Well, first I have to say that the answers sounded more like they were from a politician than a geek... which seems to be in contrast to most of the interviews so far on/..
The answers seemed evasive in many areas, particularly in regards to "what has Corel given back". Wine was mentioned briefly, but if I am to believe what some of the Wine developers were telling me on debian.irc.net, Corel hasn't made ANY CVS commits to the WINE project in months. You will notice that no meantion was made of "we have done this or that" at all, just more political style rambling about commitment. And I don't think that trying to "evangelize Linux to other ISVs" to encourage them to use linux counts for much other than pure B.S. Like Cowpland is going to be hanging out at lunch casually mentioning "hey, why don't you guys port PhotoShop?" and increasing his own competition.
What Corel has done, from my understanding, is take the thousands and thousands of hours of work of the Debian maintainers (not to mention the work of the programmers that wrote the stuff to begin with) and used apt with their own proprietary installer to install the packages (some one PLEASE correct me if I am wrong and the Corel install stuff is GPL). Red Hat's install stuff is used by just about every other distribution and they have been very good about knowing that if they wanna play the Linux game, this is the way things just are gonna be. Debian could desparately use some more modern install programs, will Debian developers be able to take parts of the Corel installer and incorporate it? From what I understand, the answer is no.
Corel seems to have too much of the Gates style "Its ours, we aren't gonna share" attitude. I don't think they really "get it" yet the same way that Red Hat, et. al. have... that if you are gonna take all these people's work and make money off of it, you better damn well be ready to accept people using your work too. I do not accept his politicians explainations of "to protect our reputation for producing quality products by not releasing code before it was fully tested". They are very used to the old model of "mine mine, don't touch" and this incident clearly showed they are not fully in step with how Open Source works.
I don't want to sound like I am totally trashing Corel. They can be a strong member of the community, I just think they need to 1- REALLY learn what it means to be a part of the open source community and leave their proprietary thinking behind and 2- actually give something back to the community. Vague comments about evanelising Linux and promises about Wine don't count. When they actually start doing some work with Wine instead of just talking about doing stuff with Wine, then I will be a lot happier. But maybe Wine work is no longer planned because they feel Wine is no longer needed for them to run Win32 apps on Linux. That would explain their new agreement with (insert the name of the company I forgot here) and complete lack of adding anything to Wine CVS in months.
No slashdot stalker should be without
on
Humpday Quickies
·
· Score: 4
I loved my Amiga. They had to pry it out of my arms when I moved out to CA to take my.com job this summer after graduation. Linux is my new love, but like Scarlet never stopped thinking about Asheley...
As exciting as the idea that yet another handsome stranger will come and sweep the poor destitute Amiga (which means girlfriend in Spanish, I think) and save her, I think that it is really time for all of us Amigans to realise that she is well and truly dead.
The crucial upgrade that Commodore missed was the upgrade to PowerPC. Some companies came up with PowerPC cards, but they were all horrendously late, poorly constructed, had non existant support and always had underpowered chips compared with what was currently available on the market.
The Amiga has basically seen no development at all since Commodore went belly up. From the hardware standpoint, absolutely nothing, from software, well, OS 3.5 could have been thrown together by a group of open source people (who would have done a better job). Trying to make anything new from circa 1992 parts would be completely unworkable, even if you had lots of money (like say, Gateway).
Gateway was a huge disappointment. With huge amounts of funds available, they did basically nothing with the Amiga. Every week you would hear something completely new and different. New PPC Amigas, Amigas on a card in your PC, new Amigas with the Magical Mystery Chip (transmeta was the best rumor), new console type systems, then no new hardware, but a new AmigaOS, then no AmigaOS, but Amiga environment running on top of Linux. It made you think that Amiga, the company, consisted of five guys that went to lunch each week and came up with a new crazy idea to throw out to us hopefulls they drew up on paper napkins. Hell, I have even seen some of those paper napkin drawings on websites heralded as "the New Amiga".
What I really wish would happen is that the AmigaOS would be released to Open Source so that if there is anything still usefull or interesting in the code, it can be used for things such as window managers, etc.
Even though part of me wants to hope that something could come of this, I have to admit to myself that the Amiga is gone forever.
This is quite sad because, as much as I love Linux, I realise that it is not suited to be a home users OS. The Amiga was great for this, with it's GUI and standardised install program (which I loved, gave you 3 levels to choose from: expert, intermediate, beginner. I wish Linux had such a standardised way to install.) What the world desparetely needs now is a good home system, that does multimedia as well as the Amiga did (Windows will always suck at this, no matter how hard they try, as I found out with one of those Gateways that are designed to be multimedia), has as straightforward and simple interface as the Amiga, and as kick ass graphics as the Amiga.
But unfortunately we live in a world in which only one OS matters and we have to live with mediocracy.
As I walked out of the theatre after seeing Mr. Ripley, I had to endure the incessant whining of the clueless hordes, now I have to endure Mr. Katz attempt at a review and the even more clueless slashdot comments.
I think that in any assessment of this movie, some important caveats must be taken into consideration.
First and most important, it is a long film. It is paced like a British or earlier American film. It was so refreshing to go to see a movie what wasn't in a rush to start blowing things up. The problem is that most Americans have an attention span of about 2 minutes and can't tolerate any movie that, well, doesn't start blowing up things in the first 2 minutes.
The second thing that must be noted is that Damon's character is gay. Not as in "has some homosexual undertones" or Mr. Katz completely off base "outsider" (I think he is still trying to drag us along the High School disaster road he can't seem to get his mind off) but rather he is gay and in love with Law's character. It provides the motive for what happens later. We are led to believe that the motivation is greed from the adverts, but it is actually love. The point is, if you are a raging homophobe, like some of the other commenters earlier, and are going to squirm in your seat at every inference of Damon's character's homosexuality, stay home.
The third point that I think is important to make is that this "mystery" isn't one in the sense of "who did it" or "will they catch him" as much as it is a portrayal of how a good person can be transformed into a murderer. I don't think we have seen a movie do this quite this well since Mr. Hitchcock's time. (The movie reminded me so much of a Hitchcock film.)
And finally, I do agree that the ending, well, it was just so wrong. I think that was the point. "Oh no, you aren't getting a happy ending." They could have let him sail off into the sunset with new boyfriend... The ending was chosen to be the most disturbing, but could have been so much constructed- so many other scenerios come to mind that make so much more sense (such as Mr. Ripley's suggestion that they stay in the cabin screwing the whole trip).
But in the end, this is really pointless because the REAL reason to see this movie at all is simply that my god, Matt Damon and Jude Law looked good.
I find it interesting that one of the most interesting article that has appeared on/. in a long time has generated almost no replies. I think this is interesting. The article was written in such a way that it offended no one (not that SOME people didn't find a reason to find something offensive anyway). It seems that slashdotters in general aren't interesting in entering into dialogue that doesn't involve confrontation. Well, to prove my point, I shall point out how confrontational my post is! The main thing I want to say, however, is good job on the article, I truly enjoyed it.
mark (Was kestrel, but damned if I can get my password)
Slashdot Mirror
The answers seemed evasive in many areas, particularly in regards to "what has Corel given back". Wine was mentioned briefly, but if I am to believe what some of the Wine developers were telling me on debian.irc.net, Corel hasn't made ANY CVS commits to the WINE project in months. You will notice that no meantion was made of "we have done this or that" at all, just more political style rambling about commitment. And I don't think that trying to "evangelize Linux to other ISVs" to encourage them to use linux counts for much other than pure B.S. Like Cowpland is going to be hanging out at lunch casually mentioning "hey, why don't you guys port PhotoShop?" and increasing his own competition.
What Corel has done, from my understanding, is take the thousands and thousands of hours of work of the Debian maintainers (not to mention the work of the programmers that wrote the stuff to begin with) and used apt with their own proprietary installer to install the packages (some one PLEASE correct me if I am wrong and the Corel install stuff is GPL). Red Hat's install stuff is used by just about every other distribution and they have been very good about knowing that if they wanna play the Linux game, this is the way things just are gonna be. Debian could desparately use some more modern install programs, will Debian developers be able to take parts of the Corel installer and incorporate it? From what I understand, the answer is no.
Corel seems to have too much of the Gates style "Its ours, we aren't gonna share" attitude. I don't think they really "get it" yet the same way that Red Hat, et. al. have... that if you are gonna take all these people's work and make money off of it, you better damn well be ready to accept people using your work too.
I do not accept his politicians explainations of "to protect our reputation for producing quality products by not releasing code before it was fully tested". They are very used to the old model of "mine mine, don't touch" and this incident clearly showed they are not fully in step with how Open Source works.
I don't want to sound like I am totally trashing Corel. They can be a strong member of the community, I just think they need to 1- REALLY learn what it means to be a part of the open source community and leave their proprietary thinking behind and 2- actually give something back to the community. Vague comments about evanelising Linux and promises about Wine don't count. When they actually start doing some work with Wine instead of just talking about doing stuff with Wine, then I will be a lot happier.
But maybe Wine work is no longer planned because they feel Wine is no longer needed for them to run Win32 apps on Linux. That would explain their new agreement with (insert the name of the company I forgot here) and complete lack of adding anything to Wine CVS in months.
(I think Rob hacked into the server to erase this once, but ha! I had a backup!)
As exciting as the idea that yet another handsome stranger will come and sweep the poor destitute Amiga (which means girlfriend in Spanish, I think) and save her, I think that it is really time for all of us Amigans to realise that she is well and truly dead.
The crucial upgrade that Commodore missed was the upgrade to PowerPC. Some companies came up with PowerPC cards, but they were all horrendously late, poorly constructed, had non existant support and always had underpowered chips compared with what was currently available on the market.
The Amiga has basically seen no development at all since Commodore went belly up. From the hardware standpoint, absolutely nothing, from software, well, OS 3.5 could have been thrown together by a group of open source people (who would have done a better job). Trying to make anything new from circa 1992 parts would be completely unworkable, even if you had lots of money (like say, Gateway).
Gateway was a huge disappointment. With huge amounts of funds available, they did basically nothing with the Amiga. Every week you would hear something completely new and different. New PPC Amigas, Amigas on a card in your PC, new Amigas with the Magical Mystery Chip (transmeta was the best rumor), new console type systems, then no new hardware, but a new AmigaOS, then no AmigaOS, but Amiga environment running on top of Linux. It made you think that Amiga, the company, consisted of five guys that went to lunch each week and came up with a new crazy idea to throw out to us hopefulls they drew up on paper napkins. Hell, I have even seen some of those paper napkin drawings on websites heralded as "the New Amiga".
What I really wish would happen is that the AmigaOS would be released to Open Source so that if there is anything still usefull or interesting in the code, it can be used for things such as window managers, etc.
Even though part of me wants to hope that something could come of this, I have to admit to myself that the Amiga is gone forever.
This is quite sad because, as much as I love Linux, I realise that it is not suited to be a home users OS. The Amiga was great for this, with it's GUI and standardised install program (which I loved, gave you 3 levels to choose from: expert, intermediate, beginner. I wish Linux had such a standardised way to install.) What the world desparetely needs now is a good home system, that does multimedia as well as the Amiga did (Windows will always suck at this, no matter how hard they try, as I found out with one of those Gateways that are designed to be multimedia), has as straightforward and simple interface as the Amiga, and as kick ass graphics as the Amiga.
But unfortunately we live in a world in which only one OS matters and we have to live with mediocracy.
I think that in any assessment of this movie, some important caveats must be taken into consideration.
First and most important, it is a long film. It is paced like a British or earlier American film. It was so refreshing to go to see a movie what wasn't in a rush to start blowing things up. The problem is that most Americans have an attention span of about 2 minutes and can't tolerate any movie that, well, doesn't start blowing up things in the first 2 minutes.
The second thing that must be noted is that Damon's character is gay. Not as in "has some homosexual undertones" or Mr. Katz completely off base "outsider" (I think he is still trying to drag us along the High School disaster road he can't seem to get his mind off) but rather he is gay and in love with Law's character. It provides the motive for what happens later. We are led to believe that the motivation is greed from the adverts, but it is actually love.
The point is, if you are a raging homophobe, like some of the other commenters earlier, and are going to squirm in your seat at every inference of Damon's character's homosexuality, stay home.
The third point that I think is important to make is that this "mystery" isn't one in the sense of "who did it" or "will they catch him" as much as it is a portrayal of how a good person can be transformed into a murderer. I don't think we have seen a movie do this quite this well since Mr. Hitchcock's time. (The movie reminded me so much of a Hitchcock film.)
And finally, I do agree that the ending, well, it was just so wrong. I think that was the point. "Oh no, you aren't getting a happy ending." They could have let him sail off into the sunset with new boyfriend... The ending was chosen to be the most disturbing, but could have been so much constructed- so many other scenerios come to mind that make so much more sense (such as Mr. Ripley's suggestion that they stay in the cabin screwing the whole trip).
But in the end, this is really pointless because the REAL reason to see this movie at all is simply that my god, Matt Damon and Jude Law looked good.
Could it be that Rob no longer needs to beg some kind soul to send him toys anymore? Wonder why.
I think this is interesting. The article was written in such a way that it offended no one (not that SOME people didn't find a reason to find something offensive anyway). It seems that slashdotters in general aren't interesting in entering into dialogue that doesn't involve confrontation.
Well, to prove my point, I shall point out how confrontational my post is!
The main thing I want to say, however, is good job on the article, I truly enjoyed it.
mark
(Was kestrel, but damned if I can get my password)