Can anyone imagine MS responding that quickly? On a *weekend* even! (Or accepting
responsibility for its bugs like that?)
Note that I am a Debian Linux user, so I have no bias in favor of Microsoft, but come on, the real question should be "Can anyone imagine MS shipping a product with such a horribly-stupid-of-stupid-critical-lose-every-flaw as the recent iTunes 2.0 ultra-blunder?" Apple is no hero for bringing out a fix as fast as they did; simply because such a fix never should have been necessary in the first place.
I have seen Microsoft release products that do really stupid things, but I have trouble recalling the last time they released a music application that unnecessarily formats your harddrive. I mean, come on... MS is bad, but are they as bad as Apple? If Apple was as popular as MS, you would probably be singing a different tune about iTunes 2.0?
Debian Linux has a community run software testing process that would never let something like iTunes ship as "stable".
GNUTella still kicks ass... better than Napster ever was at least. You can get faster more reliable downloads with the Xolox, which uses multi-source segmented downloading among other advanced file transfer features that make using the GNUTella network highly effective! The client basically downloads the same file concurrently from multiple sources, giving you greater overall transfer rates. The only problem with Xolox is that it currently only has a MS Windows port.
GNUtella is open, free, and it works great! Forget about these commercial closed networks.
It's gotten to the point now that "stable" has become a meaningless word in linuxland.
If you truely want stability in "linuxland", then you should use the current stable version of Debian Linux, the community based Linux Distro. It is very upsetting that the majority of Linux users haven't tried Debian Linux, considering how its one of, if not the best Linux Distro, and it is developed by the Linux community, not some corporation.
Punishment will only hurt the industry... it will only cause damage. I think that the DOJ should fix the problem, not punish companies. The absolute undeniable way to fix the problem would be to force Microsoft to maintain open, free, and current documentation for just 3 things:
File Formats: For example, Office formats are the most important (so that other products can open them), but also formats for MS executables (so that other products can execute them), MS shared libraries (so other products know how to load them), and media file formats.
Protocols: Other products should be able to be built to be networkable with MS products.
APIs: This would greatly help projects like WINE, but it would also help 3rd party versions of Visual Basic and other dev kits.
No need to break up Microsoft. No need to take money from them. No need to force them to give up all of their intellectual property by forcing them to open source their products. These solutions are either too extreme or they just wouldn't help the situation. However, forced FREE and OPEN documentation would absolutely solve the problem. KOffice would quickly become MSOffice compatible. WINE would work correctly %100 of the time. Visual Basic apps could be compiled for Linux. Konquerer would be able to correctly render net sites made for IE. All we need is documentation... no fighting, no breaking, no stealing... just documentation.
Falcon's Eye Nethack is probably one of the best open source video games for Linux. I mean, the graphics are as good as Diablo's! I highly recommend that any gamer check out Falcon's Eye Nethack
Come on guys, if we are going to make a robot, why not make a really cool robot that can pick up chicks? Instead, this robot just looks like one of us nerds. We have failed to create our saviour "coolio chick-pickin-upper" robot that will help us get dates.
...and God created manbot in his image... as a nerd.
Its called Predatory Pricing, and for a monopoly like Microsoft, such a thing is illegal in the USA. Yet Microsoft has done it with Internet Explorer, their SDKs, and many other things.
Maybe you can argue that IE is free now, but oh, you just wait. Microsoft will gouge the money out of you someway or another.
How much does it cost to sign up as a Linux developer?
*snicker*
More common than you'd think
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Star Control 2 is another all-time great computer game, and it too has a community trying to bring the game back (it never died in my opinion). These guys are making a sequal to the Star Control 2 universe... the game that Star Control should have been. There is also Freeciv, an open source Civilization clone. Anyway, the early Ultimas are classics, but I had to throw in a link about Star Con revival efforts. Its slightly on topic;-)
The New American Buzzword (sarcasm folks)
I don't like football. Football is terrorism.
Smoking is bad for people's health. Smoking is terrorism.
Stealing is wrong. Stealing is terrorism.
I dislike the winter. Winter is terrorism.
I ate a burger yesterday, and it tasted horrible. It was pure terrorism.
Racism is nothing more than terrorism.
Ford Explorers plus Firestone tires are nothing more than terrorism.
Hippies? Sheesh! They are terrorism born flesh.
P2P filesharing hurts our bottom line. Napster is terrorism.
Them peoples over in the middle east... yeah, they are different, and I don't like it. The only explanation is that they are terrorists.
Sooner or later, running red lights and other traffic violations will be equated with terrorism. Not long after that, the latest type of music popular amongst teens will be branded terrorism, just because the older generation dislikes it.
Reminds me of Object-Oriented Programming in the 90s. EVERYTHING IS AN OBJECT. Well now, EVERYTHING IS TERRORISM!
Are you kidding me? Compaq has another winner, at least in the PPC market and the Linux PDA market. Even though it ships with Wince, Compaq's open-spec policy and general goodness towards "the community", as lead to the IPAQ PDAs being the best PDAs to run Linux on.
Debian is the most open, standard Linux distribution, and by many standards, it is the best Linux distribution. Debian is not owned by a company, but instead it is developed by a wide variety of coders from all over the world.
When the dot-com market croaked, many Linux distributions had to let coders go, and some Linux distributions flat out died. This will never happen to Debian Linux because Debian is a different beast. Debian will always be here. Here to satisfy the practical computer user, and here to satisfy the open source puritan.
Progeny Linux isn't dying. In fact, it is going to a better place: pure Debian Linux... maybe even Woody. I like to think of it that Progeny Linux is going to the "heaven" of open source.
The Original 1996 USENET Post by Matthias Ettrich
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 4, Redundant
KDE Desktop Environment
New Project: Kool Desktop Environment (KDE)
Programmers wanted!
Motivation
Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a
consistant, nice looking free desktop-environment is missing. There are
several nice either free or low-priced applications available, so that
Linux/X11 would almost fit everybody needs if we could offer a real GUI.
Of course there are GUI's. There is the Commond Desktop Environment (much
too exensive), Looking Glas (not too expensive but not really the solution),
and several free X-Filemanagers that are almost GUI's. Moxfm for example is
very well done, but unfortunately it is based on Motif. Anyway, the
question is: What is a GUI? What should a GUI be?
First of all, since there are a lot of missunderstandings on this topic,
what is NOT a GUI:
the X-Window-System is NOT a GUI. It's what its name says: A Window system
Motif is NOT a GUI. They tried to create a GUI when they made Motif, but
unfortunately they couldn't really agree, so they released Motif as
Widget-Library with a Window-Manager. Much later they completed Motif with
the CDE, but too late, since Windows already runs on the majority of
desktops.
Window-managers are NOT GUI's. They are (better: should be) small programs
that handle the windows. It's not really the idea to hack a lot of stuff
into them.
IMHO a GUI should offer a complete, graphical environment. It should allow a
users to do his everyday tasks with it, like starting applications, reading
mail, configuring his desktop, editing some files, delete some files, look
at some pictures, etc. All parts must fit together and work together. A
nice button with a nice "Editor"-icon is not at all a graphical user
environment if it invokes "xterm -e vi". Maybe you have been disappointed
long time ago too, when you installed X with a nice window manager, clicked
on that beautiful "Help"-Icon... chrk chrk (the hard disk)...an ugly,
unsuable, weird xman appeared on the desktop:-(
A GUI for endusers
The idea is NOT to create a GUI for the complete UNIX-system or the
System-Administrator. For that purpose the UNIX-CLI with thousands of tools
and scripting languages is much better. The idea is to create a GUI for an
ENDUSER. Somebody who wants to browse the web with Linux, write some letters
and play some nice games.
I really believed that is even yet possible with Linux until I configured my
girlfriends Box. Well, I didn't notice anymore that I work with lots of
different kind of menues, scrollbars and textwidgets. I already know that
some widgets need to be under the mouse when they should get the keyevents,
some sliders wants the middle mouse for dragging and some textwidgets only
want emacs-bindings and don't understand keys like "pos1" or "end". And
selecting some text is different everywere, too. Even the menues and buttons
(for exampel Xaw, Fvwm, XForms, Motif) behave completely different.
One word to the Athena-Widgets: Although there are a few nice applications
available that uses these "widgets" we should really get rid of them.
Thinking that "Athena is a widget-library" is a similar missunderstanding
like "X is a GUI". Athena is an very old example how widget libraries could
be implemented with Xlib and Xt. It's more or less a online-documentation
for Widget-Set-Programmers, but not a tool for application-programmers.
Unfortunately, the old Unix problem, a so good online-documentation that
people used it for applications.
So one of the major goals is to provide a modern and common look&feel for
all the applications. And this is exactly the reason, why this project is
different from elder attempts.
Since a few weeks a really great new widget library is available free in
source and price for free software development. Check out
http://www.troll.no
The stuff is called "Qt" and is really a revolution in programming X. It's
an almost complete, fully C++ Widget-library that implementes a slightly
improved Motif look and feel, or, switchable during startup, Window95.
The fact that it is done by a company (Troll Tech) is IMO a great advantage.
We have the sources and a superb library, they have beta testers. But they
also spend their WHOLE TIME in improving the library. They also give great
support. That means, Qt is also interesting for commercial applications. A
real alternative to the terrible Motif:) But the greatest pro for Qt is the
way how it is programmed. It's really a very easy-to-use powerfull
C++-library.
Qt is also portable, yet to Windows95/NT, but you do not have to worry about
that. It's very easy to use UNIX/X specific things in programming, so that
porting to NT is hardly possible:-)
I really recommend looking at this library. It has IMO the power to become
the leading library for free software development. And it's a way to escape
the TCL/TK monsters that try to slow down all our processors and eat up our
memory...
It's really time yet to standarize the desktop somewhat. It's nonsense to
load 10 different widgets into memory for the same task.
Imagine this desktop:
fvwm (own widgets)
rxvt (own widgets)
tgif (own widgets)
xv (own widgets)
ghostview (athena widgets)
lyx (xforms widgets)
xftp (motif widgets)
textedit (xview widgets)
arena (own widgets)
One may argue that a usual UNIX-Box has enough memory to handle all these
different kind of widgets. Even if this might be correct, the really
annoying thing is, that all these widgets (menus, buttons, scrollbars, etc.)
behave slightly different. And this isn't only an academic example, I've
really seen such desktops:-}
I know we couldn't get rid of this chaos at once, but my dream is a
coexistance between Motif and Qt.
The Kool Desktop Environment (KDE)
I don't have the time to do this all alone (also since LyX is my main
project). But a thing like a Desktop Environment can easily be cut into lots
of parts. There is very probably a part for you, too! If you want to learn
some X-programming, why not doing a small, neat project for the KDE? If you
know others who like to programm something, please prevend them from writing
the 1004th tetris games or the 768th minesweeper clone;-) Think we also
have enough XBiffs yet...
So here is my project list so far. Probably there are even more things to do
that would fit great into the KDE. It's a very open project.
Panel:
The basic application. Run's as FvwmModule (at the beginning). Offers a
combination between Windows95 and CDE. I think about a small taskbar at
the bottom and a kind of CDE-panel on the top of the screen. The panel has
graphical icon menus on the left (similar to GoodStuff) to launch
applications, 4 buttons in the middle to switch to other virtual desktops
and few icons for often needed applications on the right. There is for
example a mail-icon that also indicates new mail, a wastebasket to open
the delete-folder (that also indicates when it isn't empty and is capable
of drag'n'drop). Maybe a analog clock with date at the very right. Also a
nice special icon for exiting the environment or locking the screen. All
the stuff is completly configurable via GUI. I'm also thinking about
solutions, that only available applications can be installed on the
desktop and that new applications appear on the desktop automatically.
I started to work on this panel, but would of course love some help. There
are also lot of smaller things to do, like a tool to chose a background
pixmap (for each virtual desktop) etc.
Also nice icons are needed!
Filemanager
Another major application inside the KDE. The idea is not to create a
powerful high-end graphical bash-replacement (like tkdesk tries to be),
but a nice looking easy-to-use filemanager for simple tasks. Simple tasks
are mainly deleting some files, copying some files, copying some files to
floppy disk, starting applications by clicking on a file (for example
ghostview for postscript files or xli for gifs, etc).
I'm thinking about nice windows, one for each directory, that shows icons
for every file. It should be possible to drag files around (either copy or
move), even between different windows. Another important point is the
support of the floppy-disk, so that mounting/umounting is done
user-transparent.
Dragging of icons should be done in a nice way, that means moving around a
special window (see Qt's xshape example), NOT like xfm or xfilemanager by
setting another monochrome bitmap for the cursor.
So it will also be possible to put files as icons on the desktop. This is
IMO a very nice feature. Since applications are launched by the panel,
it's even clear that icons are real data-objects. With fvwm-1 and the
FvwmFileMgr it wasn't really clear wether an icon is yet a file or an
iconified window.
Drag'n'drop inside a Qt application isn't really difficult.
The filemanager is IMO a very nice and not too time consuming project.
Who wants?
mail client
A really comfortable mailclient. IMO the most comfortable mailclient for X
is yet XF-Mail. And the author is willing to port it to Qt when the
KDE-project will start! But he asks for some assitance (for example for
coding the small popups, etc.)
easy texteditor
Very small but important project. An editor that fits the needs of those
who have to edit a textfile once in a month and didn't find the time yet
to learn vi (and don't have the time to wait for x-emacs to start, and
don't have the memory to use a motif-static-nedit, and don't have the
cpu-power and memory to use a tk-monster like tkedit,...)
Unfortunatly the Qt multiline-textwidget isn't available in Qt-1.0, but
Troll-Tech already announced the beta-testing. So the texteditor can be
started in a few weeks, too.
Terminal
Similar to the CDE terminal program. A kind of xterm with nice menu bar to
set the font, exit, etc. Nice project, get the xterm sources and add a GUI
with Qt!
Image viewer
The application that will be launced as default from the filemanager for
gifs, jpegs and all this. Well, xv is shareware and really needs quite a
long time for startup. But there is a plain Xlib programm without any
menues or buttons called "xli". Get the sources and make it userfriendly
with Qt!
Lots of small other tools:
xdvi with Qt-Gui
ghostview with Qt-Gui
xmag with Qt-Gui
whatever you want
Hypertext Help System
A complete desktop environment needs a nice hypertext online help. I think
the best choice would be HTML (>= 2.0). So a free Qt-based html-viewer
would be a great idea. It might be possible to use the Arena-sources, but
arena needs very long for startup. Maybe it would be best to start from
scratch. Qt offers excellent functions for dealing with different fonts.
For a help system HTML 2.0 is more than enough, some nice search function
added and that's it. Since it is also possible to convert the obsolete
troff man-pages to HTML, we can also integrate the original UNIX help
system.
BTW: There is a Troll Tech Qt-competition (look at their webpages). The
best application (not only functionallity, but also design counts. Just
porting an existing great application to Qt won't probably be enough:-( )
wins $2000 and a few Qt on NT licenses (worth another $2000). They also
mentioned a browser-project as an example. So a nice HTML-browser in Qt,
ready in Janurary may be worth $4000 (This includes selling the unneeded
NT licenses;-) )
Window Manager
At the beginning, the KDE panel will work as an Fvwm-Module. When this is
done, a lot of stuff can be stripped from the bloated fvwm window manager.
We don't need anymore fvwm-menus, icon handling and zillions of
configurable things. We need a small, realiable windowmanager. So maybe
stripping all unncessary stuff from fvwm will make sense in a while. But
this may come very last.
System Tools
Whatever a user, or you, might need. A graphical passwd comes to my mind.
But probably there are a lot more! Maybe this will lead to a small system
administration tool someday.
Games
We have yet a nice tetris game (an Qt example program). What is needed is
a nice set of small games like solitaire (please with nice cards that can
be really dragged!). There are several nice card games available for X,
for example xpat2. So why not take the cards from them and write a real
solitaire games, very similar to MS-Solitaire. I really had to install
Wine sometimes just to play solitair, what an overhead! But other games
are needed, too. Take xmris, pacman, etc. add a nice GUI. Or write some
from scratch. Whatever you want:)
Icons
A set of nice icons. 3D-pixmaps are quite a good start (but why should the
button be inside a pixmap, if we use a toolkit with buttons???)
Documentation
A documentation project is always a good thing to have. But before we
should clearify how the hypertext help system should look like. We can
then start with documentation pages in the chosen HTML-subset and for
example use arean as help browser. Anyway we need some application to
document first.
Web-Pages / Ftp Server / Aministration
We need a server for the files and webpages that inform about the state of
the project. Especially what projects are currently worked on and what
projects still wait for somebody to do them. I set up a preliminary
homepage on
http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/et trich
that just contains this posting yet and a few links. I may setup real
webpages for the very beginning but I would be very happy if I could
concentrate on discussion and coding. So if there is someone out there in
the net who likes to design and maintain webpages, here is a job for him:)
Discussion
The most important topic:-) If you are interested please
join the mailing list
kde@kde.org
Subscribing can be done by sending a mail with in *Body*:
subscribe [your email address]
to kde-request@kde.org
Applications
When the KDE gets widely accepted, new (free) applications will hopefully
be based on Qt, too, to fit with the comfortable and pleasant look and
feel of the desktop.
We may for example port LyX to Qt, so that a comfortable wordprocessor is
available. But that is still in discussion in the LyX Team.
A nice vector-orientated drawing tool would also be fine. Well, Xfig is a
powerful but ugly monster. But there is "tgif", a very powerful, easy to
use but ugly program. The author doesn't like the idea of adding a Qt GUI
for the menus, icons and scrollbars, since Qt is C++ and he wants to keep
tgif plain C, since on some sites no C++ compiler is available. Well, the
KDE doesn't really aim on these old and weird UNIX boxes (also I think a
g++ is almost everywhere available). But maybe the tgif-author agrees when
somebody else adds a nice GUI to tgif (the sources are free, don't know
wether this is GPL). Since tgif yet implements its own GUI this shouldn't
be too difficult. It's really easy with Qt to access plain Xlib
functionality and functions, so not very much will have to be rewritten.
Also C++ makes it very easy to include plain C code.
What about an easy to use, nice newsreader similar to knews? Could also be
integrated into the KDE.... and... and... and.
So there is a lot of work (and fun) to do! If you are interested, please
join the mailing list. If we get about 20-30 people we could start. And
probably before 24th December the net-community will give itself another
nice and longtime-needed gift.
The stuff will be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
I admit the whole thing sounds a bit like fantasy. But it is very serious
from my side. Everybody I'm talking to in the net would LOVE a somewhat
cleaner desktop. Qt is the chance to realize this. So let us join our rare
sparetime and just do it!
Hopefully looking foward to lots of followups and replies!
Regards,
BTW: Usually these postings get a lot of answers like "Use a Mac if you want
a GUI, CLI rules!", "I like thousands of different widgets-libraries on my
desktop, if you are too stupid to learn them, you should use windoze", "RAM
prices are so low, I only use static motif programs", "You will never
succeed, so better stop before the beginning", "Why Qt? I prefer
schnurz-purz-widgets with xyz-lisp-shell. GPL! Check it out!", etc. Thanks
for not sending these as followup to this posting:-) I know I'm a
dreamer...
BTW2: You might wonder why I'm so against Tk. Well, I don't like the
philosophy: Tk's doesn't have a textwidget, for example, but a slow
wordprocessor. Same with other widgets. In combination with TCL the programs
become slow and ugly (of course there are exceptions). I didn't yet see any
application that uses Tk from C++ or C, although an API seems to exist.
TCL/TK is very usefull for prototyping. Ideal for example for kernel
configuration. And since Tk looks little similar to Motif, the widgets are
also quite easy to use. But I really don't like any TCL/Tk application to
stay permanantly on the desktop. And Qt is much easier (at least as easy) to
program. Check it out!
BTW3: I don't have any connections to Troll Tech, I just like their product
(look at the sources: really high quality!) and their kind of marketing:
free sourcecode for free software.
Original document by Matthias Ettrich,
HTMLized by Matt McLeod
Re:Corporate Thinking or Public Service?
on
J#
·
· Score: 2
Well, seeing how Microsoft/MSN gets around 7 times the number of unique visitors that Google gets, and that they hang around the site around 25 times longer than Google's, you tell me how concerned they are.
This is mainly acheived by "bundling" MSN with Hotmail, and making MSN the default homepage for Internet Explorer. After you log out of Hotmail, you are sent directly to the MSN site. Google doesn't do any of this, and soley relied on word-of-mouth of their superior internet site.
Well, considering that IBM and others make 1GB Microdrive CF cards, you could store at least a few high quality MPEG4 movie such as the Matrix or Star Wars Ep1. Considering that you could recompress the MPEGs for such a low resolution (of the LCD screen), you could probably fit allot more.
Exactly! That was my implied point. Java has a better (more modern, more complete) standard API compared to C++, and therefore, it is not KDE's job to change or augment the C++ language, or to replace C++ with another slightly better language. KDE exists so as to create a comprehensive platform API similar to the one available for Java. In fact, this is exactly what KDE has been doing all along. KDE's API isn't just about widgets. It is about modernizing the Unix API for Object-Oriented software development of interactive desktop applications.
The question is, "will it succeed?" I claim that KDE is already succeeding in regards to modernizing the Unix API. There is more to be done, but I know that it will continue to succeed for two main reasons: First, it is open, and second, it has lots of initial momentum behind it because of the genius of its originators. It is the same two-part recipe for success that Linus used to bring the Linux kernel from just another pipe-dream to an industrial strength Unix kernel.
Note that I am not implying that the original standard Posix APIs should be replaced. However, it is very important that another layer can be added ontop of the traditional Unix layer, so as to modernize Unix and bring it to the desktop.
The main reason for two different APIs is because they are both, most likely, architectured completely differently from each other. One is OO while the other is procedural.
A simple wrapper around one would only lead to a mess similar to Microsoft's MFC, which started out as a wrapper around old procedural windows APIs. Anyone who has used MFC knows the evils of such wrapper APIs.
Most of my expertise falls into software development in Java, but recently I have been pushing myself to do more C++ development on Linux. I don't want to rely on proprietary languages. Anyway, the modern C++ is far far different from the C++ of many years ago. Things have changed, and C++ is growing up. Sure its a very complex language, if you try to learn the legacy aspects of it, but if you stick to the core OO constructs in C++, then you have a nice efficient programming language.
I am coming to realize that Java has very little over C++. Garbage Collection is more of a buzz word than an actual worthwhile feature, and it should be noted that high-level memory leaks are still possible in Java. Sure they are memory leaks of a different kind, but unreleased yet unused memory is a big problem in many large Java software systems.
In addition, for even an intermediate software developer, how difficult is it to code your own destructors? I mean, really, at worst you have a few loops in a destructor. Anyway, most JVM garbage collectors are unpredictable and hog performance at the worst of times.
The most important thing that Java has over C++ is a comprehensive set of user-friendly yet powerful APIs. But in return, C++ as templates and STL, allowing for elegant generic software systems.
When it comes down to it, C/C++ are here to stay, until some real yet practical innovation in Functional Programming languages, mobile/concurrent languages, or Declarative Programming languages is made. I am all for newer better higher-level programming languages such as Haskell, Pict, Lolli, and Mozart-Oz, but Python, Ruby, C#, and other newer procedural/OO languages are not the revolution, they are not the future, and at best, they are nothing more than slight iterative improvements on an overused overdone, and over talked about paradigm.
Give me C, give me C++, and if you can, why don't you give me something new for once? I am tired of the same old Ford Tempo with a new paint job and a new name.
Yes, Amazon may have been the first company to offern one-click web orders, but that doesn't mean that the patent isn't obvious. It is a very common and obvious concept in human-computer interface design, to minimize the number of inputs (clicks, presses, etc) required for a user to communicate a desired request to the computer. Obviously the minimum for such a request would be 1 press or click or whatever, because anything less would imply that the user has no say, and anything more would be inefficient.
You aren't supposed to be able to patent the stupidly obvious!
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen Microsoft release products that do really stupid things, but I have trouble recalling the last time they released a music application that unnecessarily formats your harddrive. I mean, come on... MS is bad, but are they as bad as Apple? If Apple was as popular as MS, you would probably be singing a different tune about iTunes 2.0?
Debian Linux has a community run software testing process that would never let something like iTunes ship as "stable".
Thats easy... The "K" stands for Kool as in "cool". (note this isn't a joke)
GNUTella still kicks ass... better than Napster ever was at least. You can get faster more reliable downloads with the Xolox , which uses multi-source segmented downloading among other advanced file transfer features that make using the GNUTella network highly effective! The client basically downloads the same file concurrently from multiple sources, giving you greater overall transfer rates. The only problem with Xolox is that it currently only has a MS Windows port.
GNUtella is open, free, and it works great! Forget about these commercial closed networks.
No need to break up Microsoft. No need to take money from them. No need to force them to give up all of their intellectual property by forcing them to open source their products. These solutions are either too extreme or they just wouldn't help the situation. However, forced FREE and OPEN documentation would absolutely solve the problem. KOffice would quickly become MSOffice compatible. WINE would work correctly %100 of the time. Visual Basic apps could be compiled for Linux. Konquerer would be able to correctly render net sites made for IE. All we need is documentation... no fighting, no breaking, no stealing... just documentation.
Falcon's Eye Nethack is probably one of the best open source video games for Linux. I mean, the graphics are as good as Diablo's! I highly recommend that any gamer check out Falcon's Eye Nethack
...but Debian does it the best, at least in the stable tree ;-)
/me keeps head down.
Come on guys, if we are going to make a robot, why not make a really cool robot that can pick up chicks? Instead, this robot just looks like one of us nerds. We have failed to create our saviour "coolio chick-pickin-upper" robot that will help us get dates.
...and God created manbot in his image... as a nerd.
All of Debian Linux finally fits on one disk ;-)
Its called Predatory Pricing , and for a monopoly like Microsoft, such a thing is illegal in the USA. Yet Microsoft has done it with Internet Explorer, their SDKs, and many other things.
Maybe you can argue that IE is free now, but oh, you just wait. Microsoft will gouge the money out of you someway or another.
How much does it cost to sign up as a Linux developer?
*snicker*
Star Control 2 is another all-time great computer game, and it too has a community trying to bring the game back (it never died in my opinion). These guys are making a sequal to the Star Control 2 universe... the game that Star Control should have been. There is also Freeciv, an open source Civilization clone. Anyway, the early Ultimas are classics, but I had to throw in a link about Star Con revival efforts. Its slightly on topic ;-)
The New American Buzzword (sarcasm folks)
I don't like football. Football is terrorism.
Smoking is bad for people's health. Smoking is terrorism.
Stealing is wrong. Stealing is terrorism.
I dislike the winter. Winter is terrorism.
I ate a burger yesterday, and it tasted horrible. It was pure terrorism.
Racism is nothing more than terrorism.
Ford Explorers plus Firestone tires are nothing more than terrorism.
Hippies? Sheesh! They are terrorism born flesh.
P2P filesharing hurts our bottom line. Napster is terrorism.
Them peoples over in the middle east... yeah, they are different, and I don't like it. The only explanation is that they are terrorists.
Sooner or later, running red lights and other traffic violations will be equated with terrorism. Not long after that, the latest type of music popular amongst teens will be branded terrorism, just because the older generation dislikes it.
Reminds me of Object-Oriented Programming in the 90s. EVERYTHING IS AN OBJECT. Well now, EVERYTHING IS TERRORISM!
Are you kidding me? Compaq has another winner, at least in the PPC market and the Linux PDA market. Even though it ships with Wince, Compaq's open-spec policy and general goodness towards "the community", as lead to the IPAQ PDAs being the best PDAs to run Linux on.
The best of apt-get and BSD Ports, all for Linux:
http://www.gentoo.org/
Debian is the most open, standard Linux distribution, and by many standards, it is the best Linux distribution. Debian is not owned by a company, but instead it is developed by a wide variety of coders from all over the world.
When the dot-com market croaked, many Linux distributions had to let coders go, and some Linux distributions flat out died. This will never happen to Debian Linux because Debian is a different beast. Debian will always be here. Here to satisfy the practical computer user, and here to satisfy the open source puritan.
Progeny Linux isn't dying. In fact, it is going to a better place: pure Debian Linux... maybe even Woody. I like to think of it that Progeny Linux is going to the "heaven" of open source.
Of course there are GUI's. There is the Commond Desktop Environment (much too exensive), Looking Glas (not too expensive but not really the solution), and several free X-Filemanagers that are almost GUI's. Moxfm for example is very well done, but unfortunately it is based on Motif. Anyway, the question is: What is a GUI? What should a GUI be?
First of all, since there are a lot of missunderstandings on this topic, what is NOT a GUI:
IMHO a GUI should offer a complete, graphical environment. It should allow a users to do his everyday tasks with it, like starting applications, reading mail, configuring his desktop, editing some files, delete some files, look at some pictures, etc. All parts must fit together and work together. A nice button with a nice "Editor"-icon is not at all a graphical user environment if it invokes "xterm -e vi". Maybe you have been disappointed long time ago too, when you installed X with a nice window manager, clicked on that beautiful "Help"-Icon ... chrk chrk (the hard disk)...an ugly,
unsuable, weird xman appeared on the desktop :-(
A GUI for endusers
The idea is NOT to create a GUI for the complete UNIX-system or the
System-Administrator. For that purpose the UNIX-CLI with thousands of tools
and scripting languages is much better. The idea is to create a GUI for an
ENDUSER. Somebody who wants to browse the web with Linux, write some letters
and play some nice games.
I really believed that is even yet possible with Linux until I configured my girlfriends Box. Well, I didn't notice anymore that I work with lots of different kind of menues, scrollbars and textwidgets. I already know that some widgets need to be under the mouse when they should get the keyevents, some sliders wants the middle mouse for dragging and some textwidgets only want emacs-bindings and don't understand keys like "pos1" or "end". And selecting some text is different everywere, too. Even the menues and buttons (for exampel Xaw, Fvwm, XForms, Motif) behave completely different.
One word to the Athena-Widgets: Although there are a few nice applications available that uses these "widgets" we should really get rid of them. Thinking that "Athena is a widget-library" is a similar missunderstanding like "X is a GUI". Athena is an very old example how widget libraries could be implemented with Xlib and Xt. It's more or less a online-documentation for Widget-Set-Programmers, but not a tool for application-programmers. Unfortunately, the old Unix problem, a so good online-documentation that people used it for applications.
So one of the major goals is to provide a modern and common look&feel for all the applications. And this is exactly the reason, why this project is different from elder attempts.
Since a few weeks a really great new widget library is available free in source and price for free software development. Check out http://www.troll.no
The stuff is called "Qt" and is really a revolution in programming X. It's an almost complete, fully C++ Widget-library that implementes a slightly improved Motif look and feel, or, switchable during startup, Window95.
The fact that it is done by a company (Troll Tech) is IMO a great advantage. We have the sources and a superb library, they have beta testers. But they also spend their WHOLE TIME in improving the library. They also give great support. That means, Qt is also interesting for commercial applications. A real alternative to the terrible Motif :) But the greatest pro for Qt is the
way how it is programmed. It's really a very easy-to-use powerfull
C++-library.
Qt is also portable, yet to Windows95/NT, but you do not have to worry about that. It's very easy to use UNIX/X specific things in programming, so that porting to NT is hardly possible :-)
I really recommend looking at this library. It has IMO the power to become the leading library for free software development. And it's a way to escape the TCL/TK monsters that try to slow down all our processors and eat up our memory...
It's really time yet to standarize the desktop somewhat. It's nonsense to load 10 different widgets into memory for the same task. Imagine this desktop:
One may argue that a usual UNIX-Box has enough memory to handle all these different kind of widgets. Even if this might be correct, the really annoying thing is, that all these widgets (menus, buttons, scrollbars, etc.) behave slightly different. And this isn't only an academic example, I've really seen such desktops :-}
I know we couldn't get rid of this chaos at once, but my dream is a coexistance between Motif and Qt. The Kool Desktop Environment (KDE) I don't have the time to do this all alone (also since LyX is my main project). But a thing like a Desktop Environment can easily be cut into lots of parts. There is very probably a part for you, too! If you want to learn some X-programming, why not doing a small, neat project for the KDE? If you know others who like to programm something, please prevend them from writing the 1004th tetris games or the 768th minesweeper clone ;-) Think we also
have enough XBiffs yet...
So here is my project list so far. Probably there are even more things to do that would fit great into the KDE. It's a very open project. Panel: The basic application. Run's as FvwmModule (at the beginning). Offers a combination between Windows95 and CDE. I think about a small taskbar at the bottom and a kind of CDE-panel on the top of the screen. The panel has graphical icon menus on the left (similar to GoodStuff) to launch applications, 4 buttons in the middle to switch to other virtual desktops and few icons for often needed applications on the right. There is for example a mail-icon that also indicates new mail, a wastebasket to open the delete-folder (that also indicates when it isn't empty and is capable of drag'n'drop). Maybe a analog clock with date at the very right. Also a nice special icon for exiting the environment or locking the screen. All the stuff is completly configurable via GUI. I'm also thinking about solutions, that only available applications can be installed on the desktop and that new applications appear on the desktop automatically.
I started to work on this panel, but would of course love some help. There are also lot of smaller things to do, like a tool to chose a background pixmap (for each virtual desktop) etc.
Also nice icons are needed!
Filemanager Another major application inside the KDE. The idea is not to create a powerful high-end graphical bash-replacement (like tkdesk tries to be), but a nice looking easy-to-use filemanager for simple tasks. Simple tasks are mainly deleting some files, copying some files, copying some files to floppy disk, starting applications by clicking on a file (for example ghostview for postscript files or xli for gifs, etc).
I'm thinking about nice windows, one for each directory, that shows icons for every file. It should be possible to drag files around (either copy or move), even between different windows. Another important point is the support of the floppy-disk, so that mounting/umounting is done user-transparent.
Dragging of icons should be done in a nice way, that means moving around a special window (see Qt's xshape example), NOT like xfm or xfilemanager by setting another monochrome bitmap for the cursor.
So it will also be possible to put files as icons on the desktop. This is IMO a very nice feature. Since applications are launched by the panel, it's even clear that icons are real data-objects. With fvwm-1 and the FvwmFileMgr it wasn't really clear wether an icon is yet a file or an iconified window.
Drag'n'drop inside a Qt application isn't really difficult. The filemanager is IMO a very nice and not too time consuming project. Who wants?
mail client A really comfortable mailclient. IMO the most comfortable mailclient for X is yet XF-Mail. And the author is willing to port it to Qt when the KDE-project will start! But he asks for some assitance (for example for coding the small popups, etc.)
easy texteditor Very small but important project. An editor that fits the needs of those who have to edit a textfile once in a month and didn't find the time yet to learn vi (and don't have the time to wait for x-emacs to start, and don't have the memory to use a motif-static-nedit, and don't have the cpu-power and memory to use a tk-monster like tkedit,...)
Unfortunatly the Qt multiline-textwidget isn't available in Qt-1.0, but Troll-Tech already announced the beta-testing. So the texteditor can be started in a few weeks, too.
Terminal Similar to the CDE terminal program. A kind of xterm with nice menu bar to set the font, exit, etc. Nice project, get the xterm sources and add a GUI with Qt!
Image viewer The application that will be launced as default from the filemanager for gifs, jpegs and all this. Well, xv is shareware and really needs quite a long time for startup. But there is a plain Xlib programm without any menues or buttons called "xli". Get the sources and make it userfriendly with Qt!
Lots of small other tools:
- xdvi with Qt-Gui
- ghostview with Qt-Gui
- xmag with Qt-Gui
- whatever you want
Hypertext Help System A complete desktop environment needs a nice hypertext online help. I think the best choice would be HTML (>= 2.0). So a free Qt-based html-viewer would be a great idea. It might be possible to use the Arena-sources, but arena needs very long for startup. Maybe it would be best to start from scratch. Qt offers excellent functions for dealing with different fonts. For a help system HTML 2.0 is more than enough, some nice search function added and that's it. Since it is also possible to convert the obsolete troff man-pages to HTML, we can also integrate the original UNIX help system.BTW: There is a Troll Tech Qt-competition (look at their webpages). The best application (not only functionallity, but also design counts. Just porting an existing great application to Qt won't probably be enough :-( )
wins $2000 and a few Qt on NT licenses (worth another $2000). They also
mentioned a browser-project as an example. So a nice HTML-browser in Qt,
ready in Janurary may be worth $4000 (This includes selling the unneeded
NT licenses ;-) )
Window Manager At the beginning, the KDE panel will work as an Fvwm-Module. When this is done, a lot of stuff can be stripped from the bloated fvwm window manager. We don't need anymore fvwm-menus, icon handling and zillions of configurable things. We need a small, realiable windowmanager. So maybe stripping all unncessary stuff from fvwm will make sense in a while. But this may come very last.
System Tools Whatever a user, or you, might need. A graphical passwd comes to my mind. But probably there are a lot more! Maybe this will lead to a small system administration tool someday.
Games We have yet a nice tetris game (an Qt example program). What is needed is a nice set of small games like solitaire (please with nice cards that can be really dragged!). There are several nice card games available for X, for example xpat2. So why not take the cards from them and write a real solitaire games, very similar to MS-Solitaire. I really had to install Wine sometimes just to play solitair, what an overhead! But other games are needed, too. Take xmris, pacman, etc. add a nice GUI. Or write some from scratch. Whatever you want :)
Icons A set of nice icons. 3D-pixmaps are quite a good start (but why should the button be inside a pixmap, if we use a toolkit with buttons???)
Documentation A documentation project is always a good thing to have. But before we should clearify how the hypertext help system should look like. We can then start with documentation pages in the chosen HTML-subset and for example use arean as help browser. Anyway we need some application to document first.
Web-Pages / Ftp Server / Aministration We need a server for the files and webpages that inform about the state of the project. Especially what projects are currently worked on and what projects still wait for somebody to do them. I set up a preliminary homepage on http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/et trich
that just contains this posting yet and a few links. I may setup real
webpages for the very beginning but I would be very happy if I could
concentrate on discussion and coding. So if there is someone out there in
the net who likes to design and maintain webpages, here is a job for him :)
Discussion The most important topic :-) If you are interested please
join the mailing list
kde@kde.org
Subscribing can be done by sending a mail with in *Body*: subscribe [your email address]
to
kde-request@kde.org
Applications When the KDE gets widely accepted, new (free) applications will hopefully be based on Qt, too, to fit with the comfortable and pleasant look and feel of the desktop.
We may for example port LyX to Qt, so that a comfortable wordprocessor is available. But that is still in discussion in the LyX Team.
A nice vector-orientated drawing tool would also be fine. Well, Xfig is a powerful but ugly monster. But there is "tgif", a very powerful, easy to use but ugly program. The author doesn't like the idea of adding a Qt GUI for the menus, icons and scrollbars, since Qt is C++ and he wants to keep tgif plain C, since on some sites no C++ compiler is available. Well, the KDE doesn't really aim on these old and weird UNIX boxes (also I think a g++ is almost everywhere available). But maybe the tgif-author agrees when somebody else adds a nice GUI to tgif (the sources are free, don't know wether this is GPL). Since tgif yet implements its own GUI this shouldn't be too difficult. It's really easy with Qt to access plain Xlib functionality and functions, so not very much will have to be rewritten. Also C++ makes it very easy to include plain C code.
What about an easy to use, nice newsreader similar to knews? Could also be integrated into the KDE. ... and ... and ... and.
So there is a lot of work (and fun) to do! If you are interested, please join the mailing list. If we get about 20-30 people we could start. And probably before 24th December the net-community will give itself another nice and longtime-needed gift.
The stuff will be distributed under the terms of the GPL.
I admit the whole thing sounds a bit like fantasy. But it is very serious from my side. Everybody I'm talking to in the net would LOVE a somewhat cleaner desktop. Qt is the chance to realize this. So let us join our rare sparetime and just do it!
Hopefully looking foward to lots of followups and replies! Regards,
Matthias Ettrich
(ettrich@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de)
BTW: Usually these postings get a lot of answers like "Use a Mac if you want a GUI, CLI rules!", "I like thousands of different widgets-libraries on my desktop, if you are too stupid to learn them, you should use windoze", "RAM prices are so low, I only use static motif programs", "You will never succeed, so better stop before the beginning", "Why Qt? I prefer schnurz-purz-widgets with xyz-lisp-shell. GPL! Check it out!", etc. Thanks for not sending these as followup to this posting :-) I know I'm a
dreamer...
BTW2: You might wonder why I'm so against Tk. Well, I don't like the philosophy: Tk's doesn't have a textwidget, for example, but a slow wordprocessor. Same with other widgets. In combination with TCL the programs become slow and ugly (of course there are exceptions). I didn't yet see any application that uses Tk from C++ or C, although an API seems to exist. TCL/TK is very usefull for prototyping. Ideal for example for kernel configuration. And since Tk looks little similar to Motif, the widgets are also quite easy to use. But I really don't like any TCL/Tk application to stay permanantly on the desktop. And Qt is much easier (at least as easy) to program. Check it out!
BTW3: I don't have any connections to Troll Tech, I just like their product (look at the sources: really high quality!) and their kind of marketing: free sourcecode for free software. Original document by Matthias Ettrich,
HTMLized by Matt McLeod
This is mainly acheived by "bundling" MSN with Hotmail, and making MSN the default homepage for Internet Explorer. After you log out of Hotmail, you are sent directly to the MSN site. Google doesn't do any of this, and soley relied on word-of-mouth of their superior internet site.
Well, considering that IBM and others make 1GB Microdrive CF cards, you could store at least a few high quality MPEG4 movie such as the Matrix or Star Wars Ep1. Considering that you could recompress the MPEGs for such a low resolution (of the LCD screen), you could probably fit allot more.
With the recent developments in robotics, we could send in Linux-based ground troops, in addition to using our smart bombs and missiles.
Really though, it would be nice to have at least one nation in the middle-east that truely like us.
Exactly! That was my implied point. Java has a better (more modern, more complete) standard API compared to C++, and therefore, it is not KDE's job to change or augment the C++ language, or to replace C++ with another slightly better language. KDE exists so as to create a comprehensive platform API similar to the one available for Java. In fact, this is exactly what KDE has been doing all along. KDE's API isn't just about widgets. It is about modernizing the Unix API for Object-Oriented software development of interactive desktop applications.
The question is, "will it succeed?" I claim that KDE is already succeeding in regards to modernizing the Unix API. There is more to be done, but I know that it will continue to succeed for two main reasons: First, it is open, and second, it has lots of initial momentum behind it because of the genius of its originators. It is the same two-part recipe for success that Linus used to bring the Linux kernel from just another pipe-dream to an industrial strength Unix kernel.
Note that I am not implying that the original standard Posix APIs should be replaced. However, it is very important that another layer can be added ontop of the traditional Unix layer, so as to modernize Unix and bring it to the desktop.
The main reason for two different APIs is because they are both, most likely, architectured completely differently from each other. One is OO while the other is procedural.
A simple wrapper around one would only lead to a mess similar to Microsoft's MFC, which started out as a wrapper around old procedural windows APIs. Anyone who has used MFC knows the evils of such wrapper APIs.
Most of my expertise falls into software development in Java, but recently I have been pushing myself to do more C++ development on Linux. I don't want to rely on proprietary languages. Anyway, the modern C++ is far far different from the C++ of many years ago. Things have changed, and C++ is growing up. Sure its a very complex language, if you try to learn the legacy aspects of it, but if you stick to the core OO constructs in C++, then you have a nice efficient programming language.
I am coming to realize that Java has very little over C++. Garbage Collection is more of a buzz word than an actual worthwhile feature, and it should be noted that high-level memory leaks are still possible in Java. Sure they are memory leaks of a different kind, but unreleased yet unused memory is a big problem in many large Java software systems.
In addition, for even an intermediate software developer, how difficult is it to code your own destructors? I mean, really, at worst you have a few loops in a destructor. Anyway, most JVM garbage collectors are unpredictable and hog performance at the worst of times.
The most important thing that Java has over C++ is a comprehensive set of user-friendly yet powerful APIs. But in return, C++ as templates and STL, allowing for elegant generic software systems.
When it comes down to it, C/C++ are here to stay, until some real yet practical innovation in Functional Programming languages, mobile/concurrent languages, or Declarative Programming languages is made. I am all for newer better higher-level programming languages such as Haskell, Pict, Lolli, and Mozart-Oz, but Python, Ruby, C#, and other newer procedural/OO languages are not the revolution, they are not the future, and at best, they are nothing more than slight iterative improvements on an overused overdone, and over talked about paradigm.
Give me C, give me C++, and if you can, why don't you give me something new for once? I am tired of the same old Ford Tempo with a new paint job and a new name.
Jesus H Christ! Microsoft truely is out of control and insane!
Yes, Amazon may have been the first company to offern one-click web orders, but that doesn't mean that the patent isn't obvious. It is a very common and obvious concept in human-computer interface design, to minimize the number of inputs (clicks, presses, etc) required for a user to communicate a desired request to the computer. Obviously the minimum for such a request would be 1 press or click or whatever, because anything less would imply that the user has no say, and anything more would be inefficient.
You aren't supposed to be able to patent the stupidly obvious!