Can you comment on if/when those Notes packages will ever be made available to the public? (or even warez group)
The short answer is "No - I can't comment". Especially about that latter part - I like my job, thanks for asking.:-)
I strongly doubt that the RPM packages I use will be made available to the public - but then again, the market can change and you never know what effect that will have. However, that doesn't mean that I can't tell you how to get Notes to run on a WINE install.
First, get a nice recent version of WINE, at least as recent as December 2003. Before that, you need a small mountain of tweaks and patches to WINE to make Notes behave.
Now you need to find a friend with a version of Notes installed on Windows. And you'd better have a license for the Notes Client (and fonts) as well or the boys in blue will be on their way. You want the entire Lotus directory which contains all the Notes.ini all the way down to the Data directory and it's contents. Grabbing the fonts off that machine and installing them in your distro for general availability is also a good start. Also grab all the Microsoft web fonts that were available on the MS website under a nice permissive license at one point (and which are now missing from their website - thanks Microsoft).
Notes 5.x runs pretty much flawlessly. Notes 6.0 is a non-starter (don't ask me why, I've beaten the front of my monitor in trying it). Notes 6.51 runs pretty much perfectly - only save all attachments silently fails for some bizarre reason. Go figure. It's pretty stable - I run it for days on end without it dying on me.
The magic part of any wine install is the config file. Or more specifically, knowing which DLLs to use from a standard Windows machine and which libraries (*.so) to use from the WINE RPMS. This is from a former Notes 5 install.
I don't have my Notes6 setup on this system. I'll try and check out the differences tomorrow.
If you are absolutely desperate to get this to run, you can email me. Now the question is: how many jokers are going to email me if I just type it in here? Probably hundreds. But my email address is public knowledge (dammit!). There is an IBM employee directory. I'm the only employee with this name. If you need help, drop me an email. I make no guarantees on any responses (I'm not in tech support...). And I work on the DB2 internals. I just use Lotus Notes. So I can't work miracles (and I don't have access to the Notes source code, so don't ask).
So if IBM is now going to be using Suse, does this mean that the Blue Linux rumor is bogus?
Speaking as a Linux user inside IBM, I always took the view that the Blue Linux rumour was bogus, or at least misleading. There is linux software flowing around the internals of IBM - plenty of it. And we do have various packages nicely wrapped up in RPMs that aren't available outside IBM (Lotus Notes 6.51 running on a standard WINE base springs immediately to mind). However, an internal distribution is a far cry from launching an external distro. That's not to say it will never happen. Just it doesn't look likely imminently.
... and yes, my sig DOES apply here. I'm not an IBM spokesman reading some approved script.
For me, PDAs, MP3 & Ogg players and all other forms of personal electronic equipment have one important consideration above pretty much everything else.
Size.
If it doesn't fit comfortably in a pocket, sit nicely in my hand or it weighs too much, it isn't going to be bought at pretty much any price. I don't care if I can watch DVDs projected onto the wall from it and it only cost $100 - if it doesn't fit in my pocket, it's not going to be carried around with me on my person. If I need something more capable than my existing small gadgets, it'll probably be my laptop (carried around in a backpack) which sports considerably more function than any standalone piece of consumer electronics and costs a similar amount to the proposed "iPod killer".
If I purchase a milliion shares of SCO on the open market, SCO does not see a PENNY of that money. The only time SCO sees money from the sale of stock is when SCO issues NEW stock into the market.
Ahh but if SCOG buys SCOX stock, say at a low price during a profound slump in their share price and does so in a manner as to not cross the written words in the SEC constraints on such purchases then you can get into fun with the accounting department.
Now - you only buy back stock if you
have surplus cash
believe that the current share price will be exceeded in the future and you can make money by selling that stock later.
or you wish to be able to write off a loss against tax by playing games with your own stock.
Yes - a company doesn't benefit directly from swings in its stock price, but it can benefit by trading in that stock. Even when that goes sour, clever accounting practices can help you recover that loss in other ways. I haven't peered too closely at SCOs recent manoevres but I seem to remember that any dip in share price allows them to record the conversion of the Series A convertible stock deal with Baystar as income. So you can have it both ways.
The conception that the computer is something that only High Priests of the Sun (or IBM) should have access to, is so 60's that it isn't even funny.
The 60's? Do you mean the 1760's? It's been so long since I last slept...
Do you need to be an electronics expert to use your TV?
well... yes... but you haven't seen my Visual Display Unit thingy I have up on the top of... what's it called... big flat thing.... ummm.. bed! Bed! Yes.. that's it. Haven't used it for ages. TV thingy. Or the bed for that matter.
Do you even need to understand microwave physics to use your microwave oven?
Oh I understand it dammit. So did my neighbour when I built a huge reflecting dish thingy and melted the doors off his car while it was standing in the street. Oh how we laughed! Shame about the six acres of farmland beyond that caught fire at the same time though...
Do you even have any knowledge at all of the chemistry and physics involved in using that detergent in your washing machine?
A washing... machine? What a strange idea!
Do you need to be an expert in lasers to operate your DVD player?
I wish I'd not miss-copied that line of working half way down my sums for the new static DVD reader (the head was supposed to spin, not the disc). First I thought the requirement for a nuclear power unit was a little high but I built it anyway. It melted much of the back garden and the head shot off through the roof. I'm told that NASA has been covertly tracking its subsequent travels and the FBI seized my paperwork and is allegedly using it for some missile defence initiative.
Well, then why the heck would an end user need to be a computer expert to use a computer?
How else would you know to press the big red lever down, turn the crank handle one-and-a-third rotations counter-clockwise and kick the side of the box while chanting the Macarena backwards to get it started?
And let's talk about the vendor-consumer relationship.
I regularly consume my vendors. But I don't quite think that's what you meant.
If you're a programmer, your job is to deliver what the users want, _not_ to make them have to take a 5 year course in CS to be able to use your stuff.
Thank god I'm a high priest instead. This... programmer... sounds like an eternity of suffering.
And what the users _want_ is an appliance that's as easy and safe to use as their TV or microwave oven. That's it.
What a dull existence these users must lead.
The current screw-up where computers are a fragile unstable contraption, and needs arcane rituals to keep it working, is _not_ what the users want.
But WHERE IS THE EXCITEMENT?!
Sorry. Forgot myself... (that happens quite a lot actually).
Just some food for thought.
Aaahhhh. Foooood. Haven't had any of that for a while. Well, there was that vendor a few years back before the fall..
Cheers,
Toby
Dammit. Was I supposed to post this anonymously?! B'g'rit.
It is certainly not just geeks who will want or need to type in file names. Skilled typists will not want to move their hands from the home row to open a file. Making them use the mouse to open a file is a bad idea.
So... type in the name of the filename, anywhere in the window. This file selector has type-ahead support so it will search through the files looking for the next file that matches the string you have typed so far. If you've been using this feature extensively in Mozilla, it'll be second nature already.
I want to see a 'pointer' device that is a glove with a gyroscope, and it has sensors on each finger as well so you can map complex hand and finger movements to different operations.
Of course, you could also get your computer to recognise other important gestures and map them to some appropriate function.
For example:
Bunch your fist and that error message goes away.
Bang your palm on the keyboard to fix that compilation problem.
Raise your middle finger to the sky and watch your machine shutdown.
Finally - a computer that responds to your emotions!:-)
If you want hardware 3D audio, then your best bet is to buy one of those old Aureal soundcards with A3D support. Recently the developers finished reverse engineering the the 3D audio hardware and got it cranking. Work on integrating this 3D hardware to work in Open AL is underway - it'll be sweet if they can get it working well. The Aureal cards now have full blown ALSA drivers complete with working hardware equalizers and mad props to them for getting it working. EAX is, as far as I can tell, still in need of heavy reverse engineering as Creative don't seem to wish to release the specs.
I dont think you can pull people out of their vehicles like in GTA3 though...
Not quite - the vehicle has to be empty for you to steal it. What makes it even funnier is that when you 'jack a vehicle, a car alarm sound goes off. Bet the developers rolled around laughing on the floor after putting that one together;-)
I personally found the score rather disappointing. It's not bad at all but, I found nothing "Tolkienish" in it.
If "music" is defined by what's on MTV, then it might be considered brilliant; but with bands like Summoning and Blind Guardian ( LotR-related interview ) around to convert Tolkien's stories into music, I consider the LotR soundtrack somewhat of a missed chance.
I was actually fairly impressed by the music for LotR when I first went to the showings. I'm even more impressed now that I have had the opportunity to watch the DVDs at home and actually give the music some serious attention.
Interpretting a book and putting music to it is inevitably a big problem - very few books go as far as actually adding a score (!) or even an indicator of the music associated with each group of people so what one person expects is a very personal response. Having watched the appendecies to FotR and TTT about the scoring of the LotRs, Howard Shore has been very attentive to the vision that Peter Jackson bought to the film in terms of the histories associated with each of the various groups in the film without falling into the trap of going completely native and only using original instruments. For example, the Eoras are derived/inspired from the Anglo-Saxon peoples (think Beowulf on horses) and the key instrument for the Eoras themes is the Norweigen fiddle - an instrument which has a wilder timbre than a normal violin. The use of various vocalists to provide different textures to various important scenes in the films is another example of the care found in augmenting the vision.
Someone else mentioned predictability. For an effectively 10 hour score, each major character and each major group has their own theme. This theme is then moulded into the scenes where they appear, so during the battle of Helm's Deep you have a mixture of the music associated with the Uruk-Hai and the Eoras with some of the Elven themes woven in. It is both unrealistic and more importantly unworkable to not have this sort of thematic approach to the scoring - the viewer is often guided through a movie on the wings of the musical score, often at a subliminal level. The thematic approach actually helps the viewer following the (often rapid) switches in the film between the story lines - to keep throwing brand new ideas in all the time would actually disorientate many audiences in what is already a complex film (in TTT there are 5 simultaneous story threads at some points).
I think Howard Shore is a deserving recipient of this Golden Globe.
Most of what I know I've discover by writing code and having to understand why what I thought should happen doesn't match the results but there are a few good pages out there which make a good intro.
Pete Becker has an article up on his website that was published in "The C/C++ Users Journal".
Donald Knuth has plenty to say in the "Art of Computer Programming".
The IEEE standard tells you all the (dry!) details - the IEEE-754 group is a good place to look to see what the current state of play is and where the steering groups see problems to be solved.
There are other issues - some platforms have their own floating point formats (S/390 a.k.a. z-Series, VAX, etc.) and if you have to deal with legacy systems, that can be an issue. Intel platforms have 80bit as well as 64bit floating point, although IA64 tends to be optimised for 64bit ops. There are other gotchas too.
We produce a lot of floating point intensive code that depends critically on the underlining OS calls, and while the code may run, it becomes quite a chore to justify to the customer (government) why the results may differ from earlier versions. This tendency for code to be brittle with compiler and OS upgrades is not something we observe under IRIX and SunOS, the two other platforms we support, and have supported for longer than LINUX.
Ahhh the joys of floating point. There are days when I wish that floating point was banned. Customers have a nasty tendency to assume that floating point means totally accurate. Very few really understand the limitations of floating point and comments along the lines of "what do you mean I can't store 20 significant figures in my database?", "I entered 1.10 and now it's 1.0999999", "I've been running my simulation through a billion iterations using a 'float' type and the answer is screwy" are not only common but rife.
That said, within the limitations of the floating point code I've written, I've not observed changes on Linux between versions. I do observe differences between the results on Linux, Solaris, HPUX, AIX and Windows in the least significant digit, but that doesn't suprise me.
I wonder therefore whether you are being burned by standard flags on the compiler with respect to mathematical optimisation. If you are suddenly using --fast-math that will definitely screw your results, as will any of the other flags turned on by that setting. Ditto check -m128bit-long-double -m96bit-long-double or similar settings that might alter your precision and throw new answers out.
To be quite honest, if you are seeing changes in behaviour and you have test cases which demonstrate these changes, you should inform the GCC team via the mailing list and try and determine what has happened. GCC vies to be compliant (often more compliant than other compilers) with IEEE and ANSI standards, and useful bug reports can go a long way to maintaining that compliance.
If you haven't logged such problems, well, nobody else knows that that problem exists.
Also, on Prehistoric Earth, Ford mentions that the arrival of the Golgafrinchans (who call Earth "Fintlewootlewix" (spelling?)) who replace the native ape-men, will cause the answer Arthur draws from the Scrabble bag ("W-H-A-T-D-O-Y-O-U-G-E-T-I-F-Y-O-U-M-U-L-T-I-P-L- Y-S-I-X-B-Y-N-I-N-E") to be partly wrong.
If I remember the book correctly, Arthur postulated that the Question in his brain was not the final answer, but might be a couple of iterations away from the final answer. I'd always taken the 6x9 to be two iterations away...
6x9... 6x8... 6x7 == 42
I'd always interpretted this to mean that seeking the question when you know the answer is a waste of time:-)
This may be quibbling about "digital camera made today", but I doubt there are night images 100% impossible with digital, as CCD scientific imaging cameras are in use for astronomy that can detect a single photon.
Spot on. Astronomers jumped to CCDs for the higher efficiency - it takes considerably fewer photons to register luminosity in a CCD bin than even the best films can acheive. All the optical and infra-red pictures I saw during my astronomy years (about 5-9 years ago) were taken on 1Mpixel cameras.
Having said that, these 1Mpixel cameras were cryogenically cooled, so I don't believe they count as the most portable of devices...
Then I had to switch back from sawfish to metacity window manager. Sawfish just doesn't seem to work with the gnome desktop switcher panel. Metacity is much better now, it allows me to define the keyboard shortcuts that kept me on sawfish for redhat 9.
If you search the mailing lists, you'll find that libwnck is buggy and the problems are visible when used with Sawfish and the Gnome pager. The fixed version is available in CVS and there is a patch for pager.c if you check the relevant bugzilla. No need to abandon Sawfish if you don't want to.
If his point is that at least line of thinking within the IP universe sets out to devalue most forms of IP (copyright, patent) -- well, is that not right?
No.
The FSF and EFF stand to promote Free software and Electronic Freedom. They do not support software patents because patents are, by their very nature, a restriction on freedom. A patent is a limited time state-mandated monopoly for the inventor(s). That does not mean that the EFF or FSF seek to devalue patents - merely that they do not support them.
On the topic of copyrights, the GPL could not survive without them as it provides the basis for the license. Without copyrights, the GPL could not require distributors to provide the source code because the distributor would have the rights to distribute the material freely. Because copyrights exist and protect the author(s) work, the GPL allows recipients of GPL'd material to further distribute that work under the terms of the GPL. If the recipient does not agree to such terms, then the GPL is not in force but the recipient can't distribute that material because it is protected by copyright. So I believe that the EFF and FSF are probably extremely staunch supporters of sane copyright laws as it helps them provide the framework for information exchange.
You use the word 'devalue' but your usage is ambiguous - it could be taken to be used as a purely monetary description. Nothing in the GPL prevents you from charging for your work. Coming from a scientific background where material is constantly made public knowledge through the many journals and scientific websites, the existence of this information in the public mind does not devalue it in a monetary sense since pure information has no monetary value. An implementation of that information may indeed lead to a monetary value - much advanced image processing software using maximum entropy theory exists which costs a significant chunk of cash is based on publicly accessible theorems and equations. The existence of a free software equivalent does not reduce the value of another solution either. Whether people are prepared to pay for a costly solution over a free implementation is up to the consumer to decide. Even in cases of direct competition between Free software and commercial software, I view the Free software as having a 'keeping everyone honest' effect. If a solution can be generated quickly or easily by a small group of developers working in their free time, competing commercial packages must do much more to justify their price. Without the Free alternatives, consumers would be at the mercy of companies massively inflating their profits by being able to pick their prices without reference to the cost of production.
I looked around the website and they don't really explain how important a priority stability is.
They do have a QA "project", but they also say they want to "Be on the leading edge of open source technology..."
I take it we're not talking OpenBSD/Debian-stable level of reliability. That's fine. But what's the goal? Will this stuff be/directly/ used by RedHat, or is there a "polishing" step?
If you are talking about this stuff ending up in RH Advanced Server, then yes, this will be heavily polished before release.
If you are talking about RH Linux 10, well, that won't be happening. This is the new world right here.
Speaking as someone who runs Mandrake Cooker (someone pick up that reader who just fainted) stability concerns really don't worry me too much as I can hack the problems as they occur:-) However, this stuff has gone through basic Redhat QA so it can be assumed that it won't eat your dog or sleep with your wife:-)
This is a distribution for the release early, release often crowd. The primary release (which this is) should be treated as being a reasonable base to build on. Once you hook up the apt-get or yum tools to the respective repositories, upgrading broken packages should be easy enough. Fedora will be making an appearance on my laptop in the next week or so - time will tell whether Fedora is stable enough. If you are nervous about being an early adopter, sit back and watch the forums, newsgroups and mailing lists for show stoppers that might hit your configuration.
I'm happy to see Fedora hit the streets. I've been running RH 8.0 on this laptop for a while now and I miss the absolute bleeding edge that the Mandrake Cooker tree gives me. Running Fedora on this laptop will allow me to track the latest stable release series. Mandrake Cooker allows me to track the latest developer releases on my desktop box.
I don't want to have to "learn to configure" a system to actually be readable. Heaven forbid I expect it to be well-designed and readable from the start.
Good thing that X can read the dimensions of a monitor and provide the needed system resolution then. That someone might wish to override the system setting because they might, say, have poor eyesight and wish everything to be bigger and higher contrast and finds that the two minutes reading the appropriate manual helps them not only set things up as they want it but also opens the door to other accessibility advantages.
Autoconfiguration is good. Manual overrides for autoconfiguration is better. Just like a good SLR camera. There will be times when you just want to press the shutter release and get a decent picture. There will be times when reading the manual and advancing your own skills so that you can take that soft focus, small depth-of-field portrait will be advantageous too.
Having many many options for configuration is a strength, not a weakness. Having good defaults is important.
My experience of running X on 1152x900 on a 17" monitor suggests that this is an appropriate resolution that doesn't cause too much issue; 1280x1024 should be more than fine.
I've driven 17" at 1280x1024, and depending on your applications everything works OK. X is a lot more customisable than MS Windows: you can actually change almost any screen font in use in most situations.
I run an IBM Thinkpad with a 15" screen at 1600x1200. In X Windows, I use the Xft2 font renderer, rather than the old core X font system, for almost every text string I see. Because I have also set the DPI for the screen to 133dpi, everything remains clear and readable and the fonts are all the correct size. So if the original parent poster was struggling with a 19" screen at this res, they should learn to configure their systems better.
The biggest problem I have with high DPI displays is viewing web sites, which will need browser technology to change in order to be useful.
Mozilla provides two useful functions at the moment, and there is another one almost there. Minimum text size is useful to stop the worst excesses of tiny fonts. Text zoom is an essential function on bad websites. Image zoom would be nice, especially if it simply runs in step with text zoom. Some tweaks would then be necessary to stop pages being limited to the 800 pixel width that some designers have decided is the perfect form factor.
SVG also offers improvements for high dpi screens. I look forward to the day that Moz/SVG takes over the web browsing domination and web designers really push vector graphics out there.
I remember, does anyone else remember, when Microsoft stopped supporting windows 95 in 2000? That caused a big stir in the slashdot community about all those millions of computers out there still running windows 95 who are going to have no support! Well, I advise you to take a look at the end-of-the-line dates [redhat.com] for RedHat. Redhat 8 was release, what, about a year ago? Mabey 14 months? And it's end of the line is December 31st of this year?
You are confused. RH Advanced Server does not have a short end-of-life like the rapidly updating RH 7/8/9 series - if I remember correctly it's about 5 years from initial release. I also suspect that you can extend that support further should you be willing to pay for it. Just don't expect support beyond the EOL of a product line to be cheap - you (and whomever else around also wants that support) will have to pay to retain that department in RedHat active.
See, another problem that's going to hit redhat is that, until now, they had planned on releasing a free product called redhat and a pay-for-support-in-order-to-get-the-CD's product, also called redhat (enterprise). But, the way I understand it now, it's looking like the enterprise product is going to be called redhat and the free one is going to be called something else (fedora?). Well, that's just great for redhat, but what about me? I'm in the webhosting business. What do I say when customers call and ask about the $119/month dedicated server? Does it come with redhat? And I have to tell them No, becuase it quite simply costs too much. In fact, sir, it's more expensive that windows server 2003, if all you want to do is webhosting.
Excellent. Well done. You are going to pass on your own confusion to your customers.
If your customers want a Redhat QA'd linux distribution, you can give them Fedora. RH is still overseeing the core packaging and quality of the Fedora release, and will probably cut stable releases from the development set as a distro every 6 months.
If your customers want Redhat Advanced Server with support, then let them pay for it. You still have options. Your customer still has options. If your customer is confused over the choices available, it is up to you to explain what is available, what is suitable and needed for their requirements. That is good business sense - know your own market.
Guess you've never had a corrupted RPM repository./var/lib/rpm/ went belly-up on me just yesterday. Much as I had all my software, I couldn't add/remove anything (for an apt4rpm user this is _most_ crucial!). So, off to the store for my SuSE 8.2 cds and a time-wasting re-install. Be glad if your distro doesn't use RPMs!
Why didn't you do an RPM database rebuild? Corrupted RPM databases are not unknown and the architecture for RPMs allows the database to be rebuilt. All dependencies are doubly linked back and forwards in the database so even fairly major corruption can be rectified.
cd/var/lib/rpm
rm -f __db.00?
rpm --rebuilddb
would have saved you a ton of problems. The only other point to make here is that apparent hangs querying the RPM database are normally the result of a hung application holding locks on the database. Look through the list of open files for locks on the Packages file in/var/lib/rpm.
lsof | grep/var/lib/rpm/Packages
kill -9 any process id (second column) that matches. If I caught you before your reinstall, so much the better.
Windows' registry getting corrupted is an extremely rare event, indeed one I've never seen; on the whole Windows chugs along very nicely without you having to worry about the registry.
Well thats lucky for you. I've seen two Windows boxes die from registry corruption and my Win 98SE box has lost track of most of the software installed on it as a result of a problem with the registry.
Linux, on the other hand, has historically relied on editing configuration files to such an extent that it's been jolly difficult *not* to screw something up terminally if you're not an expert.
At least I can seperate out each problem by config file and fix each in turn. Say networking is broken - check the ifcfg-ethX files. Fonts aren't being found - check/etc/fonts/fonts.conf. Sound card doesn't work - probably a bad line in/etc/modules.conf. At least I have some hope of working through the issues with Linux. With a corrupted windows registry you are sweet out of luck.
My experience in the past of Mandrake has been that their configuration tools merely automate the screwing-up for you, but I admit I haven't tried any recent versions...
I've not had any problems with the Mandrake utilities - given that I run the Cooker distro rather than the stable releases, I view that as a good sign. And even IF the utilities futz it up, I can still either edit the file by hand, restore the original configuration from the RPMs or go pick up another tool to try and fix it (Gnome Setup Tools spring immediately to mind).
I would wager it is easier to learn about every possible configuration file in a standard Linux distro than it is to repair a corrupted Windows registry.
Honestly, I feel some movies are SOOOO bad as to have STOLEN my time. Too bad we can't go after the movie studios for false advertising. I guess if you compress all the good parts of a movie into a 3min "preview", then even the shittiest of movies can look like Oscar nominees.
I defy ANYONE to take "Lawnmower man 2" and find 3 decent minutes in the whole film.:-) Even the best pop-vid remix would still make most people lose conciousness from chronic brain death in seconds...
He did. He was in university when it happened. And besides, in all it's horribleness, it was probably a good thing for humanity he did, since he didn't really start to take an interest in his studies until after he became ill.
I wouldn't go as far as to say he didn't take an interest in his studies prior to the onset of the motor neuron disease.
A story, possibly apocryphal, but coming directly from one of his colleagues, runs like this:
A whole group of students have been struggling with a bunch of questions for about a week. Between the lot of them, they have answers to about 30% of the problems set. Stephen Hawkins has not started the questions until the night before they are due.
The next morning, Stephen is looking tired and stressed. Assuming that he got stumped and pulled an all nighter to no avail, he is needled by his friends.
However, he reveals that he got answers out fully to 9 of the problems, and was stumped on the final part of the last problem.
So, while the motor neuron disease may have concentrated his efforts, I personally don't buy the line that he wasn't interested in his studies before that. In fact, I wonder just how much more he might have acheived if he had not been handicapped. That his life will almost certainly be shortened by the disease is a tragedy.
Slashdot Mirror
The short answer is "No - I can't comment". Especially about that latter part - I like my job, thanks for asking. :-)
I strongly doubt that the RPM packages I use will be made available to the public - but then again, the market can change and you never know what effect that will have. However, that doesn't mean that I can't tell you how to get Notes to run on a WINE install.
First, get a nice recent version of WINE, at least as recent as December 2003. Before that, you need a small mountain of tweaks and patches to WINE to make Notes behave.
Now you need to find a friend with a version of Notes installed on Windows. And you'd better have a license for the Notes Client (and fonts) as well or the boys in blue will be on their way. You want the entire Lotus directory which contains all the Notes.ini all the way down to the Data directory and it's contents. Grabbing the fonts off that machine and installing them in your distro for general availability is also a good start. Also grab all the Microsoft web fonts that were available on the MS website under a nice permissive license at one point (and which are now missing from their website - thanks Microsoft).
Notes 5.x runs pretty much flawlessly. Notes 6.0 is a non-starter (don't ask me why, I've beaten the front of my monitor in trying it). Notes 6.51 runs pretty much perfectly - only save all attachments silently fails for some bizarre reason. Go figure. It's pretty stable - I run it for days on end without it dying on me.
The magic part of any wine install is the config file. Or more specifically, knowing which DLLs to use from a standard Windows machine and which libraries (*.so) to use from the WINE RPMS. This is from a former Notes 5 install.
I don't have my Notes6 setup on this system. I'll try and check out the differences tomorrow.
If you are absolutely desperate to get this to run, you can email me. Now the question is: how many jokers are going to email me if I just type it in here? Probably hundreds. But my email address is public knowledge (dammit!). There is an IBM employee directory. I'm the only employee with this name. If you need help, drop me an email. I make no guarantees on any responses (I'm not in tech support...). And I work on the DB2 internals. I just use Lotus Notes. So I can't work miracles (and I don't have access to the Notes source code, so don't ask).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
So if IBM is now going to be using Suse, does this mean that the Blue Linux rumor is bogus?
Speaking as a Linux user inside IBM, I always took the view that the Blue Linux rumour was bogus, or at least misleading. There is linux software flowing around the internals of IBM - plenty of it. And we do have various packages nicely wrapped up in RPMs that aren't available outside IBM (Lotus Notes 6.51 running on a standard WINE base springs immediately to mind). However, an internal distribution is a far cry from launching an external distro. That's not to say it will never happen. Just it doesn't look likely imminently.
... and yes, my sig DOES apply here. I'm not an IBM spokesman reading some approved script.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Size.
If it doesn't fit comfortably in a pocket, sit nicely in my hand or it weighs too much, it isn't going to be bought at pretty much any price. I don't care if I can watch DVDs projected onto the wall from it and it only cost $100 - if it doesn't fit in my pocket, it's not going to be carried around with me on my person. If I need something more capable than my existing small gadgets, it'll probably be my laptop (carried around in a backpack) which sports considerably more function than any standalone piece of consumer electronics and costs a similar amount to the proposed "iPod killer".
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
If I purchase a milliion shares of SCO on the open market, SCO does not see a PENNY of that money. The only time SCO sees money from the sale of stock is when SCO issues NEW stock into the market.
Ahh but if SCOG buys SCOX stock, say at a low price during a profound slump in their share price and does so in a manner as to not cross the written words in the SEC constraints on such purchases then you can get into fun with the accounting department.
Now - you only buy back stock if you
Yes - a company doesn't benefit directly from swings in its stock price, but it can benefit by trading in that stock. Even when that goes sour, clever accounting practices can help you recover that loss in other ways. I haven't peered too closely at SCOs recent manoevres but I seem to remember that any dip in share price allows them to record the conversion of the Series A convertible stock deal with Baystar as income. So you can have it both ways.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
The conception that the computer is something that only High Priests of the Sun (or IBM) should have access to, is so 60's that it isn't even funny.
The 60's? Do you mean the 1760's? It's been so long since I last slept...
Do you need to be an electronics expert to use your TV?
well ... yes... but you haven't seen my Visual Display Unit thingy I have up on the top of ... what's it called ... big flat thing.... ummm .. bed! Bed! Yes .. that's it. Haven't used it for ages. TV thingy. Or the bed for that matter.
Do you even need to understand microwave physics to use your microwave oven?
Oh I understand it dammit. So did my neighbour when I built a huge reflecting dish thingy and melted the doors off his car while it was standing in the street. Oh how we laughed! Shame about the six acres of farmland beyond that caught fire at the same time though...
Do you even have any knowledge at all of the chemistry and physics involved in using that detergent in your washing machine?
A washing ... machine? What a strange idea!
Do you need to be an expert in lasers to operate your DVD player?
I wish I'd not miss-copied that line of working half way down my sums for the new static DVD reader (the head was supposed to spin, not the disc). First I thought the requirement for a nuclear power unit was a little high but I built it anyway. It melted much of the back garden and the head shot off through the roof. I'm told that NASA has been covertly tracking its subsequent travels and the FBI seized my paperwork and is allegedly using it for some missile defence initiative.
Well, then why the heck would an end user need to be a computer expert to use a computer?
How else would you know to press the big red lever down, turn the crank handle one-and-a-third rotations counter-clockwise and kick the side of the box while chanting the Macarena backwards to get it started?
And let's talk about the vendor-consumer relationship.
I regularly consume my vendors. But I don't quite think that's what you meant.
If you're a programmer, your job is to deliver what the users want, _not_ to make them have to take a 5 year course in CS to be able to use your stuff.
Thank god I'm a high priest instead. This ... programmer ... sounds like an eternity of suffering.
And what the users _want_ is an appliance that's as easy and safe to use as their TV or microwave oven. That's it.
What a dull existence these users must lead.
The current screw-up where computers are a fragile unstable contraption, and needs arcane rituals to keep it working, is _not_ what the users want.
But WHERE IS THE EXCITEMENT?!
Sorry. Forgot myself... (that happens quite a lot actually).
Just some food for thought.
Aaahhhh. Foooood. Haven't had any of that for a while. Well, there was that vendor a few years back before the fall..
Cheers,
Toby
Dammit. Was I supposed to post this anonymously?! B'g'rit.
It is certainly not just geeks who will want or need to type in file names. Skilled typists will not want to move their hands from the home row to open a file. Making them use the mouse to open a file is a bad idea.
So ... type in the name of the filename, anywhere in the window. This file selector has type-ahead support so it will search through the files looking for the next file that matches the string you have typed so far. If you've been using this feature extensively in Mozilla, it'll be second nature already.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I want to see a 'pointer' device that is a glove with a gyroscope, and it has sensors on each finger as well so you can map complex hand and finger movements to different operations.
Of course, you could also get your computer to recognise other important gestures and map them to some appropriate function.
For example:
Finally - a computer that responds to your emotions! :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I dont think you can pull people out of their vehicles like in GTA3 though...
Not quite - the vehicle has to be empty for you to steal it. What makes it even funnier is that when you 'jack a vehicle, a car alarm sound goes off. Bet the developers rolled around laughing on the floor after putting that one together ;-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I personally found the score rather disappointing. It's not bad at all but, I found nothing "Tolkienish" in it.
If "music" is defined by what's on MTV, then it might be considered brilliant; but with bands like Summoning and Blind Guardian ( LotR-related interview ) around to convert Tolkien's stories into music, I consider the LotR soundtrack somewhat of a missed chance.
I was actually fairly impressed by the music for LotR when I first went to the showings. I'm even more impressed now that I have had the opportunity to watch the DVDs at home and actually give the music some serious attention.
Interpretting a book and putting music to it is inevitably a big problem - very few books go as far as actually adding a score (!) or even an indicator of the music associated with each group of people so what one person expects is a very personal response. Having watched the appendecies to FotR and TTT about the scoring of the LotRs, Howard Shore has been very attentive to the vision that Peter Jackson bought to the film in terms of the histories associated with each of the various groups in the film without falling into the trap of going completely native and only using original instruments. For example, the Eoras are derived/inspired from the Anglo-Saxon peoples (think Beowulf on horses) and the key instrument for the Eoras themes is the Norweigen fiddle - an instrument which has a wilder timbre than a normal violin. The use of various vocalists to provide different textures to various important scenes in the films is another example of the care found in augmenting the vision.
Someone else mentioned predictability. For an effectively 10 hour score, each major character and each major group has their own theme. This theme is then moulded into the scenes where they appear, so during the battle of Helm's Deep you have a mixture of the music associated with the Uruk-Hai and the Eoras with some of the Elven themes woven in. It is both unrealistic and more importantly unworkable to not have this sort of thematic approach to the scoring - the viewer is often guided through a movie on the wings of the musical score, often at a subliminal level. The thematic approach actually helps the viewer following the (often rapid) switches in the film between the story lines - to keep throwing brand new ideas in all the time would actually disorientate many audiences in what is already a complex film (in TTT there are 5 simultaneous story threads at some points).
I think Howard Shore is a deserving recipient of this Golden Globe.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
There are other issues - some platforms have their own floating point formats (S/390 a.k.a. z-Series, VAX, etc.) and if you have to deal with legacy systems, that can be an issue. Intel platforms have 80bit as well as 64bit floating point, although IA64 tends to be optimised for 64bit ops. There are other gotchas too.
It's a minefield :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
We produce a lot of floating point intensive code that depends critically on the underlining OS calls, and while the code may run, it becomes quite a chore to justify to the customer (government) why the results may differ from earlier versions. This tendency for code to be brittle with compiler and OS upgrades is not something we observe under IRIX and SunOS, the two other platforms we support, and have supported for longer than LINUX.
Ahhh the joys of floating point. There are days when I wish that floating point was banned. Customers have a nasty tendency to assume that floating point means totally accurate. Very few really understand the limitations of floating point and comments along the lines of "what do you mean I can't store 20 significant figures in my database?", "I entered 1.10 and now it's 1.0999999", "I've been running my simulation through a billion iterations using a 'float' type and the answer is screwy" are not only common but rife.
That said, within the limitations of the floating point code I've written, I've not observed changes on Linux between versions. I do observe differences between the results on Linux, Solaris, HPUX, AIX and Windows in the least significant digit, but that doesn't suprise me.
I wonder therefore whether you are being burned by standard flags on the compiler with respect to mathematical optimisation. If you are suddenly using --fast-math that will definitely screw your results, as will any of the other flags turned on by that setting. Ditto check -m128bit-long-double -m96bit-long-double or similar settings that might alter your precision and throw new answers out.
To be quite honest, if you are seeing changes in behaviour and you have test cases which demonstrate these changes, you should inform the GCC team via the mailing list and try and determine what has happened. GCC vies to be compliant (often more compliant than other compilers) with IEEE and ANSI standards, and useful bug reports can go a long way to maintaining that compliance.
If you haven't logged such problems, well, nobody else knows that that problem exists.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Also, on Prehistoric Earth, Ford mentions that the arrival of the Golgafrinchans (who call Earth "Fintlewootlewix" (spelling?)) who replace the native ape-men, will cause the answer Arthur draws from the Scrabble bag ("W-H-A-T-D-O-Y-O-U-G-E-T-I-F-Y-O-U-M-U-L-T-I-P-L- Y-S-I-X-B-Y-N-I-N-E") to be partly wrong.
If I remember the book correctly, Arthur postulated that the Question in his brain was not the final answer, but might be a couple of iterations away from the final answer. I'd always taken the 6x9 to be two iterations away ...
6x9 ... 6x8 ... 6x7 == 42
I'd always interpretted this to mean that seeking the question when you know the answer is a waste of time :-)
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
This may be quibbling about "digital camera made today", but I doubt there are night images 100% impossible with digital, as CCD scientific imaging cameras are in use for astronomy that can detect a single photon.
Spot on. Astronomers jumped to CCDs for the higher efficiency - it takes considerably fewer photons to register luminosity in a CCD bin than even the best films can acheive. All the optical and infra-red pictures I saw during my astronomy years (about 5-9 years ago) were taken on 1Mpixel cameras.
Having said that, these 1Mpixel cameras were cryogenically cooled, so I don't believe they count as the most portable of devices...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Then I had to switch back from sawfish to metacity window manager. Sawfish just doesn't seem to work with the gnome desktop switcher panel. Metacity is much better now, it allows me to define the keyboard shortcuts that kept me on sawfish for redhat 9.
If you search the mailing lists, you'll find that libwnck is buggy and the problems are visible when used with Sawfish and the Gnome pager. The fixed version is available in CVS and there is a patch for pager.c if you check the relevant bugzilla. No need to abandon Sawfish if you don't want to.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I don't know - people can be pretty cruel. Shear lunacy - or maybe something didn't translate.
Gotta keep these things in the appropriate scale.
Cheers,
Toby
P.S. :-)
If his point is that at least line of thinking within the IP universe sets out to devalue most forms of IP (copyright, patent) -- well, is that not right?
No.
The FSF and EFF stand to promote Free software and Electronic Freedom. They do not support software patents because patents are, by their very nature, a restriction on freedom. A patent is a limited time state-mandated monopoly for the inventor(s). That does not mean that the EFF or FSF seek to devalue patents - merely that they do not support them.
On the topic of copyrights, the GPL could not survive without them as it provides the basis for the license. Without copyrights, the GPL could not require distributors to provide the source code because the distributor would have the rights to distribute the material freely. Because copyrights exist and protect the author(s) work, the GPL allows recipients of GPL'd material to further distribute that work under the terms of the GPL. If the recipient does not agree to such terms, then the GPL is not in force but the recipient can't distribute that material because it is protected by copyright. So I believe that the EFF and FSF are probably extremely staunch supporters of sane copyright laws as it helps them provide the framework for information exchange.
You use the word 'devalue' but your usage is ambiguous - it could be taken to be used as a purely monetary description. Nothing in the GPL prevents you from charging for your work. Coming from a scientific background where material is constantly made public knowledge through the many journals and scientific websites, the existence of this information in the public mind does not devalue it in a monetary sense since pure information has no monetary value. An implementation of that information may indeed lead to a monetary value - much advanced image processing software using maximum entropy theory exists which costs a significant chunk of cash is based on publicly accessible theorems and equations. The existence of a free software equivalent does not reduce the value of another solution either. Whether people are prepared to pay for a costly solution over a free implementation is up to the consumer to decide. Even in cases of direct competition between Free software and commercial software, I view the Free software as having a 'keeping everyone honest' effect. If a solution can be generated quickly or easily by a small group of developers working in their free time, competing commercial packages must do much more to justify their price. Without the Free alternatives, consumers would be at the mercy of companies massively inflating their profits by being able to pick their prices without reference to the cost of production.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I looked around the website and they don't really explain how important a priority stability is. They do have a QA "project", but they also say they want to "Be on the leading edge of open source technology..."
I take it we're not talking OpenBSD/Debian-stable level of reliability. That's fine. But what's the goal? Will this stuff be /directly/ used by RedHat, or is there a "polishing" step?
If you are talking about this stuff ending up in RH Advanced Server, then yes, this will be heavily polished before release.
If you are talking about RH Linux 10, well, that won't be happening. This is the new world right here.
Speaking as someone who runs Mandrake Cooker (someone pick up that reader who just fainted) stability concerns really don't worry me too much as I can hack the problems as they occur :-) However, this stuff has gone through basic Redhat QA so it can be assumed that it won't eat your dog or sleep with your wife :-)
This is a distribution for the release early, release often crowd. The primary release (which this is) should be treated as being a reasonable base to build on. Once you hook up the apt-get or yum tools to the respective repositories, upgrading broken packages should be easy enough. Fedora will be making an appearance on my laptop in the next week or so - time will tell whether Fedora is stable enough. If you are nervous about being an early adopter, sit back and watch the forums, newsgroups and mailing lists for show stoppers that might hit your configuration.
I'm happy to see Fedora hit the streets. I've been running RH 8.0 on this laptop for a while now and I miss the absolute bleeding edge that the Mandrake Cooker tree gives me. Running Fedora on this laptop will allow me to track the latest stable release series. Mandrake Cooker allows me to track the latest developer releases on my desktop box.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I don't want to have to "learn to configure" a system to actually be readable. Heaven forbid I expect it to be well-designed and readable from the start.
Good thing that X can read the dimensions of a monitor and provide the needed system resolution then. That someone might wish to override the system setting because they might, say, have poor eyesight and wish everything to be bigger and higher contrast and finds that the two minutes reading the appropriate manual helps them not only set things up as they want it but also opens the door to other accessibility advantages.
Autoconfiguration is good. Manual overrides for autoconfiguration is better. Just like a good SLR camera. There will be times when you just want to press the shutter release and get a decent picture. There will be times when reading the manual and advancing your own skills so that you can take that soft focus, small depth-of-field portrait will be advantageous too.
Having many many options for configuration is a strength, not a weakness. Having good defaults is important.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
My experience of running X on 1152x900 on a 17" monitor suggests that this is an appropriate resolution that doesn't cause too much issue; 1280x1024 should be more than fine.
I've driven 17" at 1280x1024, and depending on your applications everything works OK. X is a lot more customisable than MS Windows: you can actually change almost any screen font in use in most situations.
I run an IBM Thinkpad with a 15" screen at 1600x1200. In X Windows, I use the Xft2 font renderer, rather than the old core X font system, for almost every text string I see. Because I have also set the DPI for the screen to 133dpi, everything remains clear and readable and the fonts are all the correct size. So if the original parent poster was struggling with a 19" screen at this res, they should learn to configure their systems better.
The biggest problem I have with high DPI displays is viewing web sites, which will need browser technology to change in order to be useful.
Mozilla provides two useful functions at the moment, and there is another one almost there. Minimum text size is useful to stop the worst excesses of tiny fonts. Text zoom is an essential function on bad websites. Image zoom would be nice, especially if it simply runs in step with text zoom. Some tweaks would then be necessary to stop pages being limited to the 800 pixel width that some designers have decided is the perfect form factor.
SVG also offers improvements for high dpi screens. I look forward to the day that Moz/SVG takes over the web browsing domination and web designers really push vector graphics out there.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
I remember, does anyone else remember, when Microsoft stopped supporting windows 95 in 2000? That caused a big stir in the slashdot community about all those millions of computers out there still running windows 95 who are going to have no support! Well, I advise you to take a look at the end-of-the-line dates [redhat.com] for RedHat. Redhat 8 was release, what, about a year ago? Mabey 14 months? And it's end of the line is December 31st of this year?
You are confused. RH Advanced Server does not have a short end-of-life like the rapidly updating RH 7/8/9 series - if I remember correctly it's about 5 years from initial release. I also suspect that you can extend that support further should you be willing to pay for it. Just don't expect support beyond the EOL of a product line to be cheap - you (and whomever else around also wants that support) will have to pay to retain that department in RedHat active.
See, another problem that's going to hit redhat is that, until now, they had planned on releasing a free product called redhat and a pay-for-support-in-order-to-get-the-CD's product, also called redhat (enterprise). But, the way I understand it now, it's looking like the enterprise product is going to be called redhat and the free one is going to be called something else (fedora?). Well, that's just great for redhat, but what about me? I'm in the webhosting business. What do I say when customers call and ask about the $119/month dedicated server? Does it come with redhat? And I have to tell them No, becuase it quite simply costs too much. In fact, sir, it's more expensive that windows server 2003, if all you want to do is webhosting.
Excellent. Well done. You are going to pass on your own confusion to your customers.
If your customers want a Redhat QA'd linux distribution, you can give them Fedora. RH is still overseeing the core packaging and quality of the Fedora release, and will probably cut stable releases from the development set as a distro every 6 months.
If your customers want Redhat Advanced Server with support, then let them pay for it. You still have options. Your customer still has options. If your customer is confused over the choices available, it is up to you to explain what is available, what is suitable and needed for their requirements. That is good business sense - know your own market.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Guess you've never had a corrupted RPM repository. /var/lib/rpm/ went belly-up on me just yesterday. Much as I had all my software, I couldn't add/remove anything (for an apt4rpm user this is _most_ crucial!). So, off to the store for my SuSE 8.2 cds and a time-wasting re-install. Be glad if your distro doesn't use RPMs!
Why didn't you do an RPM database rebuild? Corrupted RPM databases are not unknown and the architecture for RPMs allows the database to be rebuilt. All dependencies are doubly linked back and forwards in the database so even fairly major corruption can be rectified.
cd /var/lib/rpm
rm -f __db.00?
rpm --rebuilddb
would have saved you a ton of problems. The only other point to make here is that apparent hangs querying the RPM database are normally the result of a hung application holding locks on the database. Look through the list of open files for locks on the Packages file in /var/lib/rpm.
lsof | grep /var/lib/rpm/Packages
kill -9 any process id (second column) that matches. If I caught you before your reinstall, so much the better.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Windows' registry getting corrupted is an extremely rare event, indeed one I've never seen; on the whole Windows chugs along very nicely without you having to worry about the registry.
Well thats lucky for you. I've seen two Windows boxes die from registry corruption and my Win 98SE box has lost track of most of the software installed on it as a result of a problem with the registry.
Linux, on the other hand, has historically relied on editing configuration files to such an extent that it's been jolly difficult *not* to screw something up terminally if you're not an expert.
At least I can seperate out each problem by config file and fix each in turn. Say networking is broken - check the ifcfg-ethX files. Fonts aren't being found - check /etc/fonts/fonts.conf. Sound card doesn't work - probably a bad line in /etc/modules.conf. At least I have some hope of working through the issues with Linux. With a corrupted windows registry you are sweet out of luck.
My experience in the past of Mandrake has been that their configuration tools merely automate the screwing-up for you, but I admit I haven't tried any recent versions...
I've not had any problems with the Mandrake utilities - given that I run the Cooker distro rather than the stable releases, I view that as a good sign. And even IF the utilities futz it up, I can still either edit the file by hand, restore the original configuration from the RPMs or go pick up another tool to try and fix it (Gnome Setup Tools spring immediately to mind).
I would wager it is easier to learn about every possible configuration file in a standard Linux distro than it is to repair a corrupted Windows registry.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Honestly, I feel some movies are SOOOO bad as to have STOLEN my time. Too bad we can't go after the movie studios for false advertising. I guess if you compress all the good parts of a movie into a 3min "preview", then even the shittiest of movies can look like Oscar nominees.
I defy ANYONE to take "Lawnmower man 2" and find 3 decent minutes in the whole film. :-) Even the best pop-vid remix would still make most people lose conciousness from chronic brain death in seconds...
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
He did. He was in university when it happened. And besides, in all it's horribleness, it was probably a good thing for humanity he did, since he didn't really start to take an interest in his studies until after he became ill.
I wouldn't go as far as to say he didn't take an interest in his studies prior to the onset of the motor neuron disease.
A story, possibly apocryphal, but coming directly from one of his colleagues, runs like this:
So, while the motor neuron disease may have concentrated his efforts, I personally don't buy the line that he wasn't interested in his studies before that. In fact, I wonder just how much more he might have acheived if he had not been handicapped. That his life will almost certainly be shortened by the disease is a tragedy.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes