There's always a place for light tight software
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Opera Beta Released
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· Score: 2
I'm still not sure what Opera's place in the world is, though. Consumers who use old, slow computersgenerally don't buy software.
I'm not a consumer. I'm running a 300 MHz, and typical browsers whether by Microsoft, Netscape, the KDE team, or whoever, take a ridiculous time to launch, let alone what they do to my machine performance by hogging all the memory. In my book, no program you run should take more than a second to load. Personally, I prefer load times less than.1 second. (no, really) From my experience with Opera on Windows I'd say that opera is the only browser that comes close to being able to meet my criterion. The Windows version is also about the most stable browser I ever used. I really think the Linux version will be even better, once it's done. I'm not going to dump on them for releasing a little early just so they could get it out before Santa comes.
I guess Opera's best strategy would be to open-source their code the rest of the way, let us geeks fix the code some more, proclaim themselves a linux company, and cash in with an IPO.
Re:the freedom to fork versus wrtie-once-run-anywh
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RMS on Java and GPL
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· Score: 2
I read through the 20 or so comments at JavaLobby. most were against a GPLed Java clone because the GPL allows forking. forking destroys Java's write-once-run-anywhere (WORA) property.
Yes, that explains why the Linux kernel has forked so many times. Oh wait, it hasn't! Gee, what could be going on?
Open sourcing java and removing the standardization process would aggravate the embrace and extend problem that they are already facing from microsoft
Who said anything about the removing the standardization process? You seem to be a little bit confused about this. What we're hearing now is a lot of key groups expressing intentions to get together and proceed with Java Standardization whether or not Sun cooperates. This could ony be good for Java. As other posters have stated in this thread, we have to keep both Microsoft and Sun from playing their little twisted corporate games, now that we've all been kind enough to consider adopting Java as a standard platform for business computing.
I'd like to make it clear that for years I was an enthusiastic supporter of Sun's stewardship of the Java standard - and this was based on mainly on the quality of the api designs and documentation - but now I, like many others, am pretty much disenchanted with Sun and tend to lump them together with Microsoft in terms of the self-interested games they play.
Sun has to let go of their baby and let it grow up. There chances of being able to win this fight are exactly zero, and the longer it goes on, the more it hurts java. Billg must be very happy about this.
Gee RedHat thet's a great product you've got there. Let's see here... I'll take it, revamp and improve it and then I'll outsell you using your own product. But seriously...
Perhaps you meant it as a joke, perhaps not. I certainly support the idea of a new, small, energetic group striking out on their own. But I do not support the concept of plagiarism. Please tell me I'm wrong about this, but many of the Mandrake docs appear to be Red Hat docs with no changes other than every occurance of Red Hat being replaced by Mandrake. If this is true then it's very wrong. If it's not, then I apologize for even suggesting the idea.
Hilariously enough a large percentage of the machines are running DOS (its small and old and its bugs are well known), but the rest are generally unix.
Don't laugh. I developed a big realtime machine control application last year on Dos. Now the application is being redeveloped for Windows NT - requiring a computer 20 times faster, with 16 times more memory and 10 times bigger harddisk. The NT version doesn't do any more, but it does look prettier and supports more hardware.
I'd very much like to develop this application on Linux, but it isn't going to happen this time round, because the support software we need just isn't available. However, I'm willing to predict that by this time next year we'll be looking into how we can do it on Linux, because NT by that time will be seen to suck very apparently in this application, due to bloat, flakiness, lousy documentation of api's and protocols, and miscellaneous licencing issues, to name a few reasons.
Let's see how it goes - in the meantime, I hope that Slashdotters are aware that this is a very key industry for Microsoft and they're pushing very hard to get a dominant position in it. So far, they're doing pretty well, no matter much their software may suck for realtime control. The PHB's just see the pretty colors and wizbang graphics and they're sold.
Sound support would benefit immensely from hard realtime support in the kernel. Think about it: no more skips/hiccups in your mp3 playback, no matter what the operating system is doing at the time.
Actually, all operating systems should incorporate deterministic schedulers - there's really no excuse not to. Realtime control is something you're going to be hearing more and more about, and not just for factories. Any video game is basically a realtime application, and if you ever wondered why the control in video games sometimes seems to suck and be flakey, it's often because the control isn't implemented with any real time guarantees.
Another example is the proper, dependable detection of such things as double mouse clicks. If you can't guarantee the latency of when the mouse click is handled, you can't be sure you measured the right interval.
The operation of winmodems, much as they suck, could be improved by gauranteed latency interrupt handling, so you can use a small (low latency) buffer and not get errors from delayed interrupt response.
If you look into all the things your computer is doing, you'll find lots of things that could be improved via realtime control.
but I have have few questions about this old news: How come I knew about this more than 24 hours ago and I'm just now seeing it on Slashdot?? Please, the stories are starting to lag way behind the news.
Also, some of us read this site in other time zones when the editorial staff at Slashdot seems to be sleeping: You need more editorial staff in other timezones.
One more thing, some of us don't quit reading Slashdot just because everybody at Andover goes home for the weekend: You need some editorial staff that doesn't quit on the weekend.
with the recent IPOs there are a lot of very wealthy geeks, many of which have already stated that if it came to it they'd happily use some of their money on lawyers for the big fight...
Exactly right. There are already a half-dozen $Billion companies whose business plans and future stock price depends on defending the GPL licence. Consider this scenario:
Megacorp A snarfs a bagful of GPL code B into their proprietary product C and pretends they wrote it themselves.
Random Geek D notices something about Megacorp A's product C that reminds him of GPL'd code B and decides to investigate further. Disassembly reveals an exact correspondence to said GPL'd code.
Geek D contacts GPL code B's author E, who flies into a righteous rage. After calming down, author E posts the news on Slashdot. Things heat up.
Mega-wealthy geek F reads the slashdot article and immediately contacts author E with an offer to bankroll whatever legal action is required.
Meanwhile, outrage builds and a class-action suit is launched as well
Faced with a public relations disaster and the likelihood of losing badly in court, Megacorp A quickly decides to settle. The settlement amount is paid into a non-profit fund for future defences of the GPL
Geeks D and E are now famous and land high-paying jobs at a linux startup that goes public a year later, making them rich
Geeks F's company's stock doubles on news of the settlement, making him twice as wealthy.
Everybody lives happily ever after. Except Megacorp A, which have known better in the first place
Check out the excellent c't benchmark showdown. It shows that in one configuration (two fast ethernet cards in the same machine, serving static pages) NT can truly outperform Linux, but that in all the realistic configurations tested Linux beats NT, usually by a wide margin.
Naturally something has to be done about that one case where NT sneaks ahead, right?
I was pleased to find that kernel 2.2.13 came complete with a functional driver for my NeoMagic sound chip, the one used on all the new Sony laptops, so now I can listen to mp3's while I program, etc, etc. One less reason for using Windows.:-)
As for getting developers to build the source, it's too late to be helpful for M12.
You don't get it. It's never too late to get the source: once you have it you can keep up to date with the development tree through CVS. How do you sell a puppy? By letting someone take the puppy home. How do you get developers to sign on for Mozilla's final development phase? By getting the source into their hands.
what purpose is served by slamming the FTP servers to grab the sources, especially when most people want the binaries?
Interest in Mozilla tends to peak around the time of each milestone release. That's the best time to sign up new developers. Nuff said?
I always see a "wait for the mirrors" article posted to every announcement like this, and it always gets moderated way up high. Maybe because it seems helpful. Well, actually what you're doing is insulting somebody's intelligence.
The Mozilla build team is experienced enough to figure out for themselves when to post the source - copies of the build probably went out to the mirrors before being posted on the mozilla site. By the time binaries are available the slashdot effect for the sources will have subsided. They know what they're doing.
The important thing right now is to get as many developers as possible building the source. If you're a developer and you're just downloading the binaries and maybe sending in the odd bug report, you're kind of wasting your talent don't you think?
For anyone who hasn't built it yet... the source download is 20-something meg, but it expands to 130 meg or so, then inflates itself to over 600 meg by the time it's finished building, so you'd better have a nice round gig free. The build takes about 45 minutes.
Watch for AMD to beat this by 50MHz or so pretty soon...
800 Mhz Athlons are already out. I'm not familiar with the exact details but suffice to say that the K7 was designed to scale much more easily in clock speed than Intel's parts. Coupled with the good luck AMD is having with yields it looks like Intel is going to be playing catchup for the foreseeable future.
And don't forget that and the same clockspeed Athlon delivers up to 40% more floating point power, making this the world's finest Quake II engine. Then there are the 3D now instructions.:-)
It seems that the links have been to fatbrain.com lately anyway, so it's not so much of an issue. Of course, they're running NT with Active Server Pages, so there goes Geek Idealism
Not necessarily. When you buy a book, comment on their service. Take the opportunity to comment on how much Apache on Unix:-) would improve the efficiency of their service, and how much it would make you want to come back again. (let them figure out what the best and cheapest version of Unix is for themselves) Let alone saving them piles of money on licences.
We should them know politely that we care about exactly which server they use, that we're aware of it. They'll get the idea pretty quickly. Everybody is trying to repackage themselves as open-source friendly, and we just have to remind them exactly how they could go about doing that.
The current Instant Messaging model suffers from several glaring problems stemming mostly from the reliance on centrally controlled messaging servers (that double as ad servers). Major issues with the current IM model include:
Reliability: Does the whole world want to count on one company's servers to stay up 24/7?
Security: What if someone breaks into the server that has your passwords? What if (hypothetically of course) an employee of AOL doesn't like you?
Privacy: Isn't it a warm feeling knowing that all your text goes through some other company's messaging servers?
Authentication: How the hell do you know who's on the other end of the line?
Would it suprise you if I said you aren't the first to notice these problems. It's pretty much accepted that Network Presence/Instant messaging has to be a service provided by ISP's, preferably *your* ISP. Obviously, authentification and privacy issues are solveable and they don't really have to involve the ISP much. Where the ISP comes is mainly in two places: (1) making your presence/absence known to selected others via the as-yet-to-be-built Internet Presence network. (2) Providing store and forward for messages that can't be delivered due to the (temporary) absense of the recipient.
The real question is, once we manage to produce a good solid NP/IP server/client system, how are we going to get the ISP's to adopt it? Keep this in mind: Neither AOL nor Microsoft has the slightest interest in ISPs support our NP/IP system! (Because they both want us to use their proprietary servers.) So we are going to have a big fight on our hands, and we're going to have to use some very powerful weapons indeed to get what we want.
For starters, we're going to have to reward the ISPs in some way. One idea just off the top of my head is to provide, in the clients, a clickable link for the recipient (and sender for that matter) back to a web page of the ISP's choice. This could be disabled by the user of course, but if the user clicks it the ISP gets some sort of benefit: as ad revenue, or the ability to promote it's own services to the recipient of an IM, or whatever. Another idea is to just include the winning NP/IM protocl in all new versions of the software that ISPs use. I.E, making it part of sendmail or the other mail clients, etc. (the force-feeding method) Another way is to organize some sort of email campaign to get the ISP's on board. We're going to have to have a good plan in place. Don't make any mistake about it: it's going to be an uphill battle.
If Linux is so important then why is Sun still playing cute with Java on Linux? Lets see some real comittment: put the Linux Java source tree under GPL, forget about that stupid communittee license thingy. Scott, you will win big by doing that.
This is a "me too" post and I'm not ashamed of it.
This is a stupid, obvious thing that Amazon has wrongly patented and is even more wrongly trying to enforce. We have to show them the "un-Slashdot effect", that is, the effect of thousands of geeks switching their business to Barns&Noble and Fatbrain.
Patents are not inherently wrong; software patents are not inherently wrong; this kind of patent that relies on technically-clueless patent examiners and an even more technically-clueless court system is wrong and must be stopped. Otherwise, you'll soon find that you can't program anything without paying licences.
I tried to get RMS on my board, but of course he doesn't want his name used for marketing
Remember that scene in Pirates of Silicon Valley where the Woz decides to hand over some of his own shares to long-time Apple employees that somehow never shared in the wealth-generation of Apple's IPO? Well, with double handfuls of OS luminaries now vaulted into the range of of multi-millioniare and billionaire it's getting harder and harder to explain why the man who started it all has no, so far, gotten a share of the wealth.
It's getting to the point where he should just be handed a chunk of the next Linux rocket, don't expect RMS to do the homework - we ought to know by now that he won't.
This is getting kind of embarrassing - who is going to take care of RMS???
And then put QT under GPL, removing once and for all what may be the biggest question mark in the open source world.
Like all the other linux IPOs, VA needs to beef up its assets by acquisition before the blush fades. Troll Tech would be a high profile, community-oriented acquisition that would have the immediate effect of boosting VA's market capitalization yet further. This would be a far more satisfactory arrangement that, for example, Troll tech winding up as a division of Red Hat, which already has a lot of influence over Gnome. We have to watch out for too much concentration of power on the commercial Linux side, and we have to let our desires be known.
Corel should also be thinking about making this move.
Looking into my crystal ball, I see flocks of bankers bearing bags of money camping out on a certain doorstep in Norway...
...now that they've got a modular architecture that they can split NDA'ed drivers away from, they need to open up the bulk of XFree86 development to the public. How much of the work that goes into other open source software projects comes from people who download the latest bleeding-edge CVS and fix one little instability? How many now-full-time coders on other large open source projects started as people who simply liked poring through bleeding-edge releases and hacking on them?
Yes - and there's another big advantage - opening up the non-NDA hardware drivers will put a lot more pressure on the proprietary holdouts to open their specs, because the open-spec drivers will improve a lot faster.
And I'm suffering:-) But I don't care, it feels good, and darn it, I'm going to be really bummed if mozilla finally comes out without a single line of code in it from me. So...
Does anybody know if the official netscape version is using GTK for its widgets like mozilla is doing? I really really hate motif. I think that is one of the biggest things I dislike about Netscape under linux is that it is real ugly.
There's no chance that motif will be used - the choice is between MFC or some such and GTK. I guess I have to drill down into the code to know for sure whether native widget sets are supported, but it sure looks to me like GTK is going to be completely cross-platform. Themed GTK is absolutely gorgeous and I can't think of a single thing about native windows widgets that GTK doesn't do as well or better. Obviously, mozilla's use of GTK is a big boost for it and we're going to see a lot more cross-platform packages done that way.
Also one more bit of speculation about the delay, what are the chances that they are taking so long so that AOL 6.0 can use Netscape?
They're taking so long so that it will be done:-) I'd think that the timing of AOL 6 would depend more on the availability of mozilla that vice versa. It's a no-brainer that AOL will switch to mozilla when the time is right - and that together with the increasing Linux user base, will put netscape/mozilla back on top in the browser wars more or less immediately. We haven't even considered the slashdot effect yet - what happens when several thousand well-connected and highly motivated geeks hit the cyber-highway to promote the Lizard and email it, DCC it, icq it, whatever, to everybody they know? This will make the mellisa virus look benign:-)
How long is AOL's contract with MS to use IE?
ISTR it was extended to 2002 - however if the contract is found to be illegal it will vanish instantly. I don't think AOL will have a lot of trouble with that - they just have to be sure BillG won't kick them out of the oneline service promotion deal in Windows.
...Not that I like AOL mind you, in fact I hate it, but I know lots of people who worship it and it would still be a great "big app" to have in the community.
Yup, AOL is key, however much they suck, Microsoft sucks MUCH MUCH more. IMHO, having mozilla on Linux is the biggest app of all.
At this stage of the game, a lot more non-netscape developers (like me:-) (and you;-) are joining the mozilla effort. Think about it, this is about the last chance you get to scratch that itch before every feature gets frozen - and how many chances did you get before to work on a massive, professional project like this?
a breakup would leave Microsoft (MSFT) with three or four viable businesses while still being the appropriate punishment for any antitrust violations
In what sense is this a punishment? If history is any guide the shareholders will gain from a breakup if anything, a la Standard Oil.
If split horizontally, the part of Microsoft that still owns the operating system will still be a bad actor, as will the part that owns the office products. If split vertically the companies will simply collude unless prevented from doing so by some sort of regulation - the sort of regulation that BillG has shown great willingness and skill at circumventing in the past.
At minimum the following needs to be accomplished:
Microsoft must be prevented from attacking its competitors and driving them out of business. (it's illegal for a monopoly to do this)
Microsoft must be prevented from subverting public protocols and standards
Microsoft must be prevented from extending its monopoly in office systems by means of secret file formats and protocols
Microsoft must be prevented from leveraging its operating system francise by means of secret/patented api's, protocols and file formats.
Microsoft must be prevented from using its monopoly position in operating systems and office applications to control the behaviour of OEM's, distributors, retailers, ISP's, online services, etc.
Microsoft must be prevented from using its ownership/control of internet access providers and carriers such as cable companies to force use of it's proprietary software and/or protocols.
How are these things going to be accomplished by a breakup? I'm very skeptical that a breakup will address these goals at all. In the end, further remedies will have to be applied or we'll see the same old thing all over again. Then what?
(Gak! KDE deveopers: please take note - my original post above was mangled by the KDE help browser-cum-webbrowser stripping all the html tags from the text in the preview screen edit box - PLEASE TRY posting to Slashdot yourself, you'll see what I mean. This is NOT the correct behaviour.)
Alright, this is probably going to be an unpopular post on a open-source haven like/., but I think that it's good that some of these companies have a way to protect themselves from competition.
The best protection from competition is to give great service to customers, offer great products at a good price. In other words, do what is best for the customer - people will pay money for that. When a company competes by hindering the operations of competitors it is doing something that is undeniably bad for society as a whole. In otherwords, it's a bad corporate citizen.
Not to mention that the patent in question is ridiculously obvious to anyone but a patent examiner and the judge and never should have been granted in the first place; this action should never have gotten to the point of an injunction.
I'd like to get on my little soapbox right now and say to Amazon: I'm a customer, I've bought books from you, but I never will buy from you again until you toss this stupid patent.
Alright, this is probably going to be an unpopular post on a open-source haven like/., but I think that it's good that some of these companies have a way to protect themselves from competition. The best protection from competition is to give great service to customers, offer great products at a good price. In other words, do what is best for the customer - people will pay money for that. When a company competes by hindering the operations of competitors it is doing something that is undeniably bad for society as a whole. In otherwords, it's a bad corporate citizen. Not to mention that the patent in question is ridiculously obvious to anyone but a patent examiner and the judge and never should have been granted in the first place; this action should never have gotten to the point of an injunction. I'd like to get on my little soapbox right now and say to Amazon: I'm a customer, I've bought books from you, but I never will again until you toss this stupid patent.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still not sure what Opera's place in the world is, though. Consumers who use old, slow computersgenerally don't buy software.
.1 second. (no, really) From my experience with Opera on Windows I'd say that opera is the only browser that comes close to being able to meet my criterion. The Windows version is also about the most stable browser I ever used. I really think the Linux version will be even better, once it's done. I'm not going to dump on them for releasing a little early just so they could get it out before Santa comes.
I'm not a consumer. I'm running a 300 MHz, and typical browsers whether by Microsoft, Netscape, the KDE team, or whoever, take a ridiculous time to launch, let alone what they do to my machine performance by hogging all the memory. In my book, no program you run should take more than a second to load. Personally, I prefer load times less than
I guess Opera's best strategy would be to open-source their code the rest of the way, let us geeks fix the code some more, proclaim themselves a linux company, and cash in with an IPO.
I read through the 20 or so comments at JavaLobby. most were against a GPLed Java clone because the GPL allows forking. forking destroys Java's write-once-run-anywhere (WORA) property.
Yes, that explains why the Linux kernel has forked so many times. Oh wait, it hasn't! Gee, what could be going on?
Open sourcing java and removing the standardization process would aggravate the embrace and extend problem that they are already facing from microsoft
Who said anything about the removing the standardization process? You seem to be a little bit confused about this. What we're hearing now is a lot of key groups expressing intentions to get together and proceed with Java Standardization whether or not Sun cooperates. This could ony be good for Java. As other posters have stated in this thread, we have to keep both Microsoft and Sun from playing their little twisted corporate games, now that we've all been kind enough to consider adopting Java as a standard platform for business computing.
I'd like to make it clear that for years I was an enthusiastic supporter of Sun's stewardship of the Java standard - and this was based on mainly on the quality of the api designs and documentation - but now I, like many others, am pretty much disenchanted with Sun and tend to lump them together with Microsoft in terms of the self-interested games they play.
Sun has to let go of their baby and let it grow up. There chances of being able to win this fight are exactly zero, and the longer it goes on, the more it hurts java. Billg must be very happy about this.
More links to the conference (from Linuxtoday):
realtimelinux.org: Realtime Linux Workshop Day 3 Dec 20th, 1999
realtimelinux.org: Realtime Linux Workshop Day 2 Dec 20th, 1999
realtimelinux.org: Real Time Linux Workshop Day 1, Real people, Real place, Real time Dec 18th, 1999
Gee RedHat thet's a great product you've got there. Let's see here... I'll take it, revamp and improve it and then I'll outsell you using your own product. But seriously...
Perhaps you meant it as a joke, perhaps not. I certainly support the idea of a new, small, energetic group striking out on their own. But I do not support the concept of plagiarism. Please tell me I'm wrong about this, but many of the Mandrake docs appear to be Red Hat docs with no changes other than every occurance of Red Hat being replaced by Mandrake. If this is true then it's very wrong. If it's not, then I apologize for even suggesting the idea.
Hilariously enough a large percentage of the machines are running DOS (its small and old and its bugs are well known), but the rest are generally unix.
Don't laugh. I developed a big realtime machine control application last year on Dos. Now the application is being redeveloped for Windows NT - requiring a computer 20 times faster, with 16 times more memory and 10 times bigger harddisk. The NT version doesn't do any more, but it does look prettier and supports more hardware.
I'd very much like to develop this application on Linux, but it isn't going to happen this time round, because the support software we need just isn't available. However, I'm willing to predict that by this time next year we'll be looking into how we can do it on Linux, because NT by that time will be seen to suck very apparently in this application, due to bloat, flakiness, lousy documentation of api's and protocols, and miscellaneous licencing issues, to name a few reasons.
Let's see how it goes - in the meantime, I hope that Slashdotters are aware that this is a very key industry for Microsoft and they're pushing very hard to get a dominant position in it. So far, they're doing pretty well, no matter much their software may suck for realtime control. The PHB's just see the pretty colors and wizbang graphics and they're sold.
Sound support would benefit immensely from hard realtime support in the kernel. Think about it: no more skips/hiccups in your mp3 playback, no matter what the operating system is doing at the time.
Actually, all operating systems should incorporate deterministic schedulers - there's really no excuse not to. Realtime control is something you're going to be hearing more and more about, and not just for factories. Any video game is basically a realtime application, and if you ever wondered why the control in video games sometimes seems to suck and be flakey, it's often because the control isn't implemented with any real time guarantees.
Another example is the proper, dependable detection of such things as double mouse clicks. If you can't guarantee the latency of when the mouse click is handled, you can't be sure you measured the right interval.
The operation of winmodems, much as they suck, could be improved by gauranteed latency interrupt handling, so you can use a small (low latency) buffer and not get errors from delayed interrupt response.
If you look into all the things your computer is doing, you'll find lots of things that could be improved via realtime control.
realtimelinux.org: Realtime Linux Workshop Day 3 Dec 20th, 1999
realtimelinux.org: Realtime Linux Workshop Day 2 Dec 20th, 1999
realtimelinux.org: Real Time Linux Workshop Day 1, Real people, Real place, Real time Dec 18th, 1999
but I have have few questions about this old news: How come I knew about this more than 24 hours ago and I'm just now seeing it on Slashdot?? Please, the stories are starting to lag way behind the news.
Also, some of us read this site in other time zones when the editorial staff at Slashdot seems to be sleeping: You need more editorial staff in other timezones.
One more thing, some of us don't quit reading Slashdot just because everybody at Andover goes home for the weekend: You need some editorial staff that doesn't quit on the weekend.
Exactly right. There are already a half-dozen $Billion companies whose business plans and future stock price depends on defending the GPL licence. Consider this scenario:
Megacorp A snarfs a bagful of GPL code B into their proprietary product C and pretends they wrote it themselves.
Random Geek D notices something about Megacorp A's product C that reminds him of GPL'd code B and decides to investigate further. Disassembly reveals an exact correspondence to said GPL'd code.
Geek D contacts GPL code B's author E, who flies into a righteous rage. After calming down, author E posts the news on Slashdot. Things heat up.
Mega-wealthy geek F reads the slashdot article and immediately contacts author E with an offer to bankroll whatever legal action is required.
Meanwhile, outrage builds and a class-action suit is launched as well
Faced with a public relations disaster and the likelihood of losing badly in court, Megacorp A quickly decides to settle. The settlement amount is paid into a non-profit fund for future defences of the GPL
Geeks D and E are now famous and land high-paying jobs at a linux startup that goes public a year later, making them rich
Geeks F's company's stock doubles on news of the settlement, making him twice as wealthy.
Everybody lives happily ever after. Except Megacorp A, which have known better in the first place
Check out the excellent c't benchmark showdown. It shows that in one configuration (two fast ethernet cards in the same machine, serving static pages) NT can truly outperform Linux, but that in all the realistic configurations tested Linux beats NT, usually by a wide margin.
Naturally something has to be done about that one case where NT sneaks ahead, right?
I was pleased to find that kernel 2.2.13 came complete with a functional driver for my NeoMagic sound chip, the one used on all the new Sony laptops, so now I can listen to mp3's while I program, etc, etc. One less reason for using Windows. :-)
As for getting developers to build the source, it's too late to be helpful for M12.
You don't get it. It's never too late to get the source: once you have it you can keep up to date with the development tree through CVS. How do you sell a puppy? By letting someone take the puppy home. How do you get developers to sign on for Mozilla's final development phase? By getting the source into their hands.
what purpose is served by slamming the FTP servers to grab the sources, especially when most people want the binaries?
Interest in Mozilla tends to peak around the time of each milestone release. That's the best time to sign up new developers. Nuff said?
I always see a "wait for the mirrors" article posted to every announcement like this, and it always gets moderated way up high. Maybe because it seems helpful. Well, actually what you're doing is insulting somebody's intelligence.
The Mozilla build team is experienced enough to figure out for themselves when to post the source - copies of the build probably went out to the mirrors before being posted on the mozilla site. By the time binaries are available the slashdot effect for the sources will have subsided. They know what they're doing.
The important thing right now is to get as many developers as possible building the source. If you're a developer and you're just downloading the binaries and maybe sending in the odd bug report, you're kind of wasting your talent don't you think?
For anyone who hasn't built it yet... the source download is 20-something meg, but it expands to 130 meg or so, then inflates itself to over 600 meg by the time it's finished building, so you'd better have a nice round gig free. The build takes about 45 minutes.
Watch for AMD to beat this by 50MHz or so pretty soon...
:-)
800 Mhz Athlons are already out. I'm not familiar with the exact details but suffice to say that the K7 was designed to scale much more easily in clock speed than Intel's parts. Coupled with the good luck AMD is having with yields it looks like Intel is going to be playing catchup for the foreseeable future.
And don't forget that and the same clockspeed Athlon delivers up to 40% more floating point power, making this the world's finest Quake II engine. Then there are the 3D now instructions.
It seems that the links have been to fatbrain.com lately anyway, so it's not so much of an issue. Of course, they're running NT with Active Server Pages, so there goes Geek Idealism
:-) would improve the efficiency of their service, and how much it would make you want to come back again. (let them figure out what the best and cheapest version of Unix is for themselves) Let alone saving them piles of money on licences.
Not necessarily. When you buy a book, comment on their service. Take the opportunity to comment on how much Apache on Unix
We should them know politely that we care about exactly which server they use, that we're aware of it. They'll get the idea pretty quickly. Everybody is trying to repackage themselves as open-source friendly, and we just have to remind them exactly how they could go about doing that.
- Reliability: Does the whole world want to count on one company's servers to stay up 24/7?
- Security: What if someone breaks into the server that has your passwords? What if (hypothetically of course) an employee of AOL doesn't like you?
- Privacy: Isn't it a warm feeling knowing that all your text goes through some other company's messaging servers?
- Authentication: How the hell do you know who's on the other end of the line?
Would it suprise you if I said you aren't the first to notice these problems. It's pretty much accepted that Network Presence/Instant messaging has to be a service provided by ISP's, preferably *your* ISP. Obviously, authentification and privacy issues are solveable and they don't really have to involve the ISP much. Where the ISP comes is mainly in two places: (1) making your presence/absence known to selected others via the as-yet-to-be-built Internet Presence network. (2) Providing store and forward for messages that can't be delivered due to the (temporary) absense of the recipient.The real question is, once we manage to produce a good solid NP/IP server/client system, how are we going to get the ISP's to adopt it? Keep this in mind: Neither AOL nor Microsoft has the slightest interest in ISPs support our NP/IP system! (Because they both want us to use their proprietary servers.) So we are going to have a big fight on our hands, and we're going to have to use some very powerful weapons indeed to get what we want.
For starters, we're going to have to reward the ISPs in some way. One idea just off the top of my head is to provide, in the clients, a clickable link for the recipient (and sender for that matter) back to a web page of the ISP's choice. This could be disabled by the user of course, but if the user clicks it the ISP gets some sort of benefit: as ad revenue, or the ability to promote it's own services to the recipient of an IM, or whatever. Another idea is to just include the winning NP/IM protocl in all new versions of the software that ISPs use. I.E, making it part of sendmail or the other mail clients, etc. (the force-feeding method) Another way is to organize some sort of email campaign to get the ISP's on board. We're going to have to have a good plan in place. Don't make any mistake about it: it's going to be an uphill battle.
If Linux is so important then why is Sun still playing cute with Java on Linux? Lets see some real comittment: put the Linux Java source tree under GPL, forget about that stupid communittee license thingy. Scott, you will win big by doing that.
Come on guys, really show us how you "get it".
This is a "me too" post and I'm not ashamed of it.
This is a stupid, obvious thing that Amazon has wrongly patented and is even more wrongly trying to enforce. We have to show them the "un-Slashdot effect", that is, the effect of thousands of geeks switching their business to Barns&Noble and Fatbrain.
Patents are not inherently wrong; software patents are not inherently wrong; this kind of patent that relies on technically-clueless patent examiners and an even more technically-clueless court system is wrong and must be stopped. Otherwise, you'll soon find that you can't program anything without paying licences.
I tried to get RMS on my board, but of course he doesn't want his name used for marketing
Remember that scene in Pirates of Silicon Valley where the Woz decides to hand over some of his own shares to long-time Apple employees that somehow never shared in the wealth-generation of Apple's IPO? Well, with double handfuls of OS luminaries now vaulted into the range of of multi-millioniare and billionaire it's getting harder and harder to explain why the man who started it all has no, so far, gotten a share of the wealth.
It's getting to the point where he should just be handed a chunk of the next Linux rocket, don't expect RMS to do the homework - we ought to know by now that he won't.
This is getting kind of embarrassing - who is going to take care of RMS???
And then put QT under GPL, removing once and for all what may be the biggest question mark in the open source world.
Like all the other linux IPOs, VA needs to beef up its assets by acquisition before the blush fades. Troll Tech would be a high profile, community-oriented acquisition that would have the immediate effect of boosting VA's market capitalization yet further. This would be a far more satisfactory arrangement that, for example, Troll tech winding up as a division of Red Hat, which already has a lot of influence over Gnome. We have to watch out for too much concentration of power on the commercial Linux side, and we have to let our desires be known.
Corel should also be thinking about making this move.
Looking into my crystal ball, I see flocks of bankers bearing bags of money camping out on a certain doorstep in Norway...
...now that they've got a modular architecture that they can split NDA'ed drivers away from, they need to open up the bulk of XFree86 development to the public. How much of the work that goes into other open source software projects comes from people who download the latest bleeding-edge CVS and fix one little instability? How many now-full-time coders on other large open source projects started as people who simply liked poring through bleeding-edge releases and hacking on them?
Yes - and there's another big advantage - opening up the non-NDA hardware drivers will put a lot more pressure on the proprietary holdouts to open their specs, because the open-spec drivers will improve a lot faster.
And I'm suffering :-) But I don't care, it feels good, and darn it, I'm going to be really bummed if mozilla finally comes out without a single line of code in it from me. So...
:-) I'd think that the timing of AOL 6 would depend more on the availability of mozilla that vice versa. It's a no-brainer that AOL will switch to mozilla when the time is right - and that together with the increasing Linux user base, will put netscape/mozilla back on top in the browser wars more or less immediately. We haven't even considered the slashdot effect yet - what happens when several thousand well-connected and highly motivated geeks hit the cyber-highway to promote the Lizard and email it, DCC it, icq it, whatever, to everybody they know? This will make the mellisa virus look benign :-)
...Not that I like AOL mind you, in fact I hate it, but I know lots of people who worship it and it would still be a great "big app" to have in the community.
:-) (and you ;-) are joining the mozilla effort. Think about it, this is about the last chance you get to scratch that itch before every feature gets frozen - and how many chances did you get before to work on a massive, professional project like this?
Does anybody know if the official netscape version is using GTK for its widgets like mozilla is doing? I really really hate motif. I think that is one of the biggest things I dislike about Netscape under linux is that it is real ugly.
There's no chance that motif will be used - the choice is between MFC or some such and GTK. I guess I have to drill down into the code to know for sure whether native widget sets are supported, but it sure looks to me like GTK is going to be completely cross-platform. Themed GTK is absolutely gorgeous and I can't think of a single thing about native windows widgets that GTK doesn't do as well or better. Obviously, mozilla's use of GTK is a big boost for it and we're going to see a lot more cross-platform packages done that way.
Also one more bit of speculation about the delay, what are the chances that they are taking so long so that AOL 6.0 can use Netscape?
They're taking so long so that it will be done
How long is AOL's contract with MS to use IE?
ISTR it was extended to 2002 - however if the contract is found to be illegal it will vanish instantly. I don't think AOL will have a lot of trouble with that - they just have to be sure BillG won't kick them out of the oneline service promotion deal in Windows.
Yup, AOL is key, however much they suck, Microsoft sucks MUCH MUCH more. IMHO, having mozilla on Linux is the biggest app of all.
At this stage of the game, a lot more non-netscape developers (like me
In what sense is this a punishment? If history is any guide the shareholders will gain from a breakup if anything, a la Standard Oil.
If split horizontally, the part of Microsoft that still owns the operating system will still be a bad actor, as will the part that owns the office products. If split vertically the companies will simply collude unless prevented from doing so by some sort of regulation - the sort of regulation that BillG has shown great willingness and skill at circumventing in the past.
At minimum the following needs to be accomplished:
Microsoft must be prevented from attacking its competitors and driving them out of business. (it's illegal for a monopoly to do this)
Microsoft must be prevented from subverting public protocols and standards
Microsoft must be prevented from extending its monopoly in office systems by means of secret file formats and protocols
Microsoft must be prevented from leveraging its operating system francise by means of secret/patented api's, protocols and file formats.
Microsoft must be prevented from using its monopoly position in operating systems and office applications to control the behaviour of OEM's, distributors, retailers, ISP's, online services, etc.
Microsoft must be prevented from using its ownership/control of internet access providers and carriers such as cable companies to force use of it's proprietary software and/or protocols.
How are these things going to be accomplished by a breakup? I'm very skeptical that a breakup will address these goals at all. In the end, further remedies will have to be applied or we'll see the same old thing all over again. Then what?
(Gak! KDE deveopers: please take note - my original post above was mangled by the KDE help browser-cum-webbrowser stripping all the html tags from the text in the preview screen edit box - PLEASE TRY posting to Slashdot yourself, you'll see what I mean. This is NOT the correct behaviour.)
/., but I think that it's good that some of these companies have a way to protect themselves from competition.
Alright, this is probably going to be an unpopular post on a open-source haven like
The best protection from competition is to give great service to customers, offer great products at a good price. In other words, do what is best for the customer - people will pay money for that. When a company competes by hindering the operations of competitors it is doing something that is undeniably bad for society as a whole. In otherwords, it's a bad corporate citizen.
Not to mention that the patent in question is ridiculously obvious to anyone but a patent examiner and the judge and never should have been granted in the first place; this action should never have gotten to the point of an injunction.
I'd like to get on my little soapbox right now and say to Amazon: I'm a customer, I've bought books from you, but I never will buy from you again until you toss this stupid patent.
Alright, this is probably going to be an unpopular post on a open-source haven like /., but I think that it's good that some of these companies have a way to protect themselves from competition. The best protection from competition is to give great service to customers, offer great products at a good price. In other words, do what is best for the customer - people will pay money for that. When a company competes by hindering the operations of competitors it is doing something that is undeniably bad for society as a whole. In otherwords, it's a bad corporate citizen. Not to mention that the patent in question is ridiculously obvious to anyone but a patent examiner and the judge and never should have been granted in the first place; this action should never have gotten to the point of an injunction. I'd like to get on my little soapbox right now and say to Amazon: I'm a customer, I've bought books from you, but I never will again until you toss this stupid patent.