I've always been intrigued by Objective C's messaging model, but I've never used it because it's been too closely tied to Apple OS's... BUT, now it just got more interesting.
Well, it looks like this "open source" project is lost because the authors made a decision not to actually release the source code.
There's nothing the open-source model does better than cloning software... especially cool software that's fun to use and fun to distribute. So don't moan any more - fire up your egcs and get to work. Shouldn't take too long for 3-4 guys to hack together a serviceable clone. The point is - now they've shown us what's good about the approach - that's the hard part. It's done. Just do it again.
Ever lost a bunch of code you were working on (by overwriting a file or something) and get that really depressing "I just can't write that all over again" feeling? Well, and of course you did write it again, didn't you? And it took only 20% of the time to write it the second time, and you made a bunch of improvements on the way, didn't you? Well it's like that. The only hard part is getting started.
The problem with open codecs is (at least in the eyes of content providers) copy protection.
Copy protection for audio will die for the same reason it died for software: it's not the best thing for the consumer. In the end, what's best is what survives - the simple and irresistable logic of evolution. However, this silliness about copy protection could go on for quite a long time before it finally dies, leaving us with the free, open codecs we actually want.
We can speed the process up. Just by insisting that all the players we use include, among other things, at least one free codec. Can you say streaming MP3?? Ask for it. Insist on it. Write emails. Get the software (xmms etc. etc.) Don't go to sites that don't have it. We know we can make a difference, and we will.
I hate to break it to all the folks here but there is a REASON businesses use VB: It's often the proper tool for the job.
Or at least it seems to be. Don't look now, but most of those businesses are now switching to Java to do these same apps, having been burned just too many times when VB fails to deliver the goods. If you don't believe me, read the job ads.
VB is, at best, a prototyping language, ranking somewhere below COBOL in the fitness-for-mission-critical-use department.
Several vendors are already working on binary only drivers for XFree86 4.0.
All this means is that we need to use a different means of keeping the pressure on. Personally, I'm *glad* I'll be able to have a little more flexibility in using binary drivers and at the same time I'm *sad* that this means of pressuring harware vendors to open their specs is now going to be weakened.
There are a few factors working in our favor:
The binary video driver api doesn't give hardware vendors cross-platform access - they wind up having to build and distribute drivers for every platform, multiplying their headaches and workload. This is work than can much more efficiently be done by the distributions and platform maintainers, including making necessary adaptations, for example, byte swapping - a much bigger issue than you'd think.
It doesn't give hardware vendors access to the power of open-source development, and the quality improvements resulting therefrom. Oh, and don't even *think* about trying to pass of a binary version of someone's open source driver as your own.
Closed-specs hardware vendors don't get the "coolness" bonus from, for example, us, the Slashdot community. Don't underestimate the effects of this: we've now become the "brand specifiers" for a huge part of the PC market, especially the games market. I'd say that we had a lot to do with 3Dfx's decline (because of closed-api concerns) and NVidia's rise (because they opened *part* of their specs).
The embedded market XFree is just too big and bloated for the embedded market - anybody care to argue this? Or for installing on old 486's and P90's. I know - I've tried it. We absolutely have to have an alternative, and there are already several projects underway on this. Let's not build in a binary driver api in these new video systems for at least 2 or 3 years, ok? That will keep the pressure on: if you want your card used in the embedded market (possibly much bigger than the desktop market) you'd better open the api. Do it sooner and get a bigger piece of the market. Do it later and become a historical footnote.
Apparently, all is not going well with Corel's attempts to capture a place in the Linux market
What has a disagreement between an employee of a merged company and the purchaser have to do with Corel's entry into the Linux market? Answer: nothing. This is FUD, pure and simple, and it pains me greatly to see such a thing coming from a Slashdot editor. You should be ashamed of yourself, Hemos.
For my part, I think Corel deserves all the support they can get; they are a valuable member of the Linux community; they have already contributed a great deal, and I fully expect them to contribute a great deal more; and we ***now can hope for a much more timely release of Delphi on Linux***.
The logical next step after open software is open hardware. The only reason for a lag is: hardware simply has higher capital cost than software. Until now, that is - when open tools bring about the demise of proprietary hardware design tools, the cost of designing hardware will drop dramatically, and we haven't seen nothin' yet. The cost of actually creating silicon is going to drop like a rock too.
The only real suprise is to see it happening already, before the open source hardware development tools have gotten to anything like maturity.
So they want to come into our turf and compete with open source office projects? OK *fine*, not only will it exponentially increase Linux's market share over Linux, nothing would do more to stimulate us to out-office them in every way.
Come on in, Bill the water's fine:-) But do be careful, some of the fish swimming in here have lots of little, sharp teeth.
Writing documentation is not as sexy as writing software (To quote a Slashdotter, "Honestly, how many users want to read documentation? How many of them see a fat manual and feel happy?")
Hmmph. Software that is crap because of lack of adequate documentation is not very sexy at all. Said users, if they want to use sexy software, better learn to see the beauty of good documentation. It's not first and foremost for the users (*learn to program first!*), it's for the hackers that make Linux the sexy system it is today. Of course, it sure doesn't hurt users to be able to find out how there systems work when they want to, in as much detail as they want to.
I thank everyone involved in LCP profusely, but I'm not getting involved - I'll respectfully keep hacking on my own project, and I promise to write proper draft documentation for it when it's done.
The proper pronunciation is "ramyun". I don't know how it got anglicized to "ramen" - I guess we shouldn't complain when they do similar things to our words.
I am sick of seeing linux development kernel upgrades posted on Slashdot.
I'm not. Would you kindly not try to impose your opinion on me?
Kernel releases are the most exciting thing about Linux, and if you don't understand that, you just don't get it. Don't read them if you don't want to. Just don't try to keep me from reading them.
Sometimes, Apple UI's seem to be unuseable without the mouse. Please, don't forget the keyboard support. It's not exactly rocket science any more.
That means:
Full navigation with the keyboard
All window management functions accessible via the keyboard alone
A way of moving the mouse pointer and simulating mouse clicks with the keyboard - for that one time your mouse is broken but you still have to navigate the gui, no matter how slowly.
Proper keyboard focus control. 99% of the time you should not have to use the mouse to put the keyboard focus where it ought to be
*Integration* between keyboard and mouse scrolling in all text widgets and the like - none of this snapping to somewhere in the file you didn't expect to be just because you positioned first with the mouse, then moved with the cursor keys.
A lot of other things I've forgotten, but we all know what they are when they're not there
... since languages aren't software. Implementations of the languages can be open-source, though, and some are.
Thankyou for pointing that out, I'm always appreciative of a good niggle in place of an intelligent comment (*sarcasm off*)
the stewardship of Java standards/apis is not open
... just like C++ et al.
Huh. That's not so. ISO is a public body, the standards are open to real public review, and you can join the working groups if you want (if you've time and money to travel, that is). Try to join one of Sun's api committees. Try to even identify an api committee for Java, let alone a public one. Do you get the picture?
Except that you can go to Sun's site and download their official specs free of charge, while getting ISOs specs for "their" languages will cost you an arm, leg and your daughter's hand in marriage.
So? The specs haven't been kept up to date (check for yourself). And have always been incomplete. The specs somewhat lame in a lot of places, too. For example, hardware api's sucked from the beginning, they still suck, and from the look of things, they are going to continue to suck forever unless something drastic changes in the API development process. About the only hardware Sun has created an api for is the mouse. Show me how you support a joystick in Java, for example. It's a big world out there and Java as it stands just can't deal with a lot of it. Don't talk to me about native code interface either: hardware support is pretty much useless in Java unless it exists on every platform, and it's now so late in the game that even if the api's were fixed it would be immensely difficult to deploy the new support widely enough so that application writers could write to it with confidence.
Sun's unwillingness to let go of their baby and let it grow up into an adult.
How long did it take for AT&T to let go of C++ and leave it to "grow" in the vats of ISO's JTCs?
We haven't got that much time to wait. At the current rate, Java is going to be a dead issue by the time Sun wakes up. It's going to be killed by something more useful, and more open, without one, self-interested company trying to dominate it. All I can say is, thanks Sun for giving Bill a few sleepless nights, but really, another proprietary solution is not what the world wants and it's not going to accept it. Many programmers are now using Perl and Python for applications where they would have looked seriously at Java. Python and Perl both work better than Java on Linux, they're faster to develop with, they start faster, easier to debug, more useful libraries, more code developed by other people that you can leverage, etc. etc.
Do you really feel ISO's process has been to the advantage of the language? A single, steering body is always better, whether that body is called Sun or Guido von Rossum.:-)
Then lets have a single steering body, but let that body be chosen democratically, and by merit. As far as I'm concerned Sun has dropped the ball.
We can fix all that, but not under the current conditions.
It seems you want Sun's source instead of working on the OSS projects already running, like Kaffe. Why?
Kaffe is nice. Kaffe is fine. I admire everybody that works on Kaffe, and Blackdown too for that matter. But Sun is passively resisting Kaffe and other Java-clones (by withholding important specifications and compliance tests) to the point where it is very difficult to be sure whether Kaffe is Java-compatible or not. That's evil.
This annoys me, because I'd use Java for a number of things if it weren't such a sluggish, unreliable memory hog. (Which is exactly what it is when you try to run, for example, any Swing program.) Personally, I'm not contemplating using Java for any serious development at this point whereas two years ago I was full of enthusiasm for the idea. Perhaps there are others like me?
It seems to me that you just want to keep things the way they are. Well, it isn't working, that's plain for all to see. Look at the way Linux is leaving Java in the dust as a cross-platform vehicle for delivery of net-enabled applications. That's what Java was supposed to be. Linux has already stolen a lot of Java's thunder, and it will steal the rest unless Sun smartens up fast.
...the real problem isn't the warm-and-fuzzies, (although there's no underestimating the importance of people's feelings). The real problem is that Java is not open-source, and the stewardship of Java standards/apis is not open. The earlier slight to the Blackdown team was just a symptom, the real disease is Sun's unwillingness to let go of their baby and let it grow up into an adult. The result is that Java is still running largely with training wheels. Who wants to see how well the sandbox works when there are precious few applications worth running? Who wants to run an app that is theoretically pleasing but is, in practice, slow and kinda ugly? And not 100% stable? We can fix all that, but not under the current conditions. If things continue as they are, yes, progress will happen, but it will be sloooooooooow... maybe *too* slow.
I don't want to sound ungrateful, but... when are you going to drop the other shoe, Scott???
Reading the log you can see that one of the ops (Jackie_CNN) was just too clueless to be opped on the channel. First she voiced President_C|inton (then devoiced a short time later), then voiced wankel (now known as President_Clinton) in spite of the fact that his IP address was completely wrong - with username petro for one thing, and the wrong numbers for another thing. On top of that, the other op (JoeCNN) was too clueless to undo the damage.
Any 14 year old IRC groupie could have done a better job of opping the channel. Opping is more than just knowing how to click power menu options.
Nothing personal Jackie, but you'd better go hang on IRC a while longer before you op the next interview.
It's all very good to want a return on investment, especially in the hideously expensive task of designing microprocessors, but if you?re going to hold a belief, then you need to live that belief, regardless of the consequences.
I'm of two minds about this article. First, I agree with its premise: that Transmeta should open-source its code morphing software. Not to the extent that competing companies would be able to use it for free, but to the extend that the worldwide hacker net can go to work on it. Second, I think it's a stupid article, and it's written in a pretty stupid way. Give away the processors for free. Yeah right.
All this has very little to do with beliefs. OK, the gnu organization started because of beliefs, but the open-source movement continues because it produces more and better software. That translates in $$$ by the simple rule that if you give customers what is best for them, i.e., cheap and good, they won't be slow to pay you for it.
Open sourcing the code morphing software is something that Transmeta should do because it makes business sense. Again, very little to do with beliefs, unless you count getting rich as a belief. Transmeta wants to sell processors - whatever they can do to sell more processors makes good business sense. Especially when it doesn't cost any money. Opening the code morphing source will sell more processors. It will make the software better. And it will help establish a loyal, perhaps fanatically loyal, core user base.
So why hasn't it happened? Well, I can only speculate that somebody in the executive suite doesn't get it. Yet. It's just a phase that will pass. With Torvalds in there to make the case I'll give this, hmm, six months, and I guess said suit will see the light. In the meantime, the pressure is going to increase. So far Transmeta is on a honeymoon with us - they can do no wrong at the moment and a little thing like the code morphing source code isn't going to dampen our enthusiasm for this technology. Much. But that's going to change - you'll see more frequent and more emphatic calls for a policy reversal on the open-source issues.
After a while we'll get what we want and Transmeta will be better off for it.
it's probably smart to realize that StarOffice is only a replacement for MS Office in the home enviroment. It's not even in the same ballpark in an enterprise.
True. For the enterprise you'd probably be better off with Wordperfect.:-)
The last time the OS survey at this site was updated was a year ago. What gives? We need real statistics on operating systems in use on web servers. Netcraft shows us how many Appache servers are out there - nearly 60% of all web servers are running appache - and it really seems hard to believe that less than 1/2 of them are running Linux. Which would put Linux tied with Microsoft (all flavors).
Am I wrong about this? I think the number of Linux servers is being serverly underestimated.
If I could write articles with decent formatting & dynamic supra and infra references in the footnotes & the occassional graphic in anything except MSWord, I would never boot-crash-reboot Win95
Have you tried Wordperfect 8? It works fine - it's the standard for the legal industry, for one thing. It's fully capable of handling large, complex documents, and it's cross-platform.
Abiword is coming along fine - it's useable now, in version 0.7.8 for simple documents (actually, it's a real pleasure to use) and by the time it gets to verions 1.0 it will be a killer app.
StarOffice is a good product, but when one has the choice of getting MS Office for almost the same price, I have to say that MS wins hands down.
If you're not running Windows, copies of MS Office, Visual Studio, etc. are useful mainly as coffee coasters. The same $5 will get you a 5 complete Redhat or Mandrake CD's, 4 to pass on to your friends, and you can get Staroffice or Corel Wordperfect for free. Along with about 3,000 other programs. Or maybe 5,000, is anybody keeping count?
Which is not to say I don't appreciate free software - I regularly use FreeBSD. But I think that "protesting" against a deal that benefits both students and Microsoft may be stretching things a bit.
Actually, the deal hurts students because it gets them used to using MS's proprietary file formats, something that will cause them a lot of trouble later in life when they try to get connected with the rest of the world. My advice to students is to try to stick to HTML instead of MS-proprietary-format as much as you can - it's infinitely better for sending by email (documents are a fraction of the size and everybody can read them), you can post it directly on web sites, everybody can read it, etc. etc.
Postscript format is much better than MS word format - it's much more stable, can be read on more platforms, and produces good camera-ready copy. Postscript documents can be distributed as.pdf (use ps2pdf) and then Windows users will be able to read them using Adobe Acrobat.
Use MS file formats only as a last resort when you have to give something to someone who can only read MS files, and even then you should stick to Word 6 format if you don't want to have problems. Keep in mind that office suite file formats will all be changing to XML soon, even Microsoft's.
Abiword already uses XML as its file format. MS file formats are obsolescent: avoid.
While any IT student who is serious about their profession should install Linux or a BSD on their computer, without a large committment of support resources it's not practical for a university to provide Linux (or Windows, for that matter) for their students.
That's just not correct. All the support students need is freely available on the web, via IRC. Go to any irc network and join the #linux channel. Or #linuxnewbie or whatever. You only need ONE student connected to irc, via Linux, Windows, Solaris or whatever, and all the other students can get enough support to get their own machines up and connected.
The way I got my Linux configured, starting as a complete newbie, was by rebooting to Windows, going on efnet, asking stupid questions about PPP, applications availability, configuration, whatever, then rebooting to Linux and trying it.
Once you get your Linux connected to irc, things start moving faster - you don't have to reboot any more.
Linux just doesn't require the same effort to support as Windows, because there's a whole community out there ready and willing to provide the needed support for free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Borland went toe to toe with Microsoft and lost badly (I'm not saying the fight was fair). They never really recovered from that. Corel did the same thing, but were smart enough to know when to retreat - to the high ground of Linux. Otherwise, they would have been creamed just like Borland, antitrust trial or no antitrust. The markets apparently agree - while Corel's stock is no rocket, it's certainly done well this year and seems to have a lot more support than in the past.
Now, the best thing Corel could do with Inprise nee Borland would be to hurry along the release of Delphi - a lot of programmers are waiting for Delphi to show up on LInux before then finally defect from Windows. For such people (I know several personally) Linux will only be be seen as a real platform when it runs Delphi.
About 20 years ago I predicted (you'll have to take my word for it;-) that a non-random mechanism for evolution would be discovered, and it now seems clear that that is about to happen.
So, not content to rest on my coatails (gad I love mixing metaphors) I'll make another prediction: a mechanism will be discovered by which learned information is transcribed to the DNA of reproductive cells, thus providing a path for the propagation of hereditary memory.
This mechanism has not been discovered yet because we haven't got much of a clue what the brain uses for coding mechanisms, and we've only recently began to have a clue about the higher-level coding systems of DNA. We're only beginning to have an inkling how the turing machines in our cells process the DNA tapes. Still, this research is accelerating, so I'll feel comfortable guessing that the timeframe for this discovery will be about 10 years.
A generic algorithm for making predictions about evolution is: Dream up any advantageous mechanism and predict that it already exists but hasn't been discovered yet. You'll be right most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always been intrigued by Objective C's messaging model, but I've never used it because it's been too closely tied to Apple OS's... BUT, now it just got more interesting.
Well, it looks like this "open source" project is lost because the authors made a decision not to actually release the source code.
There's nothing the open-source model does better than cloning software... especially cool software that's fun to use and fun to distribute. So don't moan any more - fire up your egcs and get to work. Shouldn't take too long for 3-4 guys to hack together a serviceable clone. The point is - now they've shown us what's good about the approach - that's the hard part. It's done. Just do it again.
Ever lost a bunch of code you were working on (by overwriting a file or something) and get that really depressing "I just can't write that all over again" feeling? Well, and of course you did write it again, didn't you? And it took only 20% of the time to write it the second time, and you made a bunch of improvements on the way, didn't you? Well it's like that. The only hard part is getting started.
The problem with open codecs is (at least in the eyes of content providers) copy protection.
Copy protection for audio will die for the same reason it died for software: it's not the best thing for the consumer. In the end, what's best is what survives - the simple and irresistable logic of evolution. However, this silliness about copy protection could go on for quite a long time before it finally dies, leaving us with the free, open codecs we actually want.
We can speed the process up. Just by insisting that all the players we use include, among other things, at least one free codec. Can you say streaming MP3?? Ask for it. Insist on it. Write emails. Get the software (xmms etc. etc.) Don't go to sites that don't have it. We know we can make a difference, and we will.
I hate to break it to all the folks here but there is a REASON businesses use VB: It's often the proper tool for the job.
Or at least it seems to be. Don't look now, but most of those businesses are now switching to Java to do these same apps, having been burned just too many times when VB fails to deliver the goods. If you don't believe me, read the job ads.
VB is, at best, a prototyping language, ranking somewhere below COBOL in the fitness-for-mission-critical-use department.
All this means is that we need to use a different means of keeping the pressure on. Personally, I'm *glad* I'll be able to have a little more flexibility in using binary drivers and at the same time I'm *sad* that this means of pressuring harware vendors to open their specs is now going to be weakened.
There are a few factors working in our favor:
The binary video driver api doesn't give hardware vendors cross-platform access - they wind up having to build and distribute drivers for every platform, multiplying their headaches and workload. This is work than can much more efficiently be done by the distributions and platform maintainers, including making necessary adaptations, for example, byte swapping - a much bigger issue than you'd think.
It doesn't give hardware vendors access to the power of open-source development, and the quality improvements resulting therefrom. Oh, and don't even *think* about trying to pass of a binary version of someone's open source driver as your own.
Closed-specs hardware vendors don't get the "coolness" bonus from, for example, us, the Slashdot community. Don't underestimate the effects of this: we've now become the "brand specifiers" for a huge part of the PC market, especially the games market. I'd say that we had a lot to do with 3Dfx's decline (because of closed-api concerns) and NVidia's rise (because they opened *part* of their specs).
The embedded market XFree is just too big and bloated for the embedded market - anybody care to argue this? Or for installing on old 486's and P90's. I know - I've tried it. We absolutely have to have an alternative, and there are already several projects underway on this. Let's not build in a binary driver api in these new video systems for at least 2 or 3 years, ok? That will keep the pressure on: if you want your card used in the embedded market (possibly much bigger than the desktop market) you'd better open the api. Do it sooner and get a bigger piece of the market. Do it later and become a historical footnote.
Apparently, all is not going well with Corel's attempts to capture a place in the Linux market
What has a disagreement between an employee of a merged company and the purchaser have to do with Corel's entry into the Linux market? Answer: nothing. This is FUD, pure and simple, and it pains me greatly to see such a thing coming from a Slashdot editor. You should be ashamed of yourself, Hemos.
For my part, I think Corel deserves all the support they can get; they are a valuable member of the Linux community; they have already contributed a great deal, and I fully expect them to contribute a great deal more; and we ***now can hope for a much more timely release of Delphi on Linux***.
In fact, I posted this with M15. It's a nightly build - so far, pretty darn nice. Still a memory hog, though.
The logical next step after open software is open hardware. The only reason for a lag is: hardware simply has higher capital cost than software. Until now, that is - when open tools bring about the demise of proprietary hardware design tools, the cost of designing hardware will drop dramatically, and we haven't seen nothin' yet. The cost of actually creating silicon is going to drop like a rock too.
The only real suprise is to see it happening already, before the open source hardware development tools have gotten to anything like maturity.
Open dvd drive, anybody?
While it is good to see the Aussie music industry working to stop this sort of thing it is a bit late. The deal is already signed and sealed.
That doesn't mean a thing if both parties agree to tear it up... or if the contract is found to violate some law... say *antitrust law* or something.
So they want to come into our turf and compete with open source office projects? OK *fine*, not only will it exponentially increase Linux's market share over Linux, nothing would do more to stimulate us to out-office them in every way.
:-) But do be careful, some of the fish swimming in here have lots of little, sharp teeth.
Come on in, Bill the water's fine
Writing documentation is not as sexy as writing software (To quote a Slashdotter, "Honestly, how many users want to read documentation? How many of them see a fat manual and feel happy?")
Hmmph. Software that is crap because of lack of adequate documentation is not very sexy at all. Said users, if they want to use sexy software, better learn to see the beauty of good documentation. It's not first and foremost for the users (*learn to program first!*), it's for the hackers that make Linux the sexy system it is today. Of course, it sure doesn't hurt users to be able to find out how there systems work when they want to, in as much detail as they want to.
I thank everyone involved in LCP profusely, but I'm not getting involved - I'll respectfully keep hacking on my own project, and I promise to write proper draft documentation for it when it's done.
You'd elect this over ramen noodles?
The proper pronunciation is "ramyun". I don't know how it got anglicized to "ramen" - I guess we shouldn't complain when they do similar things to our words.
I am sick of seeing linux development kernel upgrades posted on Slashdot.
I'm not. Would you kindly not try to impose your opinion on me?
Kernel releases are the most exciting thing about Linux, and if you don't understand that, you just don't get it. Don't read them if you don't want to. Just don't try to keep me from reading them.
That means:
Full navigation with the keyboard
All window management functions accessible via the keyboard alone
A way of moving the mouse pointer and simulating mouse clicks with the keyboard - for that one time your mouse is broken but you still have to navigate the gui, no matter how slowly.
Proper keyboard focus control. 99% of the time you should not have to use the mouse to put the keyboard focus where it ought to be
*Integration* between keyboard and mouse scrolling in all text widgets and the like - none of this snapping to somewhere in the file you didn't expect to be just because you positioned first with the mouse, then moved with the cursor keys.
A lot of other things I've forgotten, but we all know what they are when they're not there
Even my mother can type!
the stewardship of Java standards/apis is not open So? The specs haven't been kept up to date (check for yourself). And have always been incomplete. The specs somewhat lame in a lot of places, too. For example, hardware api's sucked from the beginning, they still suck, and from the look of things, they are going to continue to suck forever unless something drastic changes in the API development process. About the only hardware Sun has created an api for is the mouse. Show me how you support a joystick in Java, for example. It's a big world out there and Java as it stands just can't deal with a lot of it. Don't talk to me about native code interface either: hardware support is pretty much useless in Java unless it exists on every platform, and it's now so late in the game that even if the api's were fixed it would be immensely difficult to deploy the new support widely enough so that application writers could write to it with confidence.
Sun's unwillingness to let go of their baby and let it grow up into an adult. We haven't got that much time to wait. At the current rate, Java is going to be a dead issue by the time Sun wakes up. It's going to be killed by something more useful, and more open, without one, self-interested company trying to dominate it. All I can say is, thanks Sun for giving Bill a few sleepless nights, but really, another proprietary solution is not what the world wants and it's not going to accept it. Many programmers are now using Perl and Python for applications where they would have looked seriously at Java. Python and Perl both work better than Java on Linux, they're faster to develop with, they start faster, easier to debug, more useful libraries, more code developed by other people that you can leverage, etc. etc.
Do you really feel ISO's process has been to the advantage of the language? A single, steering body is always better, whether that body is called Sun or Guido von Rossum.
Then lets have a single steering body, but let that body be chosen democratically, and by merit. As far as I'm concerned Sun has dropped the ball.
We can fix all that, but not under the current conditions. Kaffe is nice. Kaffe is fine. I admire everybody that works on Kaffe, and Blackdown too for that matter. But Sun is passively resisting Kaffe and other Java-clones (by withholding important specifications and compliance tests) to the point where it is very difficult to be sure whether Kaffe is Java-compatible or not. That's evil.
This annoys me, because I'd use Java for a number of things if it weren't such a sluggish, unreliable memory hog. (Which is exactly what it is when you try to run, for example, any Swing program.) Personally, I'm not contemplating using Java for any serious development at this point whereas two years ago I was full of enthusiasm for the idea. Perhaps there are others like me?
It seems to me that you just want to keep things the way they are. Well, it isn't working, that's plain for all to see. Look at the way Linux is leaving Java in the dust as a cross-platform vehicle for delivery of net-enabled applications. That's what Java was supposed to be. Linux has already stolen a lot of Java's thunder, and it will steal the rest unless Sun smartens up fast.
...the real problem isn't the warm-and-fuzzies, (although there's no underestimating the importance of people's feelings). The real problem is that Java is not open-source, and the stewardship of Java standards/apis is not open. The earlier slight to the Blackdown team was just a symptom, the real disease is Sun's unwillingness to let go of their baby and let it grow up into an adult. The result is that Java is still running largely with training wheels. Who wants to see how well the sandbox works when there are precious few applications worth running? Who wants to run an app that is theoretically pleasing but is, in practice, slow and kinda ugly? And not 100% stable? We can fix all that, but not under the current conditions. If things continue as they are, yes, progress will happen, but it will be sloooooooooow... maybe *too* slow.
I don't want to sound ungrateful, but... when are you going to drop the other shoe, Scott???
Reading the log you can see that one of the ops (Jackie_CNN) was just too clueless to be opped on the channel. First she voiced President_C|inton (then devoiced a short time later), then voiced wankel (now known as President_Clinton) in spite of the fact that his IP address was completely wrong - with username petro for one thing, and the wrong numbers for another thing. On top of that, the other op (JoeCNN) was too clueless to undo the damage.
Any 14 year old IRC groupie could have done a better job of opping the channel. Opping is more than just knowing how to click power menu options.
Nothing personal Jackie, but you'd better go hang on IRC a while longer before you op the next interview.
It's all very good to want a return on investment, especially in the hideously expensive task of designing microprocessors, but if you?re going to hold a belief, then you need to live that belief, regardless of the consequences.
I'm of two minds about this article. First, I agree with its premise: that Transmeta should open-source its code morphing software. Not to the extent that competing companies would be able to use it for free, but to the extend that the worldwide hacker net can go to work on it. Second, I think it's a stupid article, and it's written in a pretty stupid way. Give away the processors for free. Yeah right.
All this has very little to do with beliefs. OK, the gnu organization started because of beliefs, but the open-source movement continues because it produces more and better software. That translates in $$$ by the simple rule that if you give customers what is best for them, i.e., cheap and good, they won't be slow to pay you for it.
Open sourcing the code morphing software is something that Transmeta should do because it makes business sense. Again, very little to do with beliefs, unless you count getting rich as a belief. Transmeta wants to sell processors - whatever they can do to sell more processors makes good business sense. Especially when it doesn't cost any money. Opening the code morphing source will sell more processors. It will make the software better. And it will help establish a loyal, perhaps fanatically loyal, core user base.
So why hasn't it happened? Well, I can only speculate that somebody in the executive suite doesn't get it. Yet. It's just a phase that will pass. With Torvalds in there to make the case I'll give this, hmm, six months, and I guess said suit will see the light. In the meantime, the pressure is going to increase. So far Transmeta is on a honeymoon with us - they can do no wrong at the moment and a little thing like the code morphing source code isn't going to dampen our enthusiasm for this technology. Much. But that's going to change - you'll see more frequent and more emphatic calls for a policy reversal on the open-source issues.
After a while we'll get what we want and Transmeta will be better off for it.
it's probably smart to realize that StarOffice is only a replacement for MS Office in the home enviroment. It's not even in the same ballpark in an enterprise.
:-)
True. For the enterprise you'd probably be better off with Wordperfect.
The last time the OS survey at this site was updated was a year ago. What gives? We need real statistics on operating systems in use on web servers. Netcraft shows us how many Appache servers are out there - nearly 60% of all web servers are running appache - and it really seems hard to believe that less than 1/2 of them are running Linux. Which would put Linux tied with Microsoft (all flavors).
Am I wrong about this? I think the number of Linux servers is being serverly underestimated.
If I could write articles with decent formatting & dynamic supra and infra references in the footnotes & the occassional graphic in anything except MSWord, I would never boot-crash-reboot Win95
Have you tried Wordperfect 8? It works fine - it's the standard for the legal industry, for one thing. It's fully capable of handling large, complex documents, and it's cross-platform.
Abiword is coming along fine - it's useable now, in version 0.7.8 for simple documents (actually, it's a real pleasure to use) and by the time it gets to verions 1.0 it will be a killer app.
StarOffice is a good product, but when one has the choice of getting MS Office for almost the same price, I have to say that MS wins hands down.
.pdf (use ps2pdf) and then Windows users will be able to read them using Adobe Acrobat.
If you're not running Windows, copies of MS Office, Visual Studio, etc. are useful mainly as coffee coasters. The same $5 will get you a 5 complete Redhat or Mandrake CD's, 4 to pass on to your friends, and you can get Staroffice or Corel Wordperfect for free. Along with about 3,000 other programs. Or maybe 5,000, is anybody keeping count?
Which is not to say I don't appreciate free software - I regularly use FreeBSD. But I think that "protesting" against a deal that benefits both students and Microsoft may be stretching things a bit.
Actually, the deal hurts students because it gets them used to using MS's proprietary file formats, something that will cause them a lot of trouble later in life when they try to get connected with the rest of the world. My advice to students is to try to stick to HTML instead of MS-proprietary-format as much as you can - it's infinitely better for sending by email (documents are a fraction of the size and everybody can read them), you can post it directly on web sites, everybody can read it, etc. etc.
Postscript format is much better than MS word format - it's much more stable, can be read on more platforms, and produces good camera-ready copy. Postscript documents can be distributed as
Use MS file formats only as a last resort when you have to give something to someone who can only read MS files, and even then you should stick to Word 6 format if you don't want to have problems. Keep in mind that office suite file formats will all be changing to XML soon, even Microsoft's.
Abiword already uses XML as its file format. MS file formats are obsolescent: avoid.
While any IT student who is serious about their profession should install Linux or a BSD on their computer, without a large committment of support resources it's not practical for a university to provide Linux (or Windows, for that matter) for their students.
That's just not correct. All the support students need is freely available on the web, via IRC. Go to any irc network and join the #linux channel. Or #linuxnewbie or whatever. You only need ONE student connected to irc, via Linux, Windows, Solaris or whatever, and all the other students can get enough support to get their own machines up and connected.
The way I got my Linux configured, starting as a complete newbie, was by rebooting to Windows, going on efnet, asking stupid questions about PPP, applications availability, configuration, whatever, then rebooting to Linux and trying it.
Once you get your Linux connected to irc, things start moving faster - you don't have to reboot any more.
Linux just doesn't require the same effort to support as Windows, because there's a whole community out there ready and willing to provide the needed support for free, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Borland went toe to toe with Microsoft and lost badly (I'm not saying the fight was fair). They never really recovered from that. Corel did the same thing, but were smart enough to know when to retreat - to the high ground of Linux. Otherwise, they would have been creamed just like Borland, antitrust trial or no antitrust. The markets apparently agree - while Corel's stock is no rocket, it's certainly done well this year and seems to have a lot more support than in the past.
Now, the best thing Corel could do with Inprise nee Borland would be to hurry along the release of Delphi - a lot of programmers are waiting for Delphi to show up on LInux before then finally defect from Windows. For such people (I know several personally) Linux will only be be seen as a real platform when it runs Delphi.
About 20 years ago I predicted (you'll have to take my word for it;-) that a non-random mechanism for evolution would be discovered, and it now seems clear that that is about to happen.
So, not content to rest on my coatails (gad I love mixing metaphors) I'll make another prediction: a mechanism will be discovered by which learned information is transcribed to the DNA of reproductive cells, thus providing a path for the propagation of hereditary memory.
This mechanism has not been discovered yet because we haven't got much of a clue what the brain uses for coding mechanisms, and we've only recently began to have a clue about the higher-level coding systems of DNA. We're only beginning to have an inkling how the turing machines in our cells process the DNA tapes. Still, this research is accelerating, so I'll feel comfortable guessing that the timeframe for this discovery will be about 10 years.
A generic algorithm for making predictions about evolution is: Dream up any advantageous mechanism and predict that it already exists but hasn't been discovered yet. You'll be right most of the time.