The harm is that Java, which is a massively powerful and useful environment doesn't ship with any non-commercial version of Linux. Yes, you can download it, but no dist except JDS can't use or rely upon it in any way because it is an optional component. Ruby, Python, Perl etc. have their place but they're nowhere near as powerful as Java either in the breadth of applications or speed even.
Furthermore, the absence of an open source and reliable Java introduces a pile of uncertainty to anyone developing J2EE apps who's investigating what platform to deploy it on. Much as I dislike Solaris, I'd probably use Sun if I were deploying J2EE stuff simply because Sun have obligation to support Linux or ensure the performance is on par with Solaris.
Just as bad, because there is no open source Java in wide use, Sun can chop and change theirs as they see fit without fear of breaking anything. Just look at the effect that Apache, gcc have on their commercial counterparts to see what I mean.
So yes time is important. Either Sun needs to open up their Java (or classes) or a viable open source version needs to appear. And by viable I mean totally interchangeable. Ten years delay means billions and billions of dollars that would have been invested in Linux in one form or other go somewhere else.
The same could be said for Kaffe, gcj, classpath et al. And in fact it probably has been, each in their time being heralded as a way to break from Sun.
Sadly the reality is that no Java is even remotely as reliable or complete as Sun's implementation for the desktop let alone anywhere else. Major work had to be done to gcj just to make Open Office 2.0 run, which hardly speaks for its maturity. And other impls such as Kaffe are missing critical security functionality such as byte code verification. And enterprise level functionality? Forget it.
Personally I'd love to see a free and open source Java, but its taken years to get this far and its still not there yet.
For all Apple's alleged attempts at ease of use, you still have to type the "smb://" at the front of the address in the Connect to Server or it assumes you meant afp. It's almost as if supporting SMB is some dirty secret they don't want anyone to know about. A button offering the choice wouldn't go amiss.
And in general, the Network area in Finder is very flakey, either not finding my server (unless I type it), or seeing it but hanging the whole Finder while it tries to connect and fails. I also appear to have a mysterious "rfc1918.space.should.not.be.used.on.publicips" entry in there, whatever that is.
Thanks for that, I'll try to use Navigator. So far however I think it is only a partial solution since it doesn't reorder paragraphs, only section headings.
It's better in some ways and it is horribly worse in others. My personal bugbear is the lack of an outline mode in the word processor which makes writing large documents a major pain. The drawing code isn't up to much either, even in 2.0.
Being that vaporware is a term for long announced but unseen software projects. I wouldn't be too put out by someone making such a statement. As soon as the thing is released, such remarks will no longer be required.
Of course the cynic in me might suggest that Sun preannounced the effort far too early, hoping it would sabotage enterprise adoption of Linux. And encourage more people to try out Solaris 10, even if Solaris 10 & Open Solaris are not the same things.
Far Cry is a great game and gives you a lot of latitude, but the levels are still levels with entrances and exits, and progression is somewhat enforced. For example your objective is indicated by an arrow and for the most part, that's the way you must go. Often this is forced on you by steep walls, cliffs, or insta-deaths if you try going out of the game zone. The best zones in Far Cry are where you *don't* have to follow a path and there might be several ways to get to the objective, but some levels are certainly not like that.
Certainly Half Life 2 is a step above the standard FPS fare, and has some great graphics, but it still very much suffers from the same faults as many FPS games - linear game play, scripted events, levels that box you in, zombies, stupid AI, health meters, a standard range of weapons etc. Its not that much different from most other FPS games in that way.
With that said, the cut-scene engine is excellent, the production is good, there's a semi-coherent plot and the gravity gun is a lot of fun. It's certainly a hell of a lot better than the invisible rail shitfest that is Doom 3, that's for sure.
Actually I disagree about the differences between NT 4 and W2K. The differences were radical stuff like plug and play, DirectX, multimedia, USB support, decent device driver model etc. just didn't exist in NT 4. W2K was the first MS operating system that you could comfortably use day to day *and* develop on.
NT4 might have had an IE4 / Win95 front-end (which IIRC even appeared in beta for NT3.51), but it wasn't that much different under the surface. And the reboots... NT4 seemed to need a reboot when you changed your wallpaper it was that bad.
In Mac land, the one true (and very, very radical) change was from OS9 to OSX. It was two different worlds, with OSX only supporting the "classic" subsystem if you had upgraded from one to the other. To my mind the changes since have been incremental and most of them (certainly those in 10.1 & 10.2) could be more accurately described as bug fixes and patches. I wouldn't have called OS X ready until at least 10.2.
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This doesn't apply to top-down games, but I recall playing Ultima Underworld II and I was literally sick from playing it. Wander around a 3-d world is great but when you're traipsing back and forth for extended periods of time through twisty tunnels all alike you tend to want to puke. Half Life 2 was very similar for the air boat missions which was one long set of vomit inducing sequences of windy docks and waterways.
I assume that Stallman started Emacs on a commercial *nix like a PDP-11. I assume also that gcc was compiled using a comercial cc. And all those shell scripts and makefiles used to build it ran on commercial tools. So clearly non free is a good thing if its convenient.
So I fail to see what he is going on about. Linus had very specific requirements and quite obviously cast around for open source tool that met them. They didn't, so pragmatism took over and he found a good commercial tool that he could use for free. The net result of this horrifying turn of events? Linus was free to write more code because the tools were better and everyone else got their kernels faster and sooner. So the lead kernel developer was much more productive than he would have been otherwise.
It's not like all that work has to be thrown away or anything either. All the patches, meta info etc. has been retrieved.
If RMS was so concerned about BitKeeper way back when, perhaps he should have lit a fire under the GNU Arch folks, or sent out an appeal to produce a tool that worked for distributed development.
The alternatives have to meet requirements, or they're not alternatives. Presumably Linus did look at the various source control efforts knocking around and decided none was for him. Let's face it, there is little even now that is remotely comparable to BitKeeper, let alone several years ago. I wouldn't trust Arch simply because it seems to be infected with the same lethargy and lack of pace that can be found in HURD. Monotone and SVK look more promising but they're not very mature.
Perhaps the decision to dump BitKeeper might spur some source control project to produce something comparable, but sitting on your hands until that day arrives is not being pragmatic at all.
And it's an incorrect point. The system built on top of the kernel is a mix of lots of software, some of it copyright FSF, and a lot of it not. Calling it GNU/Linux is simply being rude to everything else which isn't.
Expect all region free DVDs selling in France to offer *only* French soundtracks and *only* French subtitles. It might actually be beneficial for consumers in France since with less languages, the the quality will be better. Though equally, I expect certain DVD producers to hike their prices, citing "increased costs", even though it costs pennies to master and print DVDs, even if just to one country.
With that said, anything from red books to technical documentation would be useful. Even header files. Or the CSet++ / VisualAge classes. Aside from SOM / WPS, OS/2 is like a primitive NT (flame proof clothes on but it's true) - it has limited plug and play, limited registry, limited games support (DIVE), less APIs, it's not a moving target and its API very closely resembles Win16 / Win32.
Someone could produce something akin to WINE but for OS2/ apps. What use would this be? I have no idea, but I suppose there might be a lot of file servers, EPOS & banking code out there written to OS/2. It might be a big win to someone if that could be moved over to Linux.
But that's extremely disingenuous of them. I expect that every single camera manufacturer in existence has enough knowledge about the workings of light, optics, shutters etc. that they don't need info protected Nikon's crappy format. And if they did - well... they'd just reverse engineer it.
Besides, Adobe is pushing an open digital negative format called DNG. Sooner or later, it or something like it will become the industry standard. Adobe is peeved that Nikon is using a proprietary format instead of DNG, but then they're the ones who have to cope with umpteen lousy formats in their products when they contain more or less identical information. At the end of the day it's an issue for everyone else too, since who wants a camera that won't let you view your own photos without their software?
SDK or not, no professional outfit is going to go all Nikon / Kodak / Olympus etc. just because of their lousy formats.
But if the standard is actually a draft and subject to change, how can they possibly implement it and guarantee compatibility? That's exactly the kind of mess that IE got itself in with CSS, XSLT and DOM where they ploughed ahead when the draft hadn't been finalised and consequently became non-standard in the process.
Of course its a chip on my shoulder. It's what stops me and many like me from using OpenOffice over MS word. As I said I can use it for letters and day to day things, but writing techinical documents with it is a pain. Moving sections around and getting section numbering to work properly is much harder in OpenOffice. Outline mode makes reordering a case of drag and drop in MS Word and that's a straight fact. If you as an IT professional have never heard of outline mode, then it says quite a bit about your experience writing long documents.
As for grade schooler, you assume that the schools == children. When in fact schools == teachers + children. In the main, teachers are the people who use word processors, not kids. If teachers can't compile reports or are inconvenienced by the lack of certain features found in MS Word, then it is an obvious disadvantage when the two products are being compared.
My issues with it are many, but basically the lack of outline mode makes it a pain to drag and drop sections around to reorder them. This is a frequent and necessary task of writing any long document. In addition, drawing diagrams is painful, really painful. MS Word is not exactly all-powerful, but if you drag a corner of a box, it does more or less what you expect. If you group objects they do more or less behave as you expect when you resize them and so on. That is not my experience with OOO and drawing at all. Shrinking a group leads to a complete mess as linked elements unlink and so on. The behaviour in 2.0 seems much more intuitive but I still wouldn't call it on par with MS Word.
Yes I do write technical documents in MS Word. It isnt perfect by a long shot, but being able to collapse and drag and drop sections around is a godsend.
I use OpenOffice everyday, and although it's usable I wouldn't say for a second that it was a $300 competitor. It's not that it's bad, more that it's arcane. The UI is arcane, the functionality (aside from certain things like PDF support) is arcane. There's too many menus, the common things are mixed in with the uncommon things, the icons and L&F feel old etc. The drawing module is evil and essential features like outline mode don't exist at all.
But for what I use it for, it's mostly usable, albeit not pretty. It's fine for letter writing, or timesheets. But writing a technical document is painful due to the missing outline mode and nasty graphics.
I've used the 2.0 beta and some things such as drawing have improved massively even if there is still no outline mode. I'm still not sure I'd believe it cost the same as MS Office. To use the US vernacular, I'd probably say 2.0 is software "of $150 value".
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Furthermore, the absence of an open source and reliable Java introduces a pile of uncertainty to anyone developing J2EE apps who's investigating what platform to deploy it on. Much as I dislike Solaris, I'd probably use Sun if I were deploying J2EE stuff simply because Sun have obligation to support Linux or ensure the performance is on par with Solaris.
Just as bad, because there is no open source Java in wide use, Sun can chop and change theirs as they see fit without fear of breaking anything. Just look at the effect that Apache, gcc have on their commercial counterparts to see what I mean.
So yes time is important. Either Sun needs to open up their Java (or classes) or a viable open source version needs to appear. And by viable I mean totally interchangeable. Ten years delay means billions and billions of dollars that would have been invested in Linux in one form or other go somewhere else.
Sadly the reality is that no Java is even remotely as reliable or complete as Sun's implementation for the desktop let alone anywhere else. Major work had to be done to gcj just to make Open Office 2.0 run, which hardly speaks for its maturity. And other impls such as Kaffe are missing critical security functionality such as byte code verification. And enterprise level functionality? Forget it.
Personally I'd love to see a free and open source Java, but its taken years to get this far and its still not there yet.
And in general, the Network area in Finder is very flakey, either not finding my server (unless I type it), or seeing it but hanging the whole Finder while it tries to connect and fails. I also appear to have a mysterious "rfc1918.space.should.not.be.used.on.publicips" entry in there, whatever that is.
Thanks for that, I'll try to use Navigator. So far however I think it is only a partial solution since it doesn't reorder paragraphs, only section headings.
It's better in some ways and it is horribly worse in others. My personal bugbear is the lack of an outline mode in the word processor which makes writing large documents a major pain. The drawing code isn't up to much either, even in 2.0.
Of course the cynic in me might suggest that Sun preannounced the effort far too early, hoping it would sabotage enterprise adoption of Linux. And encourage more people to try out Solaris 10, even if Solaris 10 & Open Solaris are not the same things.
Far Cry is a great game and gives you a lot of latitude, but the levels are still levels with entrances and exits, and progression is somewhat enforced. For example your objective is indicated by an arrow and for the most part, that's the way you must go. Often this is forced on you by steep walls, cliffs, or insta-deaths if you try going out of the game zone. The best zones in Far Cry are where you *don't* have to follow a path and there might be several ways to get to the objective, but some levels are certainly not like that.
With that said, the cut-scene engine is excellent, the production is good, there's a semi-coherent plot and the gravity gun is a lot of fun. It's certainly a hell of a lot better than the invisible rail shitfest that is Doom 3, that's for sure.
NT4 might have had an IE4 / Win95 front-end (which IIRC even appeared in beta for NT3.51), but it wasn't that much different under the surface. And the reboots... NT4 seemed to need a reboot when you changed your wallpaper it was that bad.
In Mac land, the one true (and very, very radical) change was from OS9 to OSX. It was two different worlds, with OSX only supporting the "classic" subsystem if you had upgraded from one to the other. To my mind the changes since have been incremental and most of them (certainly those in 10.1 & 10.2) could be more accurately described as bug fixes and patches. I wouldn't have called OS X ready until at least 10.2.
Buy this 16Mb CF MP3 player and get a free 4Gb CF hard disk!
This doesn't apply to top-down games, but I recall playing Ultima Underworld II and I was literally sick from playing it. Wander around a 3-d world is great but when you're traipsing back and forth for extended periods of time through twisty tunnels all alike you tend to want to puke. Half Life 2 was very similar for the air boat missions which was one long set of vomit inducing sequences of windy docks and waterways.
So I fail to see what he is going on about. Linus had very specific requirements and quite obviously cast around for open source tool that met them. They didn't, so pragmatism took over and he found a good commercial tool that he could use for free. The net result of this horrifying turn of events? Linus was free to write more code because the tools were better and everyone else got their kernels faster and sooner. So the lead kernel developer was much more productive than he would have been otherwise.
It's not like all that work has to be thrown away or anything either. All the patches, meta info etc. has been retrieved.
If RMS was so concerned about BitKeeper way back when, perhaps he should have lit a fire under the GNU Arch folks, or sent out an appeal to produce a tool that worked for distributed development.
Perhaps the decision to dump BitKeeper might spur some source control project to produce something comparable, but sitting on your hands until that day arrives is not being pragmatic at all.
And it's an incorrect point. The system built on top of the kernel is a mix of lots of software, some of it copyright FSF, and a lot of it not. Calling it GNU/Linux is simply being rude to everything else which isn't.
Yes those, but open sourced. Plus any internal technical documents.
Expect all region free DVDs selling in France to offer *only* French soundtracks and *only* French subtitles. It might actually be beneficial for consumers in France since with less languages, the the quality will be better. Though equally, I expect certain DVD producers to hike their prices, citing "increased costs", even though it costs pennies to master and print DVDs, even if just to one country.
Someone could produce something akin to WINE but for OS2/ apps. What use would this be? I have no idea, but I suppose there might be a lot of file servers, EPOS & banking code out there written to OS/2. It might be a big win to someone if that could be moved over to Linux.
That or they use Adobe's open digital negative format(DNG) or something similar. DNG is just tiff with some extra information sections.
Mixed metaphors are fun! The hands on the other foot now!
Besides, Adobe is pushing an open digital negative format called DNG. Sooner or later, it or something like it will become the industry standard. Adobe is peeved that Nikon is using a proprietary format instead of DNG, but then they're the ones who have to cope with umpteen lousy formats in their products when they contain more or less identical information. At the end of the day it's an issue for everyone else too, since who wants a camera that won't let you view your own photos without their software?
SDK or not, no professional outfit is going to go all Nikon / Kodak / Olympus etc. just because of their lousy formats.
But if the standard is actually a draft and subject to change, how can they possibly implement it and guarantee compatibility? That's exactly the kind of mess that IE got itself in with CSS, XSLT and DOM where they ploughed ahead when the draft hadn't been finalised and consequently became non-standard in the process.
As for grade schooler, you assume that the schools == children. When in fact schools == teachers + children. In the main, teachers are the people who use word processors, not kids. If teachers can't compile reports or are inconvenienced by the lack of certain features found in MS Word, then it is an obvious disadvantage when the two products are being compared.
My issues with it are many, but basically the lack of outline mode makes it a pain to drag and drop sections around to reorder them. This is a frequent and necessary task of writing any long document. In addition, drawing diagrams is painful, really painful. MS Word is not exactly all-powerful, but if you drag a corner of a box, it does more or less what you expect. If you group objects they do more or less behave as you expect when you resize them and so on. That is not my experience with OOO and drawing at all. Shrinking a group leads to a complete mess as linked elements unlink and so on. The behaviour in 2.0 seems much more intuitive but I still wouldn't call it on par with MS Word.
Yes I do write technical documents in MS Word. It isnt perfect by a long shot, but being able to collapse and drag and drop sections around is a godsend.
But for what I use it for, it's mostly usable, albeit not pretty. It's fine for letter writing, or timesheets. But writing a technical document is painful due to the missing outline mode and nasty graphics.
I've used the 2.0 beta and some things such as drawing have improved massively even if there is still no outline mode. I'm still not sure I'd believe it cost the same as MS Office. To use the US vernacular, I'd probably say 2.0 is software "of $150 value".
Did I mention there's no outline mode?