"The fact they started with a proprietory/not free toolkit underscores the prevelant 'we dont give a shit about you' attitude the KDE project has. "
And they probably don't give a shit about you. And that would be a good thing. If someone wants to spend their time to make an open source project so other people can use it, I say that they can use whatever toolkit they want!!!!. If you don't like that, go start your own desktop environment. But then again, that would probably be a bad thing, because one is enough, right?
One of the biggest problems of windows, run-time stability, seems to be on the way to elimination, but Windows will probably still have a lot of problems. The system is completely volatile and unpredictable - things change for no reason and no one has any idea how to fix them. With linux, there is lots of documentation and source code, and every problem usually has a logical reason, so a knowledgable person can fix it rapidly. For windows, there are few people who can fix a lot of the problems reliably, but with linux there are a lot of expert who can fix many problems and figure out what's going on when they encounter a new problem.
As far as I can tell, there are two ways that Microsoft could make windows as reliable as linux: do a complete code review, fix all problems, and eliminate code bloat/problematic hacks/bad design (on 30 million lines of code; their VCS servers need 50GB to store the development code), or start from scratch. I figure they're screwed wether they decide to fix the problem or leave it as it is.
Linux takes longer than windows to configure, for sure, but the difference is that when you do something and you know what you're doing, it will generally work; the system won't suddenly fall apart for no reason; and someone who understands the system (which is not hard to learn) can fix nearly any problem. Windows may install faster, but then again you have to spend a lot more time fixing problems after. In linux, once you have it configured to your liking, all you need to do (and only if you want to have a very secure box) is upgrade the occasional program.
This is a little off-topic to the post, but I'm working with Access and although the basic parts work, some of the more advanced stuff is completely screwed up. For example, I want to select out of a table, setting a few fields to group by. The problem is that one of the fields is an expression, and i have to set the select box where I would choose group by to expression, so I can't to that. If I try to add another field that uses the result of that expression, it will ask me for the value but use the value from the expression and not group them. Also, as far as I can tell, the "filter fields" in pivot tables don't actually do anything! They document about 5% of the features too. It's a good thing i'm already working on my own database front-end.
Re:Don't try to do too much, though!
on
Linux Office Suites
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"As much as MS would have it otherwise, most Office users are only using a very small subset of the functionality available."
Joel Spolksy (former MS employee) has a great article on why this doesn't make sense - everyone who's tried to do this has failed because even if most poeple use 5% of the features they all use a different 5%, so if you do that you'll get to about 5% of the users.
Re:Wow... this should piss Russia off
on
Sklyarov Indicted
·
· Score: 1
This does not sound unlikely - remember that Britain was once the most powerful country in the world (although i'm sure people of the time would argue that:). Now I hear people over there talking about becoming a US state - the country that fought it's way free from them might now take over them (not very likely, but they've come down pretty far)
I'm consider creating a script and tarball of tarballs that would allow me to restore my machine on a blank install of linux - and that's just for one machine which will probably be clean-installed rarely, if ever (although i do have to do something because I managed to harm a few things during the installation). I think it would be far easier to create a script that would install a bunch of packages and make a few configuration changes than to do a standardized Windows installation, unless you created a CD you could just copy on to the hard drive (although then you would still have to set up the bootloader).
I agree... at 7th grade I was in the grade 12 programming class (Pascal), most of which I spent using my newfound skills to change the colors of my Win 3.1 desktop, but I suspect it will be a waste for most people. Later highschool or college/university would be a much better place.
"The business model where by music makes large amounts of money is dying."
According to one person, it hasn't even been around that long. I say good riddance if it dies, but I would want the small artists (who don't get played 40 times a day on the radio) to continue their (frequently) good work.
The difference between recording to cassettes and recording to CDs (no apostrophe please) is that no one uses cassettes to store computer backups and transfer their work to other computers.
Before you say it, tape drives are not enough to claim that ordinary cassettes can be used for data storage.
"However, when speaking of the complete, free operating system we all use and love"
Exactly. Linux usually refers to all the components taken together. Not the kernel, not an important library, not a specific server environment - everything together.
It shouldn't matter how big or important the project is - no one should take any freedoms from the developer (especially if they are doing it as free work - if Redhat tells Drepper to do something, then he would probably have to do it and I have no problems with that).
"Exactly how can you "force" someone to contribute to a project? Especially since this library is released under LGPL, Drepper would be free to port it to whatever he wanted. Give me more details and some evidence. I'm not about buy rhetoric. "
RMS was trying to discourage a Linux port, probably because it was competition for Hurd. So now after trying to stop this he wants his name in Linux because people ignored him and ported it?
"Therefore, it seems to me rather that he is the control freak here: when he realized that other contributors have a say in "his" project, he started whining."
He is not the only contributor, but he is the maintainer. If he wants to keep everyone working on the same goal instead of having a free-for-all (*cough*mozilla*cough*), that's his choice. ESR said, and I agree, that RMS seems to be trying to reduce the freedom of developers.
"The glibc situation is even more frightening if one realizes the story
behind it. When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which
eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force
me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd."
That's how it's supposed to be bad. If you look at ESR's recent article, he says that developers should have the freedom to do what they want. If i'm not reading this wrong, Drepper is the maintainer of glibc, and so should decide what goes on - if he has a plan for how it will work and evolve, and it's his project, then he should have the right to have the project follow his plan, and not be taken out of his control.
He also says:
"I find this completely unacceptable and can assure
everybody that I consider none of the code I contributed to glibc
(which is quite a lot) to be as part of the GNU project and so a major
part of what Stallman claims credit for is simply going away."
If he's an important contributor, and the project maintainer, I think he has every right to control the project. He is not a control freak just because he wants his project to be given to someone else! This doesn't apply to all situations, but for some projects it's good to have one person in control who decides how things will work, and controls the overall architecture and the project in general.
Oh yeah, one more thing that I just came up with: the GPL is intended to allow software to be used in any way for open source development with no obligations, which is what the Linux developers did in the early days - they used GPLed code to avoid re-implementing it themselves and save time. That is the whole point of the GPL!!. The only way I see for RMS to get around this is to change the GPL so a project the borrows code from someone must change the name to reflect that. If the linux developers used some GPLed code in their work, they should be free to use it in any way.
I agree with this. I don't know exactly what's used at the lower levels, but from what I know many linux developers use glibc, bash, and a few other programs because they are popular and useful. RMS wants Linux, which is hardly an acurate name for any particular system build around the kernel, to be changed to GNU/Linux because his library was popular with linux developers (who used it instead of making their own because it existed). Or is it because HURD is going nowhere and he wants to have his name up there?
Slashdot Mirror
"The fact they started with a proprietory/not free toolkit underscores the prevelant 'we dont give a shit about you' attitude the KDE project has. "
And they probably don't give a shit about you. And that would be a good thing. If someone wants to spend their time to make an open source project so other people can use it, I say that they can use whatever toolkit they want!!!!. If you don't like that, go start your own desktop environment. But then again, that would probably be a bad thing, because one is enough, right?
One of the biggest problems of windows, run-time stability, seems to be on the way to elimination, but Windows will probably still have a lot of problems. The system is completely volatile and unpredictable - things change for no reason and no one has any idea how to fix them. With linux, there is lots of documentation and source code, and every problem usually has a logical reason, so a knowledgable person can fix it rapidly. For windows, there are few people who can fix a lot of the problems reliably, but with linux there are a lot of expert who can fix many problems and figure out what's going on when they encounter a new problem.
As far as I can tell, there are two ways that Microsoft could make windows as reliable as linux: do a complete code review, fix all problems, and eliminate code bloat/problematic hacks/bad design (on 30 million lines of code; their VCS servers need 50GB to store the development code), or start from scratch. I figure they're screwed wether they decide to fix the problem or leave it as it is.
Linux takes longer than windows to configure, for sure, but the difference is that when you do something and you know what you're doing, it will generally work; the system won't suddenly fall apart for no reason; and someone who understands the system (which is not hard to learn) can fix nearly any problem. Windows may install faster, but then again you have to spend a lot more time fixing problems after. In linux, once you have it configured to your liking, all you need to do (and only if you want to have a very secure box) is upgrade the occasional program.
Caldera?
blah blah blah six seconds since you hit reply blah blah blah less then 2 minutes blah blah blah i hate this stupid limit blah blah blah
mod this up!!
:)
10 seconds to read, 6 seconds to reply, a pricelss joke... priceless
This is a little off-topic to the post, but I'm working with Access and although the basic parts work, some of the more advanced stuff is completely screwed up. For example, I want to select out of a table, setting a few fields to group by. The problem is that one of the fields is an expression, and i have to set the select box where I would choose group by to expression, so I can't to that. If I try to add another field that uses the result of that expression, it will ask me for the value but use the value from the expression and not group them. Also, as far as I can tell, the "filter fields" in pivot tables don't actually do anything! They document about 5% of the features too. It's a good thing i'm already working on my own database front-end.
"As much as MS would have it otherwise, most Office users are only using a very small subset of the functionality available."
Joel Spolksy (former MS employee) has a great article on why this doesn't make sense - everyone who's tried to do this has failed because even if most poeple use 5% of the features they all use a different 5%, so if you do that you'll get to about 5% of the users.
This does not sound unlikely - remember that Britain was once the most powerful country in the world (although i'm sure people of the time would argue that :). Now I hear people over there talking about becoming a US state - the country that fought it's way free from them might now take over them (not very likely, but they've come down pretty far)
I'm consider creating a script and tarball of tarballs that would allow me to restore my machine on a blank install of linux - and that's just for one machine which will probably be clean-installed rarely, if ever (although i do have to do something because I managed to harm a few things during the installation). I think it would be far easier to create a script that would install a bunch of packages and make a few configuration changes than to do a standardized Windows installation, unless you created a CD you could just copy on to the hard drive (although then you would still have to set up the bootloader).
I agree... at 7th grade I was in the grade 12 programming class (Pascal), most of which I spent using my newfound skills to change the colors of my Win 3.1 desktop, but I suspect it will be a waste for most people. Later highschool or college/university would be a much better place.
I believe at worst it only applies to music covered by them - it would have to be sold to them first.
wow - I hope their mail servers can take this!
Well, to try it out on a different compiler you could always build the kernel in MSVC :)
I can't believe it took me all of 18 seconds to type that!!!
"The business model where by music makes large amounts of money is dying."
According to one person, it hasn't even been around that long. I say good riddance if it dies, but I would want the small artists (who don't get played 40 times a day on the radio) to continue their (frequently) good work.
The difference between recording to cassettes and recording to CDs (no apostrophe please) is that no one uses cassettes to store computer backups and transfer their work to other computers.
Before you say it, tape drives are not enough to claim that ordinary cassettes can be used for data storage.
I don't believe this applies to most music.
I suspect it's just the open-source release schedule - make lots of releases.
Well, according to the local conspiracy theorists that will only happen when there is no problem (like the router non-problem)
"However, when speaking of the complete, free operating system we all use and love"
Exactly. Linux usually refers to all the components taken together. Not the kernel, not an important library, not a specific server environment - everything together.
It shouldn't matter how big or important the project is - no one should take any freedoms from the developer (especially if they are doing it as free work - if Redhat tells Drepper to do something, then he would probably have to do it and I have no problems with that).
At that point most people working on it probably had another compiler of some kind, which would keep them going until they had their own.
"though Engelbart/PARC"
/me senses this will become a popular GNU/joke among geeks
"Exactly how can you "force" someone to contribute to a project? Especially since this library is released under LGPL, Drepper would be free to port it to whatever he wanted. Give me more details and some evidence. I'm not about buy rhetoric. "
RMS was trying to discourage a Linux port, probably because it was competition for Hurd. So now after trying to stop this he wants his name in Linux because people ignored him and ported it?
"Therefore, it seems to me rather that he is the control freak here: when he realized that other contributors have a say in "his" project, he started whining."
He is not the only contributor, but he is the maintainer. If he wants to keep everyone working on the same goal instead of having a free-for-all (*cough*mozilla*cough*), that's his choice. ESR said, and I agree, that RMS seems to be trying to reduce the freedom of developers.
How about this:
"The glibc situation is even more frightening if one realizes the story
behind it. When I started porting glibc 1.09 to Linux (which
eventually became glibc 2.0) Stallman threatened me and tried to force
me to contribute rather to the work on the Hurd."
That's how it's supposed to be bad. If you look at ESR's recent article, he says that developers should have the freedom to do what they want. If i'm not reading this wrong, Drepper is the maintainer of glibc, and so should decide what goes on - if he has a plan for how it will work and evolve, and it's his project, then he should have the right to have the project follow his plan, and not be taken out of his control.
He also says:
"I find this completely unacceptable and can assure
everybody that I consider none of the code I contributed to glibc
(which is quite a lot) to be as part of the GNU project and so a major
part of what Stallman claims credit for is simply going away."
If he's an important contributor, and the project maintainer, I think he has every right to control the project. He is not a control freak just because he wants his project to be given to someone else! This doesn't apply to all situations, but for some projects it's good to have one person in control who decides how things will work, and controls the overall architecture and the project in general.
Oh yeah, one more thing that I just came up with: the GPL is intended to allow software to be used in any way for open source development with no obligations, which is what the Linux developers did in the early days - they used GPLed code to avoid re-implementing it themselves and save time. That is the whole point of the GPL!!. The only way I see for RMS to get around this is to change the GPL so a project the borrows code from someone must change the name to reflect that. If the linux developers used some GPLed code in their work, they should be free to use it in any way.
I agree with this. I don't know exactly what's used at the lower levels, but from what I know many linux developers use glibc, bash, and a few other programs because they are popular and useful. RMS wants Linux, which is hardly an acurate name for any particular system build around the kernel, to be changed to GNU/Linux because his library was popular with linux developers (who used it instead of making their own because it existed). Or is it because HURD is going nowhere and he wants to have his name up there?