really cool." The first and most important is do we really need it? Does this really need to be an integral part of the desktop or can it just be added with some kind of interface? KISS would seem to apply to the desktop and GNOME is complex enough as it is.
Assuming we do need something like this at the very core of the desktop, is this the right technology for the application? Is it the right version of.NET technology to use? Why not DotGNU?
Ultimately this needs to be discussed in much more detail and decided by concensous and not just decreed by Miguel. If he can sell the idea on the basis of merit to the GNOME hacker community and the GNOME Foundation I can live with.NET's tainted past. But that still doesn't make it a white wedding.
Re:Mac OS X will unify the *BSDs
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Debian NetBSD
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· Score: 1
Holy Khrushchev Macman, were you banging your shoe on a podium during that speech?
Really now, anyone who thinks the G4 has kept pace in the CPU wars can hardly be expected to understand why an open source OS doesn't correct the problems with running a proprietary GUI on proprietary hardware.
Wolf3d created/popularized a genre, just as the Beatles did with rock'n'roll, and Run DMC did with rap, and Marilyn Manson did w/ shock-rock.
Marilyn Manson created/popularized shock-rock? What are you, fifteen years old? Marilyn Manson is a cheap plastic imitation of the original. The sad part is that he doesn't even get the joke.
Isn't it funny that it took this whole Compaq plot to make people recognize that Carly is a nitwit? It was seen as a coup when HP lured her away from Lucent because at the time the Rich McGinn management team she was a part of was seen as a big success.
Since then it was discovered that a lot of Lucent's "success" was based on juggled books and bad debt. But by the time all that was discovered, Lucent was spiraling down in flames. They kicked McGinn out with that most golden of golden parachutes, but Carly was long gone to HP by that time.
You can bet that Carly has learned her old Lucent management lessons well, and in between Power Point presentations about how gutting the company of technical expertise is going to save billions and inspirational talks about how the merger is good and the old HP is bad, she's carefully packing that parachute.
Hmm. I just tried this and it preserved the file name as I switched directories. I'm running Ximian Gnome and I think they replaced the normal file selector with their own, somewhat improved version.
Nonsense. UTV's USB and printer ports are virtually useless and there's no sign they'll add functionality for those any time soon. More importantly, UTV has yet to offer many of the PVR features that TiVo has had for years. If you want WebTV by all means go with UTV, but if you want the most capable PVR it's still TiVo by a mile.
Meanwhile, a bug in UTV has caused many subscribers to lose access to multiple DirecTV channels and some UTV features. Those users have been without access to those channels for two weeks now. Microsoft thinks they have a fix, but it will take a couple of weeks to get it rolled out to all UTV users. Read about it in this AVS Forum thread.
Yep, Microsoft has certainly thrown all their capability behind their digital home push. Buggy PVRs and broken Xboxes. No wonder Bill is started to make noises about using XP as the center of their digital home. Their efforts at convergence boxes continue to come up short and without an OS monopoly to force people to suffer through their miscues, it's just not working.
Any company with a patent in the Digital Recorder area (Tivo, Replay, MS?) will likely sue them to try to stop the competition.
TiVo's Chief Evangelist didn't seem to consider them competition in this AVS Forum thread. "We have more in common than in competition," he says. So I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of licensing for TiVo's technology is already in the works.
Huh? You mean a company run by slackers, for slackers isn't a good business model? Rats, there goes my whole business plan.
The sad irony is that the idea of bringing a cinematic story line into the FPS genre was good, but Valve executed faster and better. Maybe as a new company Ion Storm should have figured out how to take a few steps forward before they got so caught up in the idea of a making a quantum leap.
I'm more than a little skeptical of this message, as well. But it's almost too strange to be made up. It's just the kind cross between executive-speak and stupid user tricks you get from management types. The broken URLs are typical and you can't poke a pointy-haired IT manager with stick these days without him blurting out "server consolidation!"
What I found interesting is that a Google Search verifies that there is a "Kelly File" working for Microsoft, but he's not high enough profile that you would expect some Linux geek to pull his name out.
So would someone care to drop a line to kellyfi@microsoft.com and see if bounces? I mean, the guy evidently wants to know if we're using Linux, right?
Linux fans should take note. This is what Linux market leadership looks like. Everything Microsoft does in the PVR market is defined in terms of TiVo. UTV users speak of upgrades 'easier than TiVo', software upgrades coming real soon now that will 'lift UTV over Tivo' and so on, and so forth.
Ya know, I frankly hadn't even thought about using mirrors for Red Carpet, even during times when the Ximian server was slow, it just never occurred to me. I generally leave the updates to run so speed hasn't been an issue. If bandwidth is a big part of the problem Ximian might do well to pop up a reminder now and then that there are mirrors available.
None of this is such a big deal, Ximian can do as it pleases. But I'm not paying more than I paid for my Linux distro each year just to have the latest builds right away.
XML is great for content, but like HTML and SGML there's really no layout data, which can be important for many documents. Perhaps some type of style-sheets over XML?
The W3C has already has a recommendation for an Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) for use with XML. The specification is here.
Another slow, ugly but wonderfully effective aircraft that looks set to be in service well past most people's expectations (including the Air Force) is the A10 Thunderbolt II (a.k.a. Warhog).
The A10 was originally projected to be good for 8000 flight hours, now they're planning to keep them in service for up to three times that. There's a detailed description of the updates and overhauls they plan use to keep the A10 in service on FAS.org's A10 page.
It's worse than that. With the decline of USENET and ascention of web boards, tons of useful information is being poured into sites that may only keep the information around for days or weeks. At least slashdot has kept some kind of history that could be easily saved and ported elsewhere if they disappeared.
Shocking, but true - thousands of first posts are being cast into the oblivion on a daily basis.
Ximian Evolution is becoming quite stable and powerful. They just need to get LDAP and spell checking working in a painless installation and world domination will be within their grasp. The combination of Evolution, Open Office and Galeon is looking sweeter every day.
Sorry Xanex, you're coming in with too little, too late. There are plenty of other easy to install, easy to use distros. Corel would have had something if they could have gotten their full suite of tools ported and stable and bundled the whole thing for under $100.
Instead they gave us a half-baked distro and a half finished office suite. So long, Corel. Remember that Bill likes his shoes really shiny.
30 second skip is not a feature that Tivo ever promised to anyone.
Did venture funding kill GNOME?
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Eazel Tells All
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· Score: 1
A few years ago there seemed to be a lot of sensitivity in the GNOME team to resisting bloat and keeping things lean and focused. That seems to be gone now. It's almost as though a lot of the development has gotten sucked into these new companies and everyone has powerful new PC's and they've forgotten where they came from.
I can't imagine that any of the top developers of Nautilus or Evolution have tried to run these things on hardware that's more than a year old. Seperately they labor along, running them together will bring a strong system to its knees.
Somewhere along the way GNOME's component architecture has gone wrong. I only need my file manager and my web browser to be aquainted, I don't need them to be intimate. But now I get the overhead from one every time I start the other. Evolution is the same way, why do I need overhead my scheduler every time I start my email?
Their new file indexing scheme is another example. Suddenly I'm waking up every morning to the sound of medusa still trying to thrash my disk into stone two hours after it started. It's old machine, guys, I don't have that much disk.
I've always prefered GNOME because I liked the look and feel and the flexibility that it gave me without too much overhead. I also never cared for the look of KDE and I was wary of their licensing issues. But it looks like it's time to give KDE a try. GNOME appears to have been set adrift in a sea of venture capital. Until the last of that cash finally swirls down the drain I see no sign that they're going to get back on the right track.
Will all of the rich people who don't want their tax cut please send it to me? I will invest most of it and use the rest to buy goods and services that will help bolster our flagging economy.
Everytime there are "budget cuts" (and I use that term loosely) the big government agencies squeal that it's the end of the world as they cut programs they probably should have cut years ago. It's good to know that there are some folks still niave enough to buy into that.
Give it some time. Eventually you to will start to wonder were all your money is going. And then you'll do some simple math. And you'll get it.
Many winmodems do have a DSP chip onboard. The main difference between them and a "real" modem is that they control the modem and DSP directly over the PCI bus instead of through a faux UART interface, they download the DSP code on the fly instead of storing it on the board and they sometimes use system memory instead of onboard memory. All this uses little or no more CPU than a normal modem at high data speeds. The Mwave modem IBM has released drivers for appears to be of this type, as are all of the "winmodems" using Lucent chips.
The real culprits for the bad rap that "winmodems" get are the cheapest of the cheap modems which do everything in software, suck up lots of CPU power and aren't worth the circuit boards they're printed on.
What the poster fails to mention is that the "hacker community" (as he calls these crackers) had a regular little cottage industry going selling hacked H cards and then fleecing their costumers for upgrades each time the card got ECMed.
Of course I have no sympathy for the people who have been conned by H card scams. It's easy to con someone who wants something for nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, let's forget about .NET's tainted past and pretend like it's just another ECMA standard. There are still a boatload of questions that need answered here.
.NET direction been discussed and agreed upon by the GNOME hacker community and the GNOME foundation? Obviously Miguel is the founder, maintainer and chief architect of GNOME. But at this stage too many players have a stake in GNOME to allow Miguel to take the project flying off in a new direction at his whim, particularly when the whim just happens to have potential commerical benefits for the company he founded and runs.
.NET puts Ximian in a position to do the same thing with GNOME. Okay, the free version works with all those ECMA standard API's but if you want it to work with those Microsoft proprietary API's (and you know they'll appear) you've got to pay up for the Ximian version.
.NET technology to use? Why not DotGNU?
.NET's tainted past. But that still doesn't make it a white wedding.
Is this a unilateral declaration from Miguel, or has this
Ximian's business plan is to get companies to pay for their distribution of open source products because they're nicely packaged, maintained and supported. That's all well and good, but we've already seen one instance with Evolution where Ximian has developed open source software and then decided to charge for an extension to support Microsoft's proprietary protocols (Evolution's Exchange connector).
Building GNOME on
In short - Miguel has far too much of a conflict of interest to make a unilateral decision on this. There are too many questions that need answered with something other than Miguel's "It's really cool." The first and most important is do we really need it? Does this really need to be an integral part of the desktop or can it just be added with some kind of interface? KISS would seem to apply to the desktop and GNOME is complex enough as it is.
Assuming we do need something like this at the very core of the desktop, is this the right technology for the application? Is it the right version of
Ultimately this needs to be discussed in much more detail and decided by concensous and not just decreed by Miguel. If he can sell the idea on the basis of merit to the GNOME hacker community and the GNOME Foundation I can live with
Holy Khrushchev Macman, were you banging your shoe on a podium during that speech?
Really now, anyone who thinks the G4 has kept pace in the CPU wars can hardly be expected to understand why an open source OS doesn't correct the problems with running a proprietary GUI on proprietary hardware.
So how long before they declare that we have to start calling it GNU/NetBSD?
Since then it was discovered that a lot of Lucent's "success" was based on juggled books and bad debt. But by the time all that was discovered, Lucent was spiraling down in flames. They kicked McGinn out with that most golden of golden parachutes, but Carly was long gone to HP by that time.
You can bet that Carly has learned her old Lucent management lessons well, and in between Power Point presentations about how gutting the company of technical expertise is going to save billions and inspirational talks about how the merger is good and the old HP is bad, she's carefully packing that parachute.
Hmm. I just tried this and it preserved the file name as I switched directories. I'm running Ximian Gnome and I think they replaced the normal file selector with their own, somewhat improved version.
Meanwhile, a bug in UTV has caused many subscribers to lose access to multiple DirecTV channels and some UTV features. Those users have been without access to those channels for two weeks now. Microsoft thinks they have a fix, but it will take a couple of weeks to get it rolled out to all UTV users. Read about it in this AVS Forum thread.
Yep, Microsoft has certainly thrown all their capability behind their digital home push. Buggy PVRs and broken Xboxes. No wonder Bill is started to make noises about using XP as the center of their digital home. Their efforts at convergence boxes continue to come up short and without an OS monopoly to force people to suffer through their miscues, it's just not working.
TiVo's Chief Evangelist didn't seem to consider them competition in this AVS Forum thread. "We have more in common than in competition," he says. So I wouldn't be surprised if some kind of licensing for TiVo's technology is already in the works.
Nokia announced their Mediaterminal last year and it just now available
Huh? You mean a company run by slackers, for slackers isn't a good business model? Rats, there goes my whole business plan.
The sad irony is that the idea of bringing a cinematic story line into the FPS genre was good, but Valve executed faster and better. Maybe as a new company Ion Storm should have figured out how to take a few steps forward before they got so caught up in the idea of a making a quantum leap.
I'm more than a little skeptical of this message, as well. But it's almost too strange to be made up. It's just the kind cross between executive-speak and stupid user tricks you get from management types. The broken URLs are typical and you can't poke a pointy-haired IT manager with stick these days without him blurting out "server consolidation!"
What I found interesting is that a Google Search verifies that there is a "Kelly File" working for Microsoft, but he's not high enough profile that you would expect some Linux geek to pull his name out.
So would someone care to drop a line to kellyfi@microsoft.com and see if bounces? I mean, the guy evidently wants to know if we're using Linux, right?
Ya know, I frankly hadn't even thought about using mirrors for Red Carpet, even during times when the Ximian server was slow, it just never occurred to me. I generally leave the updates to run so speed hasn't been an issue. If bandwidth is a big part of the problem Ximian might do well to pop up a reminder now and then that there are mirrors available.
None of this is such a big deal, Ximian can do as it pleases. But I'm not paying more than I paid for my Linux distro each year just to have the latest builds right away.
The W3C has already has a recommendation for an Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) for use with XML. The specification is here.
If you don't like it then cancel your service and return your TiVo.
The A10 was originally projected to be good for 8000 flight hours, now they're planning to keep them in service for up to three times that. There's a detailed description of the updates and overhauls they plan use to keep the A10 in service on FAS.org's A10 page.
Shocking, but true - thousands of first posts are being cast into the oblivion on a daily basis.
More importantly, here's the first mention of Natalie Portman .
Ximian Evolution is becoming quite stable and powerful. They just need to get LDAP and spell checking working in a painless installation and world domination will be within their grasp. The combination of Evolution, Open Office and Galeon is looking sweeter every day.
Sorry Xanex, you're coming in with too little, too late. There are plenty of other easy to install, easy to use distros. Corel would have had something if they could have gotten their full suite of tools ported and stable and bundled the whole thing for under $100.
Instead they gave us a half-baked distro and a half finished office suite. So long, Corel. Remember that Bill likes his shoes really shiny.
30 second skip is not a feature that Tivo ever promised to anyone.
I can't imagine that any of the top developers of Nautilus or Evolution have tried to run these things on hardware that's more than a year old. Seperately they labor along, running them together will bring a strong system to its knees.
Somewhere along the way GNOME's component architecture has gone wrong. I only need my file manager and my web browser to be aquainted, I don't need them to be intimate. But now I get the overhead from one every time I start the other. Evolution is the same way, why do I need overhead my scheduler every time I start my email?
Their new file indexing scheme is another example. Suddenly I'm waking up every morning to the sound of medusa still trying to thrash my disk into stone two hours after it started. It's old machine, guys, I don't have that much disk.
I've always prefered GNOME because I liked the look and feel and the flexibility that it gave me without too much overhead. I also never cared for the look of KDE and I was wary of their licensing issues. But it looks like it's time to give KDE a try. GNOME appears to have been set adrift in a sea of venture capital. Until the last of that cash finally swirls down the drain I see no sign that they're going to get back on the right track.
Give it some time. Eventually you to will start to wonder were all your money is going. And then you'll do some simple math. And you'll get it.
The real culprits for the bad rap that "winmodems" get are the cheapest of the cheap modems which do everything in software, suck up lots of CPU power and aren't worth the circuit boards they're printed on.
Of course I have no sympathy for the people who have been conned by H card scams. It's easy to con someone who wants something for nothing.