If RedHat buys Corel we should get Open Source WordPerfect Suite. This could really kill MS Office. A good well known office suite that's free! Why would anyone buy MS Office for some $500 or so.
Sadly, for the same reason WPOffice sales are a mere fraction of M$Office: the network effect. If you friends, neighbors, colleagues, clients, etc all have M$ OfficePark, then you will too if only for reasons of being able to easily exchange files. Sad, but true.
Castles used to be largely effective at keeping out barbarians. Let's call that the "castle effect". Then gunpowder was invented. Wow! Look at all that rubble! That's the "gunpowder effect":-)
My take on it is that, while Microsoft still has a mighty fine castle, we've got a lot more gunpowder - freeness, reliably, flexibility, constant improvements - and unlike Microsoft, our powder isn't wet.
As somebody else said, we have to play and win the game of file format tag. We also have to take the high ground: do all our own native formats in zipped XML. I think Abiword already does this. Make sure it's good, intelligent XML, and Corel will adopt it too. Work towards the goal of complete file format interoperability across all "open" word processors. Pretty soon, Joe Average will be pressuring Microsoft to support our format. Then we've won, please pass the grog.
It's common to here the pundits opine that "open source may be good at improving 30-year-old operating systems, but the open-source model just doesn't work when it comes to large scale applications." Various reasons are given, for example: "open source programmers only do what is fun and interesting, and applications aren't interesting". But here we see yet another large-scale application falling to the barbarian hordes.
Those pundits are wrong: there is no genre of software that the open-source model will never absorb. Simply because the open-source model results in better software, for reasons that are well-known. And no, there is no no software application that is so uninteresting that no volunteer anywhere in the world will touch it. On the contrary: the more an application area remains untouched, the more interesting it becomes to open-source programmers, simply because it's virgin territory.
This is the "stamp collector" syndrome: when you already have a goodly number of stamps in your collection, adding the missing ones becomes an obsession.
for whatever reason it seems people remain private and keep to themselves without a who's online option, and a message feature
The new buzzword is "internet presence" - this is the facility provided by ICQ's 'contact list' for example, and soon to be provided by open messaging systems like jabber. You know the idea - whenever you come online your "internet presence" client contacts a server and forwards the information about your change of state to all your contacts that are also online. This is the right way to do things - once the technology is generally available in a non-proprietary form (and a non-amateurish form - jeez ICQ is weak) it will spread like wildfire. You'll see online communities popping up like they never have before.
Of course, once you know someone is online you can do all kinds of things - send messages, chat, send files, news, forums, other things that haven't been thought of yet. Widespread use of internet presence will essentially cause the internet to be reinvented yet one more time.
I guess what I'm saying is: don't feel too bad about the demise of the good 'ol BBS - progress marches on, and what's coming next will beat the heck out of BBS in every way.
As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on/. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results..
I used to dual-boot Windows until one day I accidently told lilo to place 600K of linux kernel smack on top of the windows 98 root directory. I was on the road, and wouldn't you know it I had the OEM re-install disk, but no magic number to type into the product authorization screen. Faced with the option of (1) humiliating myself by calling M$'s 1-800-RULEGIT (I didn't make that up) or (2) finally installing on Linux and learning to use the remaining packages that Windows was still hanging around on my hard disk for - I bit the bullet and did what I had to do.
Well, it turns out that it was just my imagination that I ever needed Windows. I haven't run Windows once in the last 2 months, and It feels good.
Sure, there are still a few rough spots, especially in the apps. But it gets easier every month. My wife is now a linux user too - she's really not very computer-literate and she doesn't have trouble.
The time has come when we can realistically lose those dual-boots. Hey, freeing up 2 more gig for linux apps is really useful.
I haven't used Konquerer BUT just type http://www.slashdot.org into kfm (the kde file browser for any who don't know) and I promise you'll be impressed. I have every confidence that the team that did this can and are going the rest of the distance.
The @#*&%! Neomagic sound chip in my VAIO?????????
on
Sony/Palm To Team Up
·
· Score: 2
The real problem with Sony here is their penchant for closed or proprietary formats and devices.
What about it sony? You are big enough to force the specs to be publicly released. Because you don't force the specs to be released, we Linux users are forced to wait for the chip to be laboriously reverse engineered by determined geeks. This just hurts your reputation, and hurts it more than you know. So get out your pencils and do some figuring on the value of making friends with 1,000,000 geeks.
The same goes for the stupid winmodem in all the newer VAIO's, also with secret specs. I was forced to lay out an additional $100 for an AT-command compatible pcmcia modem.
My advice to any Linux user about getting a VAIO: don't. Wait until Sony does something about their undocumented hardware. Look at other laptops in the meantime. Email Sony, tell them you'll buy a VAIO as soon as specs for the sound/video chip and the modem are publicly released. Look at other laptops in the meantime. Don't buy a VAIO.
We've seen some pretty dramatic disparity between Microsoft's evidence and the governments's evidence. Especially, we've seen the video taped examination of Bill Gates where he answers many direct questions in ways that other evidence seems to contradict. As a result, the judge's findings of fact seems to me to make a number of Microsoft witnesses out to be liars. My question: why don't we hear the word perjury mentioned by those who understand these things? Has it gotten to the point where lying in court is just accepted as part of the game?
Moderators, how did this piece of tripe get moderated up to 5? (Check out this guy's posting history.)
Gates makes software. That, and that alone, is the significant difference between Disney and Gates.
Disney made flawless, artistic, captivating animations, the quality of which is unequalled. Look at Fantasia, or Snow White - look at the 3D effects other animation houses still can't do with any amount of computer power.
These benchmarks were released on the day of Gates' Comdex Keynote? Coincidence?
Everything we learned from the antitrust findings of fact would suggest that it's not coincidence. I therefore have to hand it to Microsoft, not for winning yet another questionable benchmark contest, but for maximizing the spin benefits thus obtained. That is true art.
This is an example of a Microsoft "spin" attack. There will be more to come - the battle has just begun. Let's admit it, Microsoft won this round in the spin battle - mainly because we weren't fighting, and took a punch below the belt. Referee - what referee? OK, so we learned something about the rules of the game.
Let's do two things:
1) Make Linux better so we win these high-end SMP contests as well. I don't know about you, but I'm treating myself to a 2-processor machine this Christmas, and I want it to kick ass running Linux. With 100,000's of geeks likely doing the same time, we can expect 2000 to be the breakthrough year for geek-SMP. We also need better file I/O. Not that the existing I/O isn't damm good, but it has to be the best, right? (Personally I'm putting my money where my mouth is - as a developer, I can make a difference and thanks, MS for getting me steamed enough to jump in.)
2) Master the PR game. Microsoft can, and will hurt us with PR. Some may say "so what, who cares what Microsoft says, it's how good Linux is that matters" and there's a lot of truth to that. Nonetheless, why don't we cover all the bases? We need an open-source think tank cum swat team whose only purpose is to anticipate, forestall and counter the PR moves that Microsoft makes. We have the collective intelligence to play that game well, and hey, it's a fun game when you win.
good move for Red Hat -- they're protecting their interests by ensuring they don't lose their development toolchain
The key Cygnus tools such as EGCS are GPL, so what danger was there? I mean, if Cygnus turned bad, I always could have just grabbed the source and started my own forks, couldn't I? Now, if there ever was any chance of Red Hat losing its development tool chain, then there was the same chance for all of us.
I'm an optimist, and I'd prefer to believe that Red Hat is after something less proprietary - branding, say, or customer base, or human capital. Not intellectual property. If Red Hat was after intellectual property, then I'm worried.
Something else that worries me is standardization. Will Red Hat take the same fanatical approach to standardization as Cygnus did with EGCS? Again, I'm an optimist and I'd prefer to believe that Cygnus's commitment to standardization will infect Red Hat to the benefit of us all. I wouldn't like the converse: Red Hat's reputed lack of regard for certain standards infecting Cygnus.
Now, I'm relatively new to Linux - about 9 months - so I'm not yet in a position to judge whether Red Hat's adherance to standards is good or bad. I do know that I've run into a couple of files with the "wrong" names or located in the "wrong" place, for example, the file HOSTNAME shouldn't be in caps, as I understand it. The ppp support appears to be somewhat "customized". More, I don't know... but it's already enough to get me thinking. It's not so much incompatibility that worries me - I expect it to arise in the natural course of development - but the fact that known incompatibilities go uncorrected for no good reason. Somebody, please tell me that this is accidental, and that with good feedback from the community, Red Hat would do what they have to to stay compatible with the rest of the distributions.
1) Become popular and famous by leading a gui-building project 2) Announce you're going into business and describe any kind of business plan, however incomplete or impractical 3) Sit back and wait for slashdot readers to improve your business plan for you
Yes, well sorry, that was kind of facetious - but I'll throw my $.02 in by saying that, with gnome developing rapidly (it had better, it's got a long way to go) I for one would be interested in subscribing to some kind of automatic update feed where I always had the latest of everything. Would that be worth $20/year? Darn right it would.
Now that I've got your attention (stop reading now if you're not in the mood for a rant) I have to mention a few things that just have to be fixed in Gnome:
Keyboard focus handling is abysmal - almost entirely missing. For example, when you put away the panel focus should automatically go back to where it was before you clicked on the panel. Another example: when you click on an app in the pager, it should get keyboard focus (duh). Whenever you minimize an app, the next app on the stack should get focus.
There has to be a delay between the time the mouse moves off a main menu and the time the submenu disappears.
When you click a widget and some other widget is supposed to disappear, your click *must still get through* to the widget you clicked on.
Why is the pager applet tied to the panel task list? That's just wrong.
Task cycling via alt-tab isn't well thought through, i.e., it's very hard to get to the task you want. There is no excuse for cycling through only the list of raised tasks - you need to be able to cycle through all tasks, including minimized.
Far too many applications in the suite are unuseable without the mouse. *Everything* with a scroll bar should respond to the arrow keys.
Good things about Gnome are too many to mention. Especially, it's good that Gnome is now stable and doesn't mess up its configuration like it used to. Nonetheless, I'm running KDE right now, mainly because of the above-mentioned irritations. I recognize that working on the internals first and getting everything stable has been the highest priority till now, but I sure hope that more attention starts getting paid to those little details that really matter to the user.
Don't be so lazy. It took me 10 seconds to find it on slashdot. It's called Caitoo.
Yes, thanks. Well you must be fast because it took me 30 seconds to get to the page and find it - and another minute to determine that one of the two hits returned by the search wasn't applicable. I guess I didn't make my point clearly the first time. 90 seconds per geek - needless waste of geek time. Multiply that by 1,000 geeks, that's, um, 25 hours - time that would have been better spent debugging Mozilla or something. That is why the original poster would have been more thoughtful to do the search himself, then post specific information, ideally, a link. Sure, it's also good to say "I just searched freshmeat to find this", that's useful too. Notice how the posts that include specific links to useful things tend to get moderated up immediately.
The Common UNIX Printing System utilizes GNU GhostScript 4.03 to convert PostScript files into a stream of raster images.
So CUPS's function would appear to be to translate bitmap files into the (usually goofy) languages of various printers. This is an important function indeed, and providing such a function in Windows only, not in Dos, is one method Microsoft used to raise the barriers products that might have competed with Windows. (ramble: but in retrospect, THANKYOU Bill, for not making Dos useful enough to dominate forever. That's one down, one to go)
So, CUPS is another important piece in the puzzle for us. Now - why is CUPS 2.0-oriented and not 2.2? Is it time to pay more attention to the printer problem? Or should be wait until there are more newbies on board so that people are more in the mood to pay us for working on this gungy stuff?
Using PostScript as the API for communicating printers is just a bad idea. PostScript is Turing complete. That means there's all sorts of analysis yousimply can't do to the stream sent to the printer. It isn't even guaranteed that the printer will ever finish (the halting problem). It would be a lot simpler if there was a drawing API, sort of like a subset of X, but for paper. Or heck, an XML-based page description language. Just make sure it isn't Turing complete.
Postscript isn't going away any time soon, and the glitches you mentioned will be eradicated over time in classic open-source style. The turing-complete problem isn't a horrible problem because the postscript-generating program can limit itself to generating postscript commands that are known to produce predictable results.
You can use the turing-complete features of postscript judiciously without taking the risk of your printer never halting. E.g, for doing things like headers and footers - you don't download the whole text every page, you just make up a function and call it. Not that it really matters that much with a fast printer connection.
But basically, I agree with you, why does a printer language have to be turing-complete? If it does, then why don't we make every darn interface in the whole computer turing complete? IOW, what's so special about printers?
Postscript is so firmly entrenched, though, that an alternate solution would have to be really compelling to make any headway. The easier to implement, the more compelling. So, what's easy to implement? I'd say, start with Gecko:-) and do what had to be done to it to make it render everything a printer has to render. We need that anyway (probably) so we do things like write full biz documents and books, using HTML+CSS.
Then we'd need a kickass way to talk to Gecko. XML would fill the bill, as you said.
I was going to sign up for the beta program, until I saw the application form and I decided not to - 35 mandatory fields. I don't want to submit to a rectal examination just to join a beta program. I don't want to give away that much personal information, either. Man, corel should be bending over backwards to get techies to join the beta program. Why can't I just sign up with my slashdot id??
While I'm in rant mode, corel should make sure the download is not just a cgi script, but also has a straight url. Big downloads do get cut off, and with a cgi script I can't use nice programs like getright. (yes, I'd boot to windows just to use getright)
2) no standard and reliable installation and de-installation methods a'la windows uninstall menus. You can argue for RPM, but its not exactly easy for a beginner. We need to be able to click on an executable, have it install like installshield, and be able to be uninstalled from a centralized...
You are 100% on the money. I love rpm (the program) - it's so reliable and it's a joy to use once you get to know it. But I was a linux-newbie a few short months ago - hardly knew how to man or --help, so I used gnorpm. Gnorpm is - um - really badly designed from as far as user interface goes, but at least it knew things I didn't at the time, like where to find files and how to issue the commands...
Sombody who wants to establish themselves quickly as an open-source star please create a better interface to rpm. For bonus points, make it work seamlessly with.deb packages as well. What I'd suggest is a shell to rpm that re-factors it into 2 parts:
Install Package - gives you a file browser window filtered for rpm's (and debs?). Automagically shows the package info as you move the cursor, as well as telling you whether the package is already installed and showing the existing info if it is. Single click to show info, double-click to install.
Remove Package - gives you a list of installed packages that you can see the info about by single-clicking or remove by double clicking.
Note how we get away from m$'s Add/remove programs stupidity. (1) Not all packages are programs. (2) I always know whether I want to add or remove, so give me two separate menu items, please (3) I want this primarily accessible from a menu, not from some icon buried way deep in the system. Sure, make it idiot proof, but don't make it user-proof.
The fixed bug list is truly impressive, but there aren't just three bugs open as your link would have us believe.
Who said "three bugs"? You did. One of the list items is this one which is the "Release Notes scratchpad", which IMHO is about as definitive as it gets. Did you read the list, or just count the items??? By any measure, M11 is obviously nearly here.
BTW, who besides me thinks that Bugzilla is infinitely cool, yet could be made even better?
To compile a program, or part of one, you just edit and save the file. Saving the file compiles it. Wow.
Yikes! You can turn that off, right? I habitually save every time I pause to think for a moment, which is frequently right in the middle of writing something such that if a compile were attempted at that point it would produce a large number of errors.
I don't know if you can turn it off - you probably can, but I never felt the need to. For one thing, VAJ remembers your edits whether you save them or not - that how it should be, right? If you do save something with errors, it's no big deal, the program just stops until you fix them. It's really nice, trust me. You can work in the traditional way if you want, but this new way of working really beats heck out of the old way - it's fast.
On the other hand, you'd want to exercise some care if you were actually working on a running system that was doing something important, but bear in mind how hard it would be to even contemplate doing this without something sophisticated like VAJ. I don't think most folks appreciate just what a high-tech feature this is.
The only hope for preventing this is a quick (within months) acceptation of mozilla by a large share of the web community (I'm thinking 40% or more of the web users here). Just looking at the figures of usage of the latest generation of browsers will show you that that is not going to happen (sorry don't have those figures readily available so please post them if you have them).
Let's not ask if it's going to happen. Let's ask how it's going to happen. The best figures I know of are in the recent findings of fact. These by the way have been found as fact. (duh) So you can treat them as more reliable than normal statistics. What they clearly show is that AOL by itself can tip the balance back to 50%+ for Mozilla. Let alone Compuserve (which happens to be a subsidiary). And all the other online service providers that were forced by Microsoft to push IE.
There are a couple things that have to happen before AOL and the other online services to unilaterally change the face of browser market share:
Mozilla has to be good enough (we can take care of that)
AOL has to be relieved of its contractual obligation to keep pushing IE (which they will be if that obligation is found to be illegal)
Both these things are going to happen. I'm beginning to feel better already.
I think the HTML spec is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned as soon as possible
Ok, you abandon it and I'll keep using it. I happen to use it on a daily basis - having switched from writing all my technical documents in HTML, whereas formerly we used to use Word 6 format. This works marvelously - our docs are all internally hyperlinked now, they look great when you email them, they're a fraction of the size, everybody can read them, just using their browser. Ah, HTML is obviously here to stay. You're not just FUDding are you? WTF, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
I evaluated VAJ when the first beta came out, and it was already darn good. OK, it takes about 15 secs to start up, but Visual Studio is no speed demon in that department either. Once it's up it's solid as a rock - it always has been, right from the first beta.
VAJ can do something that's worth the price of admission alone: you can recompile parts of a program while it's running and the changes take effect immediately. Cutting incremental development time down to practically nothing. This feature is very easy to get addicted to, believe me.
VAJ uses native UI components, so the UI's run fast. Well, there are a whole lot of things I like about it, too many to mention. There was a very noticable speed up between version 1 and 2. I haven't tried version 3 yet, but I'm looking forward to it. If I had an enterprise Java project to do, I'd feel comfortable using this tool, no doubt about it.
As far as using it to get your feet wet, it's not such a bad idea. The ramp-up time is pretty good - I got my first sample app running in about 10 mintutes, following the wizard-kind-of-thingy that comes up when you first start it. The nice thing about the initial tutorial is - it holds your hand, but not so much that you don't have to think. Very fast ramp-up.
Oh - another thing that is really cool - where's the compile option? There is none. To compile a program, or part of one, you just edit and save the file. Saving the file compiles it. Wow.
Mozilla milestone M11 is coming out any minute. Here's the open bug list. Obviously, the team is on the green and just about to sink the putt.
This is the one, guys. This is the first mozilla named "mozilla" instead of "apprunner". This is a fully functional browser, with all the trimmings (plus more), and it just could be good enough to browse with. If not, we can make it that way. The source code is only 20~ something meg - it's a reasonable sized project. It's ours. This is the time to jump in and help.
Guys, this is our last chance to claw back the client side of the net from Microsoft.
I wouldn't fancy downloading the 5 MB Word EXE file (not to mention all the accociated DLLS) just to type up a letter
My understanding of how web-based applications work is that the application code stays on the server - and the user inteface is presented to you over the web by some means. This of course implies that you have to pay for time and space on the server in some way. Maybe just by reading ads?
The whole idea isn't completely ridiculous - look at the phenomenal success of web mail. But it's still somewhat ridiculous. Why would you ever want to do that when you can run the apps on your PC, or telephone (next years model:) or whatever. Especially - why would you want to pay good money for the privilege? I imagine there will be a few people - on the road or whatever - that can get access to a browser but not an office suite and therefore would be able to get some use out of something like this, but they would be few in number compared to the massive hordes of people with laptops onto which the applications can be loaded in the usual way. I have to ask again: what is the reason that people would pay good money for this?
Slashdot Mirror
Castles used to be largely effective at keeping out barbarians. Let's call that the "castle effect". Then gunpowder was invented. Wow! Look at all that rubble! That's the "gunpowder effect"
My take on it is that, while Microsoft still has a mighty fine castle, we've got a lot more gunpowder - freeness, reliably, flexibility, constant improvements - and unlike Microsoft, our powder isn't wet.
As somebody else said, we have to play and win the game of file format tag. We also have to take the high ground: do all our own native formats in zipped XML. I think Abiword already does this. Make sure it's good, intelligent XML, and Corel will adopt it too. Work towards the goal of complete file format interoperability across all "open" word processors. Pretty soon, Joe Average will be pressuring Microsoft to support our format. Then we've won, please pass the grog.
It's common to here the pundits opine that "open source may be good at improving 30-year-old operating systems, but the open-source model just doesn't work when it comes to large scale applications." Various reasons are given, for example: "open source programmers only do what is fun and interesting, and applications aren't interesting". But here we see yet another large-scale application falling to the barbarian hordes.
Those pundits are wrong: there is no genre of software that the open-source model will never absorb. Simply because the open-source model results in better software, for reasons that are well-known. And no, there is no no software application that is so uninteresting that no volunteer anywhere in the world will touch it. On the contrary: the more an application area remains untouched, the more interesting it becomes to open-source programmers, simply because it's virgin territory.
This is the "stamp collector" syndrome: when you already have a goodly number of stamps in your collection, adding the missing ones becomes an obsession.
for whatever reason it seems people remain private and keep to themselves without a who's online option, and a message feature
The new buzzword is "internet presence" - this is the facility provided by ICQ's 'contact list' for example, and soon to be provided by open messaging systems like jabber. You know the idea - whenever you come online your "internet presence" client contacts a server and forwards the information about your change of state to all your contacts that are also online. This is the right way to do things - once the technology is generally available in a non-proprietary form (and a non-amateurish form - jeez ICQ is weak) it will spread like wildfire. You'll see online communities popping up like they never have before.
Of course, once you know someone is online you can do all kinds of things - send messages, chat, send files, news, forums, other things that haven't been thought of yet. Widespread use of internet presence will essentially cause the internet to be reinvented yet one more time.
I guess what I'm saying is: don't feel too bad about the demise of the good 'ol BBS - progress marches on, and what's coming next will beat the heck out of BBS in every way.
As a proof (or rather, vague indication) of this, perhaps we could do a poll here on /. on how many people still dual-boots to Windows. I think I can almost predict the results..
I used to dual-boot Windows until one day I accidently told lilo to place 600K of linux kernel smack on top of the windows 98 root directory. I was on the road, and wouldn't you know it I had the OEM re-install disk, but no magic number to type into the product authorization screen. Faced with the option of (1) humiliating myself by calling M$'s 1-800-RULEGIT (I didn't make that up) or (2) finally installing on Linux and learning to use the remaining packages that Windows was still hanging around on my hard disk for - I bit the bullet and did what I had to do.
Well, it turns out that it was just my imagination that I ever needed Windows. I haven't run Windows once in the last 2 months, and It feels good.
Sure, there are still a few rough spots, especially in the apps. But it gets easier every month. My wife is now a linux user too - she's really not very computer-literate and she doesn't have trouble.
The time has come when we can realistically lose those dual-boots. Hey, freeing up 2 more gig for linux apps is really useful.
I haven't used Konquerer BUT just type http://www.slashdot.org into kfm (the kde file browser for any who don't know) and I promise you'll be impressed. I have every confidence that the team that did this can and are going the rest of the distance.
The real problem with Sony here is their penchant for closed or proprietary formats and devices.
What about it sony? You are big enough to force the specs to be publicly released. Because you don't force the specs to be released, we Linux users are forced to wait for the chip to be laboriously reverse engineered by determined geeks. This just hurts your reputation, and hurts it more than you know. So get out your pencils and do some figuring on the value of making friends with 1,000,000 geeks.
The same goes for the stupid winmodem in all the newer VAIO's, also with secret specs. I was forced to lay out an additional $100 for an AT-command compatible pcmcia modem.
My advice to any Linux user about getting a VAIO: don't. Wait until Sony does something about their undocumented hardware. Look at other laptops in the meantime. Email Sony, tell them you'll buy a VAIO as soon as specs for the sound/video chip and the modem are publicly released. Look at other laptops in the meantime. Don't buy a VAIO.
We've seen some pretty dramatic disparity between Microsoft's evidence and the governments's evidence. Especially, we've seen the video taped examination of Bill Gates where he answers many direct questions in ways that other evidence seems to contradict. As a result, the judge's findings of fact seems to me to make a number of Microsoft witnesses out to be liars. My question: why don't we hear the word perjury mentioned by those who understand these things? Has it gotten to the point where lying in court is just accepted as part of the game?
Moderators, how did this piece of tripe get moderated up to 5? (Check out this guy's posting history.)
Gates makes software. That, and that alone, is the significant difference between Disney and Gates.
Disney made flawless, artistic, captivating animations, the quality of which is unequalled. Look at Fantasia, or Snow White - look at the 3D effects other animation houses still can't do with any amount of computer power.
Gates makes shoddy software.
There's a big difference.
Why yes
These benchmarks were released on the day of Gates' Comdex Keynote? Coincidence?
Everything we learned from the antitrust findings of fact would suggest that it's not coincidence. I therefore have to hand it to Microsoft, not for winning yet another questionable benchmark contest, but for maximizing the spin benefits thus obtained. That is true art.
This is an example of a Microsoft "spin" attack. There will be more to come - the battle has just begun. Let's admit it, Microsoft won this round in the spin battle - mainly because we weren't fighting, and took a punch below the belt. Referee - what referee? OK, so we learned something about the rules of the game.
Let's do two things:
1) Make Linux better so we win these high-end SMP contests as well. I don't know about you, but I'm treating myself to a 2-processor machine this Christmas, and I want it to kick ass running Linux. With 100,000's of geeks likely doing the same time, we can expect 2000 to be the breakthrough year for geek-SMP. We also need better file I/O. Not that the existing I/O isn't damm good, but it has to be the best, right? (Personally I'm putting my money where my mouth is - as a developer, I can make a difference and thanks, MS for getting me steamed enough to jump in.)
2) Master the PR game. Microsoft can, and will hurt us with PR. Some may say "so what, who cares what Microsoft says, it's how good Linux is that matters" and there's a lot of truth to that. Nonetheless, why don't we cover all the bases? We need an open-source think tank cum swat team whose only purpose is to anticipate, forestall and counter the PR moves that Microsoft makes. We have the collective intelligence to play that game well, and hey, it's a fun game when you win.
good move for Red Hat -- they're protecting their interests by ensuring they don't lose their development toolchain
The key Cygnus tools such as EGCS are GPL, so what danger was there? I mean, if Cygnus turned bad, I always could have just grabbed the source and started my own forks, couldn't I? Now, if there ever was any chance of Red Hat losing its development tool chain, then there was the same chance for all of us.
I'm an optimist, and I'd prefer to believe that Red Hat is after something less proprietary - branding, say, or customer base, or human capital. Not intellectual property. If Red Hat was after intellectual property, then I'm worried.
Something else that worries me is standardization. Will Red Hat take the same fanatical approach to standardization as Cygnus did with EGCS? Again, I'm an optimist and I'd prefer to believe that Cygnus's commitment to standardization will infect Red Hat to the benefit of us all. I wouldn't like the converse: Red Hat's reputed lack of regard for certain standards infecting Cygnus.
Now, I'm relatively new to Linux - about 9 months - so I'm not yet in a position to judge whether Red Hat's adherance to standards is good or bad. I do know that I've run into a couple of files with the "wrong" names or located in the "wrong" place, for example, the file HOSTNAME shouldn't be in caps, as I understand it. The ppp support appears to be somewhat "customized". More, I don't know... but it's already enough to get me thinking. It's not so much incompatibility that worries me - I expect it to arise in the natural course of development - but the fact that known incompatibilities go uncorrected for no good reason. Somebody, please tell me that this is accidental, and that with good feedback from the community, Red Hat would do what they have to to stay compatible with the rest of the distributions.
I'd prefer to remain an optimist.
2) Announce you're going into business and describe any kind of business plan, however incomplete or impractical
3) Sit back and wait for slashdot readers to improve your business plan for you
Yes, well sorry, that was kind of facetious - but I'll throw my $.02 in by saying that, with gnome developing rapidly (it had better, it's got a long way to go) I for one would be interested in subscribing to some kind of automatic update feed where I always had the latest of everything. Would that be worth $20/year? Darn right it would.
Now that I've got your attention (stop reading now if you're not in the mood for a rant) I have to mention a few things that just have to be fixed in Gnome:
Keyboard focus handling is abysmal - almost entirely missing. For example, when you put away the panel focus should automatically go back to where it was before you clicked on the panel. Another example: when you click on an app in the pager, it should get keyboard focus (duh). Whenever you minimize an app, the next app on the stack should get focus.
There has to be a delay between the time the mouse moves off a main menu and the time the submenu disappears.
When you click a widget and some other widget is supposed to disappear, your click *must still get through* to the widget you clicked on.
Why is the pager applet tied to the panel task list? That's just wrong.
Task cycling via alt-tab isn't well thought through, i.e., it's very hard to get to the task you want. There is no excuse for cycling through only the list of raised tasks - you need to be able to cycle through all tasks, including minimized.
Far too many applications in the suite are unuseable without the mouse. *Everything* with a scroll bar should respond to the arrow keys.
Good things about Gnome are too many to mention. Especially, it's good that Gnome is now stable and doesn't mess up its configuration like it used to. Nonetheless, I'm running KDE right now, mainly because of the above-mentioned irritations. I recognize that working on the internals first and getting everything stable has been the highest priority till now, but I sure hope that more attention starts getting paid to those little details that really matter to the user.
Don't be so lazy. It took me 10 seconds to find it on slashdot. It's called Caitoo.
Yes, thanks. Well you must be fast because it took me 30 seconds to get to the page and find it - and another minute to determine that one of the two hits returned by the search wasn't applicable. I guess I didn't make my point clearly the first time. 90 seconds per geek - needless waste of geek time. Multiply that by 1,000 geeks, that's, um, 25 hours - time that would have been better spent debugging Mozilla or something. That is why the original poster would have been more thoughtful to do the search himself, then post specific information, ideally, a link. Sure, it's also good to say "I just searched freshmeat to find this", that's useful too. Notice how the posts that include specific links to useful things tend to get moderated up immediately.
So, CUPS is another important piece in the puzzle for us. Now - why is CUPS 2.0-oriented and not 2.2? Is it time to pay more attention to the printer problem? Or should be wait until there are more newbies on board so that people are more in the mood to pay us for working on this gungy stuff?
Using PostScript as the API for communicating printers is just a bad idea. PostScript is Turing complete. That means there's all sorts of analysis yousimply can't do to the stream sent to the printer. It isn't even guaranteed that the printer will ever finish (the halting problem). It would be a lot simpler if there was a drawing API, sort of like a subset of X, but for paper. Or heck, an XML-based page description language. Just make sure it isn't Turing complete.
:-) and do what had to be done to it to make it render everything a printer has to render. We need that anyway (probably) so we do things like write full biz documents and books, using HTML+CSS.
Postscript isn't going away any time soon, and the glitches you mentioned will be eradicated over time in classic open-source style. The turing-complete problem isn't a horrible problem because the postscript-generating program can limit itself to generating postscript commands that are known to produce predictable results.
You can use the turing-complete features of postscript judiciously without taking the risk of your printer never halting. E.g, for doing things like headers and footers - you don't download the whole text every page, you just make up a function and call it. Not that it really matters that much with a fast printer connection.
But basically, I agree with you, why does a printer language have to be turing-complete? If it does, then why don't we make every darn interface in the whole computer turing complete? IOW, what's so special about printers?
Postscript is so firmly entrenched, though, that an alternate solution would have to be really compelling to make any headway. The easier to implement, the more compelling. So, what's easy to implement? I'd say, start with Gecko
Then we'd need a kickass way to talk to Gecko. XML would fill the bill, as you said.
why use GetRight when there's "Downloader for X" and that KDE GetRight clone (sorry, forget it's name)?
Why don't you try to remember?
I was going to sign up for the beta program, until I saw the application form and I decided not to - 35 mandatory fields. I don't want to submit to a rectal examination just to join a beta program. I don't want to give away that much personal information, either. Man, corel should be bending over backwards to get techies to join the beta program. Why can't I just sign up with my slashdot id??
While I'm in rant mode, corel should make sure the download is not just a cgi script, but also has a straight url. Big downloads do get cut off, and with a cgi script I can't use nice programs like getright. (yes, I'd boot to windows just to use getright)
You are 100% on the money. I love rpm (the program) - it's so reliable and it's a joy to use once you get to know it. But I was a linux-newbie a few short months ago - hardly knew how to man or --help, so I used gnorpm. Gnorpm is - um - really badly designed from as far as user interface goes, but at least it knew things I didn't at the time, like where to find files and how to issue the commands...
Sombody who wants to establish themselves quickly as an open-source star please create a better interface to rpm. For bonus points, make it work seamlessly with
Install Package - gives you a file browser window filtered for rpm's (and debs?). Automagically shows the package info as you move the cursor, as well as telling you whether the package is already installed and showing the existing info if it is. Single click to show info, double-click to install.
Remove Package - gives you a list of installed packages that you can see the info about by single-clicking or remove by double clicking.
Note how we get away from m$'s Add/remove programs stupidity. (1) Not all packages are programs. (2) I always know whether I want to add or remove, so give me two separate menu items, please (3) I want this primarily accessible from a menu, not from some icon buried way deep in the system. Sure, make it idiot proof, but don't make it user-proof.
The fixed bug list is truly impressive, but there aren't just three bugs open as your link would have us believe.
Who said "three bugs"? You did. One of the list items is this one which is the "Release Notes scratchpad", which IMHO is about as definitive as it gets. Did you read the list, or just count the items??? By any measure, M11 is obviously nearly here.
BTW, who besides me thinks that Bugzilla is infinitely cool, yet could be made even better?
The fixed bug list is truly impressive, but there aren't just three bugs open as your link would have us believe.
Who said "three bugs"? You did. One of the list items is this one which the "Release Notes scratchpad", which IMHO is about as definitive as it gets.
I don't know if you can turn it off - you probably can, but I never felt the need to. For one thing, VAJ remembers your edits whether you save them or not - that how it should be, right? If you do save something with errors, it's no big deal, the program just stops until you fix them. It's really nice, trust me. You can work in the traditional way if you want, but this new way of working really beats heck out of the old way - it's fast.
On the other hand, you'd want to exercise some care if you were actually working on a running system that was doing something important, but bear in mind how hard it would be to even contemplate doing this without something sophisticated like VAJ. I don't think most folks appreciate just what a high-tech feature this is.
Let's not ask if it's going to happen. Let's ask how it's going to happen. The best figures I know of are in the recent findings of fact. These by the way have been found as fact. (duh) So you can treat them as more reliable than normal statistics. What they clearly show is that AOL by itself can tip the balance back to 50%+ for Mozilla. Let alone Compuserve (which happens to be a subsidiary). And all the other online service providers that were forced by Microsoft to push IE.
There are a couple things that have to happen before AOL and the other online services to unilaterally change the face of browser market share: Both these things are going to happen. I'm beginning to feel better already.
I think the HTML spec is fundamentally flawed and should be abandoned as soon as possible
Ok, you abandon it and I'll keep using it. I happen to use it on a daily basis - having switched from writing all my technical documents in HTML, whereas formerly we used to use Word 6 format. This works marvelously - our docs are all internally hyperlinked now, they look great when you email them, they're a fraction of the size, everybody can read them, just using their browser. Ah, HTML is obviously here to stay. You're not just FUDding are you? WTF, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
I evaluated VAJ when the first beta came out, and it was already darn good. OK, it takes about 15 secs to start up, but Visual Studio is no speed demon in that department either. Once it's up it's solid as a rock - it always has been, right from the first beta.
VAJ can do something that's worth the price of admission alone: you can recompile parts of a program while it's running and the changes take effect immediately. Cutting incremental development time down to practically nothing. This feature is very easy to get addicted to, believe me.
VAJ uses native UI components, so the UI's run fast. Well, there are a whole lot of things I like about it, too many to mention. There was a very noticable speed up between version 1 and 2. I haven't tried version 3 yet, but I'm looking forward to it. If I had an enterprise Java project to do, I'd feel comfortable using this tool, no doubt about it.
As far as using it to get your feet wet, it's not such a bad idea. The ramp-up time is pretty good - I got my first sample app running in about 10 mintutes, following the wizard-kind-of-thingy that comes up when you first start it. The nice thing about the initial tutorial is - it holds your hand, but not so much that you don't have to think. Very fast ramp-up.
Oh - another thing that is really cool - where's the compile option? There is none. To compile a program, or part of one, you just edit and save the file. Saving the file compiles it. Wow.
Mozilla milestone M11 is coming out any minute. Here's the open bug list. Obviously, the team is on the green and just about to sink the putt.
This is the one, guys. This is the first mozilla named "mozilla" instead of "apprunner". This is a fully functional browser, with all the trimmings (plus more), and it just could be good enough to browse with. If not, we can make it that way. The source code is only 20~ something meg - it's a reasonable sized project. It's ours. This is the time to jump in and help.
Guys, this is our last chance to claw back the client side of the net from Microsoft.
I wouldn't fancy downloading the 5 MB Word EXE file (not to mention all the accociated DLLS) just to type up a letter
My understanding of how web-based applications work is that the application code stays on the server - and the user inteface is presented to you over the web by some means. This of course implies that you have to pay for time and space on the server in some way. Maybe just by reading ads?
The whole idea isn't completely ridiculous - look at the phenomenal success of web mail. But it's still somewhat ridiculous. Why would you ever want to do that when you can run the apps on your PC, or telephone (next years model:) or whatever. Especially - why would you want to pay good money for the privilege? I imagine there will be a few people - on the road or whatever - that can get access to a browser but not an office suite and therefore would be able to get some use out of something like this, but they would be few in number compared to the massive hordes of people with laptops onto which the applications can be loaded in the usual way. I have to ask again: what is the reason that people would pay good money for this?