I had problem burning good FC3 CDs from the bittorrent images in FC2 before the upgrade. I ended up using Windows XP Pro to burn the CDs.
I had various troubles with an "upgrade from FC2 to FC3 on my workstation. Most of the problems were gone when I later did a full install.
Everything seems to be polished and working wonderfully now, with a few exceptions: My graphics is slow (I have a nVIDIA GeForce 4MX), and I still can't burn good FC3 CDs.
I'm open minded about.NET and C#. Actually I like both. I like Java too. And GNOME!
However, before I go any further evaluating the situation, could someone enlighten me as to whether Ximian entering the.NET arena has anything to do with the future plans (funding, etc.) of Ximian?
In other words, who's paying for all of this? (It should cost millions of dollars.)
GJC was used by the GJ compiler (Generic Java) which is going into JDK 1.5.
Talking about which, Generics needs to get into GCJ too.
What ever happened to ... (off topic)
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 1
... the sensational claims made this time two years ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago?
The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem turns out to be valid. The original proof had holes in it and it took several people several years to fill it.
But what about the 14 year-old Irish girl who discovered something or rather about encryption. Remember her, from a couple of year ago? Where is she now? What happened to her research?
Cold fusion?
High temporature superconductor?
Do we remember the then "Next Big Thing" before Linux? Before the Web? Was it OS/2?
Excuse my ignorance, but could anybody fill me in on the "International Free Computing Task Force"?
What kind of an organization is it?
Who are the officers of the organization?
What is their charter?
Where is their headquarters?
Is it a for profit organization or a non-profit organization?
What are some of their past activities?
Are they affiliated with any public or private companies?
Are they affiliated with any governments?
Are they affiliated with any universities?
Can anyone join the task force?
What credentials does one have to poccess to become a member?
How many members do they have?
I'm just curious about this organization because I have never heard of it before.
In the context of competing products, like KDE and GNOME are, as long as both a viable, they will eventually become indistinguishable by the users (like CocaCola and PepsiCola, McDonald's and Burger King, IE4 and NC4, Intel and AMD, etc.).
Imagine a day when both GNOME and KDE are in that state. Which one would people choose to use? The one with a licensing shadow hanging over its head, or the one that's GPL/LGPLed free and clear?
For the 90% of the people who don't care, it'll be half and half, so 45% for KDE and 45% for GNOME. For the 10% who cares, it'll go GNOME! So GNOME gets 55% while KDE gets 45%.
Granted this day won't come within this year, or the next, but as long as GNOME is alive and well and attracting developers, it will eventually come.
The current technical merit (which KDE/Qt seems to have a lot over GNOME/gtk+) doesn't really matter in this argument.
Like I said in the first post, the best Trolltech can do is to make Qt at least as free as gtk+, and hope to get even at the end. But I'm afraid that they can't do that until too late. In a sense, the QPL was already too late.
(Netscape gave up on the $29.99 revenue for every copy of their browser too late. Motif released it's (semi-open) source too late. etc.)
These are no accidents. Proprietary technologies won't have a reason to lower their price until a competitor come along. But if a competitor gives out the same functionality for free, then the proprietary technology is hosed! Because they CAN'T afford to make their product completely free. They have to attach a little string to their 'free' product, because the livelihood of every employee in the company depends on it. It is that final string, however short, that separates them from their truly free competitors.
I draw my conclusion from the timing of both the Debian and the Trolltech articles.
Ask this question: Why now? And the motivation of both sides will be revealed.
For all these years, Trolltech was not bothered by the fact that their software was not included in Debian. Why, all of a sudden, they feel compelled to show their hands, now?
Qt is a high quality GUI toolkit, well documented, and easy to use. That is a given.
Trolltech wants everyone to use Qt instead of Motif on the pure commercial side or Gtk+ on the free software side. That is also a given.
Trolltech wants to make money. That is also a given.
The problem is, these goals work against each other.
And now, for the first time, they are scared! They thought they had a big advantage over GNOME/Gtk+ five years ago (GNOME doesn't exist yet!). That advantage was in the process of being eliminated two years ago, when they released Qt under the QPL.
The QPL was meant to kill the copycat project called the Harmony. They succeded in that.
The QPL was also meant to somewhat blunt the rapidly maturing GNOME project. Thay failed at that miserably.
Now that GNOME 1.2 is out and getting rave reviews, it woun't be long before more of the distributions make GNOME their default desktop.
If that happens, Qt will lose out completely. And that is a sure thing now. They can see it. They can sense it. They have no way of slowing the trend down.
At this stage, not even releasing Qt under the GPL will save them.
Any license would do. Start with the GPL. You can always change the license for the code that you've written in a later version, if there is a later version. You still own that code.
Contributions from other people will become problematic if you decide to change the license. So you may not want to change the license after all.
In the tradition of transliterating western words into Chinese, and then contract the result by trsditional Chinese rules of pick the first syllable of each group of two or three, we have:
I got my copy of the book "Open Sources" over the week end and was reading the whole thing yesterday. In the final chapter, ESR made a prediction that some UNIX companies are going to go, probably SCO or HP.
It's sad to see it come true so soon.
-- Weiqi Gao (aka IIO) my sixth(?) post on/.
Michael Tiemann's Piece is available online
on
Review:Open Sources
·
· Score: 3
Just want to mention that Michael Tiemann's piece on Cygnus Solutions is available online from the cygnus main website. It's a very well-written piece.
Two important pieces that's LACKING from the book are, IMHO, 1. Donald Knuth, TeX, Metafont, And The Art Of Computer Programming 2. Peter Deutsch, PostScript, GhostScript, And Alladin.
-- IIO, my fifth post to/.
If you are Microsoft, you'd think this way:
on
Microsoft's COOL
·
· Score: 1
1. Open standards just doesn't work. Every time they enbrace and extend something remotely open, like TCP/IP, HTML or Java, someone else's OS gets a boost.
2. Enbrace and extends is not enough. WinSock made Windows just another node on the internet. Java made Windows just another OS, and HTML made Windows just another browser. What good does these do to Microsoft?
3. You have to throw a code name out once every six months. Look at the evolution of Windows: + In the beginning was the big loop (WinProc) + Then came DDE and DDEML + Then came OLE1 + Then came OLE2 + Then came COM + Then came DCOM + Then came ActiveX + Then came COM+ + Now it's COOL
4. License and kill. License an outside product for a couple of years, and then kill the license. It worked every time. Can you name the original licensERs of these products: + MS DOS (undelete?, scandisk?, doublespace?) + MS SQLServer + MS LAN Manager + MS Word + MS MediaPlayer + MS IE (And here's some "almost" and some future ones) + MS Rose + MS Quicken + MS Visio + MS NBC + MS Reserve Bank + MS Security Council
I thought I might bring in some fresh air, and mention a few facts that might be of interest to Linux user. If you have worked with TAO before, what I say isn't going to be anything new. But I believe a lot of people might benefit from some solid information, whether they like weapons or not.
1. Please go easy on Doug Schmidt's web site. They are/.-ed.
2. TAO stands for "The ACE Orb", while ACE stands for "Adaptive Communication Environment". ACE is a very nice environment for developing communications systems. TAO is developed using ACE.
3. TAO (pronounced [dow]) has been ported to many platforms---Win32 (NT3, NT4, 95, even CE), SunOS4, 5, IRIX 5, 6, HP-UX 9, 10, 11, DEC UNIX 4, AIX4, Linux, SCO, UnixWare, NetBSD, FreeBSD, VxWorks, Chorus, LynxOS, and pSoS, MVS.
4. Compiling TAO on Linux is totally painless. Although an auto config script is not available, each platform is HAND CONFIGURED already. I compiled it on Red Hat 5.1.
5. TAO is mainly a C++ thing. There is not yet IDL compiler for other languages. But it is compliant with the CORBA 2.2 specification and IIOP 1.0 specification. So it INTEROPERATES with CORBA objects from another ORB.
6. The comp.soft-sys.ace is a USENET news group dedicated to ACE. A fair amount of TAO discussion is also carried on there. There's an ACE and TAO mailing list that you can subscribe from the TAO home page. The traffic of the mailing list is GATEWAYED to the news group, so you can expact to see some useful discussions there. The news group postinga are NOT gatewayed back to the mailing list.
7. TAO is a very serious ORB. It is written for standard compliance and performance. It's Real-Time claim is rarely seen amount ORB vendors.
8. TAO is Open Source, you get the source! You compile it yourself. And it just works. You can also get someone else to do it for you, see #10. below
9. TAO is the whole thing. There's the ORB, and there's all (well, almost) the CORBA services (Naming_Service, Event_Service, Trading_Service, etc., things other vendors unbundle from their ORB).
10. TAO is commercially supported. Just like Cygnus supports GNU C/C++, TAO has gained a commercial support provider. Industrial grade support and training is obtainable by contacting Object Computing, Inc. (http://www.ociweb.com).
[Disclaimer: I am an employee of OCI, although not in the TAO group. The opinions above does not represent any one else but my own.]
Slashdot Mirror
I had problem burning good FC3 CDs from the bittorrent images in FC2 before the upgrade. I ended up using Windows XP Pro to burn the CDs.
I had various troubles with an "upgrade from FC2 to FC3 on my workstation. Most of the problems were gone when I later did a full install.
Everything seems to be polished and working wonderfully now, with a few exceptions: My graphics is slow (I have a nVIDIA GeForce 4MX), and I still can't burn good FC3 CDs.
Petreleley?
The "Slashdot is Moving" story is posted on 10:25PM, and the "Welcome to the New Cluster" story is posted on 11:35PM.
What kind of time are they? Are they east coast time or west coast time?
I'm open minded about .NET and C#. Actually I like both. I like Java too. And GNOME!
.NET arena has anything to do with the future plans (funding, etc.) of Ximian?
However, before I go any further evaluating the situation, could someone enlighten me as to whether Ximian entering the
In other words, who's paying for all of this? (It should cost millions of dollars.)
--
Weiqi Gao
weiqigao@networkusa.net
GJC was used by the GJ compiler (Generic Java) which is going into JDK 1.5.
Talking about which, Generics needs to get into GCJ too.
... the sensational claims made this time two years ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago?
The proof of Fermat's Last Theorem turns out to be valid. The original proof had holes in it and it took several people several years to fill it.
But what about the 14 year-old Irish girl who discovered something or rather about encryption. Remember her, from a couple of year ago? Where is she now? What happened to her research?
Cold fusion?
High temporature superconductor?
Do we remember the then "Next Big Thing" before Linux? Before the Web? Was it OS/2?
--
IIO
Excuse my ignorance, but could anybody fill me in on the "International Free Computing Task Force"?
What kind of an organization is it?
Who are the officers of the organization?
What is their charter?
Where is their headquarters?
Is it a for profit organization or a non-profit organization?
What are some of their past activities?
Are they affiliated with any public or private companies?
Are they affiliated with any governments?
Are they affiliated with any universities?
Can anyone join the task force?
What credentials does one have to poccess to become a member?
How many members do they have?
I'm just curious about this organization because I have never heard of it before.
It's speculative prediction on my part.
In the context of competing products, like KDE and GNOME are, as long as both a viable, they will eventually become indistinguishable by the users (like CocaCola and PepsiCola, McDonald's and Burger King, IE4 and NC4, Intel and AMD, etc.).
Imagine a day when both GNOME and KDE are in that state. Which one would people choose to use? The one with a licensing shadow hanging over its head, or the one that's GPL/LGPLed free and clear?
For the 90% of the people who don't care, it'll be half and half, so 45% for KDE and 45% for GNOME. For the 10% who cares, it'll go GNOME! So GNOME gets 55% while KDE gets 45%.
Granted this day won't come within this year, or the next, but as long as GNOME is alive and well and attracting developers, it will eventually come.
The current technical merit (which KDE/Qt seems to have a lot over GNOME/gtk+) doesn't really matter in this argument.
Like I said in the first post, the best Trolltech can do is to make Qt at least as free as gtk+, and hope to get even at the end. But I'm afraid that they can't do that until too late. In a sense, the QPL was already too late.
(Netscape gave up on the $29.99 revenue for every copy of their browser too late. Motif released it's (semi-open) source too late. etc.)
These are no accidents. Proprietary technologies won't have a reason to lower their price until a competitor come along. But if a competitor gives out the same functionality for free, then the proprietary technology is hosed! Because they CAN'T afford to make their product completely free. They have to attach a little string to their 'free' product, because the livelihood of every employee in the company depends on it. It is that final string, however short, that separates them from their truly free competitors.
I draw my conclusion from the timing of both the Debian and the Trolltech articles.
Ask this question: Why now? And the motivation of both sides will be revealed.
For all these years, Trolltech was not bothered by the fact that their software was not included in Debian. Why, all of a sudden, they feel compelled to show their hands, now?
Qt is a high quality GUI toolkit, well documented, and easy to use. That is a given.
Trolltech wants everyone to use Qt instead of Motif on the pure commercial side or Gtk+ on the free software side. That is also a given.
Trolltech wants to make money. That is also a given.
The problem is, these goals work against each other.
And now, for the first time, they are scared! They thought they had a big advantage over GNOME/Gtk+ five years ago (GNOME doesn't exist yet!). That advantage was in the process of being eliminated two years ago, when they released Qt under the QPL.
The QPL was meant to kill the copycat project called the Harmony. They succeded in that.
The QPL was also meant to somewhat blunt the rapidly maturing GNOME project. Thay failed at that miserably.
Now that GNOME 1.2 is out and getting rave reviews, it woun't be long before more of the distributions make GNOME their default desktop.
If that happens, Qt will lose out completely. And that is a sure thing now. They can see it. They can sense it. They have no way of slowing the trend down.
At this stage, not even releasing Qt under the GPL will save them.
The GPL has won another battle.
--
IIO
Any license would do. Start with the GPL. You can always change the license for the code that you've written in a later version, if there is a later version. You still own that code.
Contributions from other people will become problematic if you decide to change the license. So you may not want to change the license after all.
--
IIO
I don't understand a word in your post. I think I'm going to save it for future reference. What's a DVD anyway?
/. ? :)
How do you save a post on
--
IIO
How about a Slashdot Poll?
Question: What is your primary language for programming (Choose One)?
[x] Perl
[x] Python
[x] Java
Java might come in number one!
--
IIO
In the tradition of transliterating western words into Chinese, and then contract the result by trsditional Chinese rules of pick the first syllable of each group of two or three, we have:
Slashdot
==> Si-La-Shi Dao-Te
==> Si Dao
>Of course, but has he ever looked at the NT sources?
Well, AT&T has always had the NT source. They sued last year when Microsoft stopped sending them NT source and settled for something.
How fascinating!
/.
This is too perfect!
I got my copy of the book "Open Sources" over the week end and was reading the whole thing yesterday. In the final chapter, ESR made a prediction that some UNIX companies are going to go, probably SCO or HP.
It's sad to see it come true so soon.
--
Weiqi Gao (aka IIO) my sixth(?) post on
Just want to mention that Michael Tiemann's piece on Cygnus Solutions is available online from the cygnus main website. It's a very well-written piece.
/.
Two important pieces that's LACKING from the book are, IMHO,
1. Donald Knuth, TeX, Metafont, And The Art Of Computer Programming
2. Peter Deutsch, PostScript, GhostScript, And Alladin.
--
IIO, my fifth post to
1. Open standards just doesn't work. Every time they enbrace and extend something remotely open, like TCP/IP, HTML or Java, someone else's OS gets a boost.
/.
2. Enbrace and extends is not enough. WinSock made Windows just another node on the internet. Java made Windows just another OS, and HTML made Windows just another browser. What good does these do to Microsoft?
3. You have to throw a code name out once every six months. Look at the evolution of Windows:
+ In the beginning was the big loop (WinProc)
+ Then came DDE and DDEML
+ Then came OLE1
+ Then came OLE2
+ Then came COM
+ Then came DCOM
+ Then came ActiveX
+ Then came COM+
+ Now it's COOL
4. License and kill. License an outside product for a couple of years, and then kill the license. It worked every time. Can you name the original licensERs of these products:
+ MS DOS (undelete?, scandisk?, doublespace?)
+ MS SQLServer
+ MS LAN Manager
+ MS Word
+ MS MediaPlayer
+ MS IE
(And here's some "almost" and some future ones)
+ MS Rose
+ MS Quicken
+ MS Visio
+ MS NBC
+ MS Reserve Bank
+ MS Security Council
See the trend?
--
IIO, my fourth message on
I thought I might bring in some fresh air, and mention a few facts that might be of interest to Linux user. If you have worked with TAO before, what I say isn't going to be anything new. But I believe a lot of people might benefit from some solid information, whether they like weapons or not.
/.-ed.
/.
1. Please go easy on Doug Schmidt's web site. They are
2. TAO stands for "The ACE Orb", while ACE stands for "Adaptive Communication Environment". ACE is a very nice environment for developing communications systems. TAO is developed using ACE.
3. TAO (pronounced [dow]) has been ported to many platforms---Win32 (NT3, NT4, 95, even CE), SunOS4, 5, IRIX 5, 6, HP-UX 9, 10, 11, DEC UNIX 4, AIX4, Linux, SCO, UnixWare, NetBSD, FreeBSD, VxWorks, Chorus, LynxOS, and pSoS, MVS.
4. Compiling TAO on Linux is totally painless. Although an auto config script is not available, each platform is HAND CONFIGURED already. I compiled it on Red Hat 5.1.
5. TAO is mainly a C++ thing. There is not yet IDL compiler for other languages. But it is compliant with the CORBA 2.2 specification and IIOP 1.0 specification. So it INTEROPERATES with CORBA objects from another ORB.
6. The comp.soft-sys.ace is a USENET news group dedicated to ACE. A fair amount of TAO discussion is also carried on there. There's an ACE and TAO mailing list that you can subscribe from the TAO home page. The traffic of the mailing list is GATEWAYED to the news group, so you can expact to see some useful discussions there. The news group postinga are NOT gatewayed back to the mailing list.
7. TAO is a very serious ORB. It is written for standard compliance and performance. It's Real-Time claim is rarely seen amount ORB vendors.
8. TAO is Open Source, you get the source! You compile it yourself. And it just works. You can also get someone else to do it for you, see #10. below
9. TAO is the whole thing. There's the ORB, and there's all (well, almost) the CORBA services (Naming_Service, Event_Service, Trading_Service, etc., things other vendors unbundle from their ORB).
10. TAO is commercially supported. Just like Cygnus supports GNU C/C++, TAO has gained a commercial support provider. Industrial grade support and training is obtainable by contacting Object Computing, Inc. (http://www.ociweb.com).
[Disclaimer: I am an employee of OCI, although not in the TAO group. The opinions above does not represent any one else but my own.]
--
IIO, my third(?) message to