Article: Robertson's message said it will take time to shift to a new name, because Lindows has thousands of Web pages and 100-plus computer servers.
I'm sorry, but both of those numbers sound bogus, or the logic doesn't apply... If they are using database-backed dynamic pages, changing to a new name and domain should be rather easy.
On a related topic, at http://support.lindows.com/, the Knowledge Base they are using looks a like like ones I've seen in other sites, such as ximian's and Sierra's sites. I have no idea what the name of the software is though, and with my company wanting to deploy a knowledge base for their own software, I'd like to know which it is to save some research time.
The information is supposed to be viewed at a glance, off to the side, and potentially useful. It's not popping up on top of your work saying "This bug is blah blah blah".
One of the things I would love to see it do, for instance, is if it brought up contact information about a specifc person, I would love to see which time zone they live in and their local time.
Ever see dashboard? It takes information gathered during IRC, IM, web browsing, e-mail, and more, does a lot of backend cluepacket mojo, and returns a lot of useful information while you work. If "bug 1565" comes up during your work, it'll fetch information in dashboard about the bug without needing you to click on a bug link. Microsoft is working on the same thing, called "implicit query" or some such. Look at the Windows Longhorn screenshots so far... It looks like they are taking the classic IE information sidebar and altering it to work in this way.
Wonderful. Another/. headline: "Combinddesktop uses XFce rather than the more popular KDE". Yet, of course, XFce uses gtk+, the screenshots ( http://cobind.com/desktop.html ) show firebird and GNOME/gtk+ apps.
"It's going to take a corporation to step up and unify this effort in order to gain mass acceptance."
Reminds me of bits I read in ESR's new book.... UNIX devotees expected... then hoped... then made wish against wish that one of the major corporations would save UNIX during the 80s. They saw no alternatives. For most of them, the possibility of a successful, open-source operating system such as Linux coming along was never on the radar screen.
Comments like the one above aren't mean-spirited or meant to detract, it's just that the majority of computer users are used to their desktop interfaces being dictated to them by corporate vendors.... There's no need for a single, unified Linux desktop, in my opinon. It's just many of us have been groomed to expect that the goal of a successful desktop is domination over other desktops, thanks in no small part to Microsoft's conditioning of the general public. There's a reason the start button has a Windows icon in it... They want their brand to visible, on-screen, gathering your attention and support, at any time you look at your screen.
It's a bit odd that this article wasn't posted to/. sooner, as most people first noticed it when it made osnews almost a week ago.
Many BrainShare attendees have already dismissed this as a badly written article, as it combines statements from Novell about their desire to see a unified Linux desktop (see one of the worst examples of tech reporting in years) with rumors and rampant speculation. There is no basis of truth in the heise article.
I'm sure Novell will send out someone with authority in due time to stomp this out, but this is just what I've heard so far.
Re:GNOME 2.6 view from a software engineer.
on
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hello, oGALAXYo.
Nice to see you using the "worked on GNOME for 5 years and got ticked off" line, it makes it much easier to put together posts you've made on "osnews.com". Haven't seen you posting much there lately, but I assume that's only because you've been banned there.
How long did you have this rant stored on your copy of notepad... er, I mean, whatever text editor comes with MorphOS? Why did you post as an AC? I've got nothing personal against you, but man.... I've got to call a cheese a cheese.
A repost... any new articles?
on
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is a repost of an article submitted by the author and posted by Taco.... I wonder if any newer articles about this topic have been posted since? Personally, I doubt we will see too much more from article-writers until GNOME is packaged up by the major distros...
Even though, admittedly, this looks is a joke post, I couldn't help but think this the moment I noticed the article: "I don't really need a programming language that hates Catholic, can't grasp the realities of free-market economics, and is determined to write-in Howard Dean on the 2004 elections ballots..."
Well, here in the real world, when customers sign up to use stuff like an online product support site, they are asked to provide and e-mail address and passively agree to get e-mail mailings. Many of them are PAYING CUSTOMERS. Just because you are sending regular e-mail to paying customers does not mean it is not spam.
"We regularly send out email that our members have agreed to receive."
The problem:
"The only problem is, we have found that most of the time the AOL users are reporting our email as spam on accident!"
They may have agreed to recieve it, but that in no way means that they are making a mistake by marking it spam. They've answered their own question: Stop sending out e-mail on a regular basis.... The only regular mailing that I welcome is the GNOME weekly summary.
I should have also mentioned that all of the fill and stroke specifications could be easily avoided with CSS and simply specifying a style for that path instead.
SVG does what you want, and XML makes it managable...
Full disclosure, I did a SVG tileset for GNOME Mahjongg... To make a rectangle that fits your description, just add <rect x="0" y="0" width="50" height="50" fill="#0000FF" stroke-width="5">... Too bloated? Try a path: I think <path fill="#0000FF" strike-width="5" d="M0 0H50V50H0Z"> would work...
As far as XML goes, I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful xmllint is in what I do with SVG, how nice it is to be able to automate the creation of certain SVGs with perl scripts, and the aid provided by typical tools such as sed. Most of us have not yet even started to exploit CSS. Anyway, doing the same in a non-xml format, to me, would be a nightmare.
It makes sense if you want to combine e-mail with phone service and to roll out voice-recognition services based on DNS. Telling the phone "call rahga at virgin mobile" sounds at least somewhat cool to you, doesn't it?:)
Never thought about this before, but forget about just mobile phones... applying DNS(-ish stuff) along with Voice Recognition software, posibly off-site, would be nice to have eventually. Pick up the phone, "Call jacksmith at aol", phone number gets looked up and dialed.... Why on earth are we still using phone numbers?
I'm sorry, but that number is way too low.... I'm in a bit of a hospital/nursing town, and I'd say that at least half of the nurses-in-training I know have experimented with Kazaa and other music piracy services, and are usually loaded down with 5 to 10 bad (at least gator-level) spyware installs. The only thing that has infected that "community" around here worse would be smoking habits.
Cool, thanks, I had no idea that they reprinted Freespace 2. The $50 asking price is slightly insane, but if it comes down a good bit I may actually buy it.
Actually, quite a lot of people are playing old PC adventure games whenever technologically possible, and Quake I and II still have active TeamFortress and CTF communities, respecitively.
This is quite sad.... When you get right down to it, advernture games created solid customer bases for both Sierra On-Line and Lucasarts that provided enough support for those companies to experiment and often succeed with FPS and console games. The problem with those sit-down-and-play games is that they are much worse at building customer loyalty. The largest draw that Sierra had, with Half-Life, has been stolen by the overambitious developers at Valve. While a number of Star Wars games are quite good, they've not helped LucasArts in customer loyalty since failing to follow up X-Wing Alliance.... I know of tons of people who would love the X-Wing concept to get a massive update for today's PC hardware.
I do see one bit of logic in what LucasArts is doing, and it's because they probably don't believe that the new game would surpass the original. Just look at the Monkey Island 1 and 2 compared to the rest of the series. However, I believe those flopped largely because of the teams and writers.... Whereas with this Sam & Max, I believe that Michael Stemmle and Steve Purcell were involved in some way.
Sorry, but in my case, it's true. I work for a small-ish "GIS company" that makes a name for itself by not being a traditional GIS company, but a knowledge company. We serve our customers by providing software that they need... but as I'm reminded all the time from the higher-ups, the value of the company is not really in the software, but in the employees. If all of the programmers suddenly disappeared, it would be practically impossible to replace them.
That said, they also use a lot of free and open source software internally (esp. bugzilla and apache), and see no problems with employees giving back.
"Senator Ashcroft is so far out of the mainstream that he has said citizens need to be armed in order to protect themselves against a tyrannical government"
There seems to be two schools of thought at work, one endorsing protection from the government, and the other endorsing protection by the government. I wish I knew which one was mainstream.
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Texas has a sales tax, but no income tax. We do not have personal income tax forms.
Article: Robertson's message said it will take time to shift to a new name, because Lindows has thousands of Web pages and 100-plus computer servers.
I'm sorry, but both of those numbers sound bogus, or the logic doesn't apply... If they are using database-backed dynamic pages, changing to a new name and domain should be rather easy.
On a related topic, at http://support.lindows.com/, the Knowledge Base they are using looks a like like ones I've seen in other sites, such as ximian's and Sierra's sites. I have no idea what the name of the software is though, and with my company wanting to deploy a knowledge base for their own software, I'd like to know which it is to save some research time.
The information is supposed to be viewed at a glance, off to the side, and potentially useful. It's not popping up on top of your work saying "This bug is blah blah blah".
One of the things I would love to see it do, for instance, is if it brought up contact information about a specifc person, I would love to see which time zone they live in and their local time.
Ever see dashboard? It takes information gathered during IRC, IM, web browsing, e-mail, and more, does a lot of backend cluepacket mojo, and returns a lot of useful information while you work. If "bug 1565" comes up during your work, it'll fetch information in dashboard about the bug without needing you to click on a bug link. Microsoft is working on the same thing, called "implicit query" or some such. Look at the Windows Longhorn screenshots so far... It looks like they are taking the classic IE information sidebar and altering it to work in this way.
Wonderful. Another /. headline: "Combinddesktop uses XFce rather than the more popular KDE". Yet, of course, XFce uses gtk+, the screenshots ( http://cobind.com/desktop.html ) show firebird and GNOME/gtk+ apps.
"It's going to take a corporation to step up and unify this effort in order to gain mass acceptance."
Reminds me of bits I read in ESR's new book.... UNIX devotees expected... then hoped... then made wish against wish that one of the major corporations would save UNIX during the 80s. They saw no alternatives. For most of them, the possibility of a successful, open-source operating system such as Linux coming along was never on the radar screen.
Comments like the one above aren't mean-spirited or meant to detract, it's just that the majority of computer users are used to their desktop interfaces being dictated to them by corporate vendors.... There's no need for a single, unified Linux desktop, in my opinon. It's just many of us have been groomed to expect that the goal of a successful desktop is domination over other desktops, thanks in no small part to Microsoft's conditioning of the general public. There's a reason the start button has a Windows icon in it... They want their brand to visible, on-screen, gathering your attention and support, at any time you look at your screen.
It's a bit odd that this article wasn't posted to /. sooner, as most people first noticed it when it made osnews almost a week ago.
Many BrainShare attendees have already dismissed this as a badly written article, as it combines statements from Novell about their desire to see a unified Linux desktop (see one of the worst examples of tech reporting in years) with rumors and rampant speculation. There is no basis of truth in the heise article.
I'm sure Novell will send out someone with authority in due time to stomp this out, but this is just what I've heard so far.
Hello, oGALAXYo.
Nice to see you using the "worked on GNOME for 5 years and got ticked off" line, it makes it much easier to put together posts you've made on "osnews.com". Haven't seen you posting much there lately, but I assume that's only because you've been banned there.
How long did you have this rant stored on your copy of notepad... er, I mean, whatever text editor comes with MorphOS? Why did you post as an AC? I've got nothing personal against you, but man.... I've got to call a cheese a cheese.
This is a repost of an article submitted by the author and posted by Taco.... I wonder if any newer articles about this topic have been posted since? Personally, I doubt we will see too much more from article-writers until GNOME is packaged up by the major distros...
Even though, admittedly, this looks is a joke post, I couldn't help but think this the moment I noticed the article: "I don't really need a programming language that hates Catholic, can't grasp the realities of free-market economics, and is determined to write-in Howard Dean on the 2004 elections ballots..."
Well, here in the real world, when customers sign up to use stuff like an online product support site, they are asked to provide and e-mail address and passively agree to get e-mail mailings. Many of them are PAYING CUSTOMERS. Just because you are sending regular e-mail to paying customers does not mean it is not spam.
Let's look at this again... The situation:
"We regularly send out email that our members have agreed to receive."
The problem:
"The only problem is, we have found that most of the time the AOL users are reporting our email as spam on accident!"
They may have agreed to recieve it, but that in no way means that they are making a mistake by marking it spam. They've answered their own question: Stop sending out e-mail on a regular basis.... The only regular mailing that I welcome is the GNOME weekly summary.
You'll have to download and install the latest of the librsvg series, at least librsv-2.7.0
I should have also mentioned that all of the fill and stroke specifications could be easily avoided with CSS and simply specifying a style for that path instead.
SVG does what you want, and XML makes it managable...
... Too bloated? Try a path: I think <path fill="#0000FF" strike-width="5" d="M0 0H50V50H0Z"> would work...
Full disclosure, I did a SVG tileset for GNOME Mahjongg... To make a rectangle that fits your description, just add <rect x="0" y="0" width="50" height="50" fill="#0000FF" stroke-width="5">
As far as XML goes, I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful xmllint is in what I do with SVG, how nice it is to be able to automate the creation of certain SVGs with perl scripts, and the aid provided by typical tools such as sed. Most of us have not yet even started to exploit CSS. Anyway, doing the same in a non-xml format, to me, would be a nightmare.
It makes sense if you want to combine e-mail with phone service and to roll out voice-recognition services based on DNS. Telling the phone "call rahga at virgin mobile" sounds at least somewhat cool to you, doesn't it? :)
I mentioned this later, but my thoughts... Just use voice recognition /w DNS. Hit a button, "Call rahga at virgin mobile", call goes through....
Never thought about this before, but forget about just mobile phones... applying DNS(-ish stuff) along with Voice Recognition software, posibly off-site, would be nice to have eventually. Pick up the phone, "Call jacksmith at aol", phone number gets looked up and dialed.... Why on earth are we still using phone numbers?
:)
I wonder if I'll be marked as a troll for this.
Make sure to go back and pick up gtk+-2.4.0 (as well as glib and pango updates) which may be released by the time you are done compiling. :)
I'm sorry, but that number is way too low.... I'm in a bit of a hospital/nursing town, and I'd say that at least half of the nurses-in-training I know have experimented with Kazaa and other music piracy services, and are usually loaded down with 5 to 10 bad (at least gator-level) spyware installs.
The only thing that has infected that "community" around here worse would be smoking habits.
Cool, thanks, I had no idea that they reprinted Freespace 2. The $50 asking price is slightly insane, but if it comes down a good bit I may actually buy it.
Actually, quite a lot of people are playing old PC adventure games whenever technologically possible, and Quake I and II still have active TeamFortress and CTF communities, respecitively.
This is quite sad.... When you get right down to it, advernture games created solid customer bases for both Sierra On-Line and Lucasarts that provided enough support for those companies to experiment and often succeed with FPS and console games. The problem with those sit-down-and-play games is that they are much worse at building customer loyalty. The largest draw that Sierra had, with Half-Life, has been stolen by the overambitious developers at Valve. While a number of Star Wars games are quite good, they've not helped LucasArts in customer loyalty since failing to follow up X-Wing Alliance.... I know of tons of people who would love the X-Wing concept to get a massive update for today's PC hardware.
I do see one bit of logic in what LucasArts is doing, and it's because they probably don't believe that the new game would surpass the original. Just look at the Monkey Island 1 and 2 compared to the rest of the series. However, I believe those flopped largely because of the teams and writers.... Whereas with this Sam & Max, I believe that Michael Stemmle and Steve Purcell were involved in some way.
Sorry, but in my case, it's true. I work for a small-ish "GIS company" that makes a name for itself by not being a traditional GIS company, but a knowledge company. We serve our customers by providing software that they need... but as I'm reminded all the time from the higher-ups, the value of the company is not really in the software, but in the employees. If all of the programmers suddenly disappeared, it would be practically impossible to replace them.
That said, they also use a lot of free and open source software internally (esp. bugzilla and apache), and see no problems with employees giving back.
"Senator Ashcroft is so far out of the mainstream that he has said citizens need to be armed in order to protect themselves against a tyrannical government"
There seems to be two schools of thought at work, one endorsing protection from the government, and the other endorsing protection by the government. I wish I knew which one was mainstream.