Although I agree with you that/. != Freshmeat, the announcement here on/. is OTOH a good thing. It is the final release candidate, and this will get more people testing it. Maybe one of those people testing it, finds a "showstopper" which then will get fixed before the final release.
I will certainly be downloading it ASAP and test it to see if I can find any bugs.
The European Parliament are soon (in November) going to decide whether Europe should change the current patent laws and thereby making software patents a reality in Europe too.
There is a Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe here - please sign it, if you haven't already.
What is really great about Adomo's "solution" is that it is all released under the GPL. That means that every company or private person who would like to make a "client" (for whatever perpose you can think of), can do so - without thinking about paying Adomo royalties!
To get something like this widespread, you have to set a standard (like nearly anything else). If you create a good open standard, you will have a much better chance of succes and with Adomo's aproach, I think they could have a winner.
The guy you talk about could also make his own private appliances (isn't that what it is called) for this standard.
I really hope they succed, because I would like to have a such a system at home. Before such a system becomes reality, MP3 (and soon Ogg Vorbis instead!) will NOT be of much use IMHO, simply because I don't play music from my PC very often - I do it from my stereo.
Adomo is taking a client/server aproach, where the clients is small wireless stations for everything you would can imagine. It uses Linux and the protocols, etc. is, of course, going to be released under the GPL.
Sun has just "announced" J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition), which they of course hope will be the next standard.
The standard is called the mobile information device profile (MIDP) and will be in mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, LG Electronics, Nextel and NTT DoCoMo.
According to the latest Netcraft report, Hotmail.com now runs Windows 2000:
"
Hotmail Windows 2000 migration completes without incident
The migration of the www.hotmail.com front end from FreeBSD to Windows 2000 seems to be complete with all recent requests from the site served from Windows 2000 machines and no evidence of any FreeBSD/Apache machines remaining in the load balancing pool. Microsoft will be pleased with this as the migration was completed inless than a month, without any reports of service disruption, and the site has previously been a beacon for open source evangelism."
That's correct, as it is now, but I think the main reason is because the technology just hasn't evolved enough yet.
First, not many people has a fat pipe to the internet and therefore downloading a lot of MP3's (or hopefully soon.ogg files) just isn't very convenient.
Second, most peolpe listen to music on their stereo, not on their computer (better sound, easier, etc.) and most peolpe doesn't have a "connection" from their computer to the stereo. If you have a "connection" from you computer to your stereo, then you still can't control it with your stereo or your remote, which, well sucks...
It has to be atleastas easy to use as existing technology (CD's), before it will be widely used.
Solutions to this is on the way though. Take a look at what Adomo is doing.
LinuxPlanet has a pretty good article about the default security in all or most Linux distributions here.
It is about the lack of default security in most distros.
Why is it that most distributions isn't made secure by default? (like OpenBSD, which I have heard is pretty secure by default)
Is it convinience? (just turn on "everything", then the user don't have to bother with starting any services)
I know that you can choose the security level when installing the Mandrake distro - does anybody know how secure it is if you choose "paranoid" (the most secure), or which level you have to choose to make it pretty secure by default?
The benifit of this being a linux box and not Irix....
I, a huge linux vs. irix advocate, strugle to see why this would be good. Most of the apps that I would use are built for Irix first and then Linux (like Maya's renderer). I can see where others might have custom apps to use this, but the code would probably port to Irix just as easily as it would to Linux on the MIPS.
If they can get Linux to run on most of their machines, then they will get access to all (or most of) the Linux stuff and they don't have to maintain the kernel for themselves (which I believe is not a cheap thing to do)
Futhermore wouldn't it be nice to have an "IT-infrastructure" with only one OS to support - no Irix, AIX, Windows, etc. to support - only Linux.
If this is completely wrong, then it is most likely because I don't know much about system administration or Linux/Unix generally:-)
IBM has just held an installfest which they talk about, and they talk with Peter McCaffrey, System/390 Program Director and it looks like IBM is pretty serious about it.
They also talks about what classes of applications performs well on their mainframe and about possible customers.
=== Cut === General system improvements: o FHS compliant packaging of files /usr/man is now/usr/share/man /usr/doc is now/usr/share/doc /usr/info is now/usr/share/info See http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ for more information === Cut ===
What about the rest? Ex. KDE - where does that get installed?
Read this article for more info about what I'm talking about.
GNOME is even more difficult to install. I don't know anyone who has figured out what to download to get it working and the only "easy install tool" means you have to foolishly trust an online shell script via "lynx -source" and run it as root.
You obviously haven't tried the Helix GNOME Preview 2! It is *very* easy to install and update - you should try it out! You will not be disappointed - I garantee!
The report focus on a lot of smaller details which have been improved, such as the minimum font size in the browser etc.
These things may not seem very important at first, but many of them, you will be using several times every day and this "stuff" are therefore very important to the overall desktop experience.
YEP - it's pretty cool, but it is a very small car - not one I would like to drive far away in.
IMHO the Lupo is actually more cool, because it only uses normal fuel.
There is a little review (for you Americans) of the car here.
In Denmark 1 litre of gas now costs more than 1$ - which makes this a very attractive car - problem is that you simply can't get in Denmark (you can't even order it!). VW produce very few each day and can't follow the demand at all.
but you can get its cousin, the Golf, which is an awesome car for its price.
Hmm...it is absolutely not one of the cheapest cars you can get in Denmark (all cars in Denmark are *very* expensive because of the "taxes you have to pay). Generally VW cars is somewhat more expensive than most of the others in the same class. A Passat costs maybe 7000$ more than a similar Pegeout 406 or Ford Mondeo, and I don't think a Passat is that much better.
Theres a petition out there to ask the KDE and GNOME teams for a way to make KParts and Bonobo compatible...
I know, but it is far out in the future. Bonobo is (AFAIK) Corba, which the KDE-team decided not to use, because KParts is much faster and much of the functionality in Corba isn't needed.
I absolutely disagree. The apps should be independent of the desktop-environment used. Otherwise, they would be part of it. Or even better, the apps shouldn't require a desktop-environment to be runnig at all.
You are absolutely correct - the apps should be independent of the desktop environment, as they can be. But the apps use some functionality in the desktop (ex. bonobo in GNOME), and such "things" should be standards, shared between the different environments.
Sadly that is far from reality, so right now, I believe I'm right when saying that the apps is the most important thing.
But users of Qt and KDE should realize that the Troll Tech QPL license is bad for open source and for Linux. If Linux had been licensed like Qt, it would have never caught on. And if KDE succeeds at displacing other Linux desktops, it will largely spell the end of Linux as a competitive, open source client desktop operating system: if you have to pay Troll Tech under the conditions they require you to pay, as a developer, you might as well go with BeOS or Windows, pay less money, get more development tools, and (in the case of Windows) cover a much bigger market segment.
Since when do you have to pay Troll Tech for developing KDE applications?
It is impossible to say which or if any one of the two will "win", maybe they will both win and have about 50% of the desktop each.
But what about the opposite, if it was Qt which was "left in the dark" instead of GTK? Many people/developers don't like the GPL. Therefore I think it could harm Linux just as much. But right now both are (AFAIK) getting more users, so it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Personally I would like to see one desktop win soon (no matter what people say about choice), it is the applications that matters. If there only where one desktop (Gnome or KDE), there would be less "dublicate apps" as you have now, where you find many apps where the only diffences is the first letter ("Kapp" or "Gapp") and the functionality is mostly the same.
That actually limits your choice - if you had one desktop environment, you could choose whichever suits your needs best (without having to take desktop environments conditions in consideration). It would remove much of the "competition focus" from the desktop environmens to the apps. which I think would be a *Good thing*.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I fail to see that you loose much of a choice by having only one desktop environment. You will loose a lot of confusion and a bit of the competition between KDE and GNOME, but you will (IMHO) gain much more (and this will get me marked as flamebait:-).
KDE2 and GNOME uses different technologies for embedding applications - look at the upcomming Koffice and the Konqueror browser - you will (more or less) be able to embed all KDE2 applications objects in those, but not GNOME apps. It's the same the other way around.
What you says about Real Player just confirms my theory - what if a lot of other software products does the same, but only in KDE?
It will give the user a lot more hassle if they choose GNOME, and therefore most users will choose KDE where it "just works out of the box".
I don't have any preferences - I started using KDE because it was much more mature and stable than GNOME, but right now I'm using the latest Helix GNOME as my default desktop. I'm waiting for KDE2, which could be a winner, alone because of Konqueror - if the browser part is fast and actually useful, then they may have a winner.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I agree with you that /. != Freshmeat, the announcement here on /. is OTOH a good thing. It is the final release candidate, and this will get more people testing it. Maybe one of those people testing it, finds a "showstopper" which then will get fixed before the final release.
I will certainly be downloading it ASAP and test it to see if I can find any bugs.
This is *serious*!
The European Parliament are soon (in November) going to decide whether Europe should change the current patent laws and thereby making software patents a reality in Europe too.
There is a Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe here - please sign it, if you haven't already.
What is really great about Adomo's "solution" is that it is all released under the GPL. That means that every company or private person who would like to make a "client" (for whatever perpose you can think of), can do so - without thinking about paying Adomo royalties!
To get something like this widespread, you have to set a standard (like nearly anything else). If you create a good open standard, you will have a much better chance of succes and with Adomo's aproach, I think they could have a winner.
The guy you talk about could also make his own private appliances (isn't that what it is called) for this standard.
I really hope they succed, because I would like to have a such a system at home. Before such a system becomes reality, MP3 (and soon Ogg Vorbis instead!) will NOT be of much use IMHO, simply because I don't play music from my PC very often - I do it from my stereo.
Adomo is taking a client/server aproach, where the clients is small wireless stations for everything you would can imagine. It uses Linux and the protocols, etc. is, of course, going to be released under the GPL.
Link to adomo.com
A good preview of the technology can be found here.
Sun has just "announced" J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition), which they of course hope will be the next standard.
The standard is called the mobile information device profile (MIDP) and will be in mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, LG Electronics, Nextel and NTT DoCoMo.
Story on java.sun.com.
Story on News.com
Check Adomo.com, which makes something similar. ZDnet has an excellent article describing it.
According to the latest Netcraft report, Hotmail.com now runs Windows 2000:
" Hotmail Windows 2000 migration completes without incident The migration of the www.hotmail.com front end from FreeBSD to Windows 2000 seems to be complete with all recent requests from the site served from Windows 2000 machines and no evidence of any FreeBSD/Apache machines remaining in the load balancing pool. Microsoft will be pleased with this as the migration was completed inless than a month, without any reports of service disruption, and the site has previously been a beacon for open source evangelism."
That's correct, as it is now, but I think the main reason is because the technology just hasn't evolved enough yet.
.ogg files) just isn't very convenient.
First, not many people has a fat pipe to the internet and therefore downloading a lot of MP3's (or hopefully soon
Second, most peolpe listen to music on their stereo, not on their computer (better sound, easier, etc.) and most peolpe doesn't have a "connection" from their computer to the stereo. If you have a "connection" from you computer to your stereo, then you still can't control it with your stereo or your remote, which, well sucks...
It has to be atleastas easy to use as existing technology (CD's), before it will be widely used.
Solutions to this is on the way though. Take a look at what Adomo is doing.
LinuxPlanet has a pretty good article about the default security in all or most Linux distributions here.
It is about the lack of default security in most distros.
Why is it that most distributions isn't made secure by default? (like OpenBSD, which I have heard is pretty secure by default)
Is it convinience? (just turn on "everything", then the user don't have to bother with starting any services)
I know that you can choose the security level when installing the Mandrake distro - does anybody know how secure it is if you choose "paranoid" (the most secure), or which level you have to choose to make it pretty secure by default?
The benifit of this being a linux box and not Irix.... I, a huge linux vs. irix advocate, strugle to see why this would be good. Most of the apps that I would use are built for Irix first and then Linux (like Maya's renderer). I can see where others might have custom apps to use this, but the code would probably port to Irix just as easily as it would to Linux on the MIPS.
:-)
If they can get Linux to run on most of their machines, then they will get access to all (or most of) the Linux stuff and they don't have to maintain the kernel for themselves (which I believe is not a cheap thing to do)
Futhermore wouldn't it be nice to have an "IT-infrastructure" with only one OS to support - no Irix, AIX, Windows, etc. to support - only Linux.
If this is completely wrong, then it is most likely because I don't know much about system administration or Linux/Unix generally
> Discovered 32 cpus on 16 nodes
;-)
Why does my kernel not discover something like that?
In Europe, UMTS licenses are being "launched" at the moment.
UMTS should deliver 2Mbps wireless.
LinuxPlanet has just postet an article about this here.
IBM has just held an installfest which they talk about, and they talk with Peter McCaffrey, System/390 Program Director and it looks like IBM is pretty serious about it.
They also talks about what classes of applications performs well on their mainframe and about possible customers.
This I see as a nice thing:
/usr/man is now /usr/share/man
/usr/doc is now /usr/share/doc
/usr/info is now /usr/share/info
=== Cut ===
General system improvements:
o FHS compliant packaging of files
See http://www.pathname.com/fhs/ for more information
=== Cut ===
What about the rest? Ex. KDE - where does that get installed?
Read this article for more info about what I'm talking about.
GNOME is even more difficult to install. I don't know anyone who has figured out what to download to get it working and the only "easy install tool" means you have to foolishly trust an online shell script via "lynx -source" and run it as root.
You obviously haven't tried the Helix GNOME Preview 2!
It is *very* easy to install and update - you should try it out! You will not be disappointed - I garantee!
The report focus on a lot of smaller details which have been improved, such as the minimum font size in the browser etc.
These things may not seem very important at first, but many of them, you will be using several times every day and this "stuff" are therefore very important to the overall desktop experience.
Incredible - Yahoo actually beated /. in the competition "Who makes the article with most broken links*".
:-)
* Broken links include links which requires username and password.
YEP - it's pretty cool, but it is a very small car - not one I would like to drive far away in.
IMHO the Lupo is actually more cool, because it only uses normal fuel.
There is a little review (for you Americans) of the car here.
In Denmark 1 litre of gas now costs more than 1$ - which makes this a very attractive car - problem is that you simply can't get in Denmark (you can't even order it!). VW produce very few each day and can't follow the demand at all.
but you can get its cousin, the Golf, which is an awesome car for its price.
Hmm...it is absolutely not one of the cheapest cars you can get in Denmark (all cars in Denmark are *very* expensive because of the "taxes you have to pay).
Generally VW cars is somewhat more expensive than most of the others in the same class. A Passat costs maybe 7000$ more than a similar Pegeout 406 or Ford Mondeo, and I don't think a Passat is that much better.
Right now they don't:
Validate Slashdot.org HTML.
The Register has the story here.
Theres a petition out there to ask the KDE and GNOME teams for a way to make KParts and Bonobo compatible...
I know, but it is far out in the future. Bonobo is (AFAIK) Corba, which the KDE-team decided not to use, because KParts is much faster and much of the functionality in Corba isn't needed.
I absolutely disagree. The apps should be independent of the desktop-environment used. Otherwise, they would be part of it. Or even better, the apps shouldn't require a desktop-environment to be runnig at all.
You are absolutely correct - the apps should be independent of the desktop environment, as they can be. But the apps use some functionality in the desktop (ex. bonobo in GNOME), and such "things" should be standards, shared between the different environments.
Sadly that is far from reality, so right now, I believe I'm right when saying that the apps is the most important thing.
But users of Qt and KDE should realize that the Troll Tech QPL license is bad for open source and for Linux. If Linux had been licensed like Qt, it would have never caught on. And if KDE succeeds at displacing other Linux desktops, it will largely spell the end of Linux as a competitive, open source client desktop operating system: if you have to pay Troll Tech under the conditions they require you to pay, as a developer, you might as well go with BeOS or Windows, pay less money, get more development tools, and (in the case of Windows) cover a much bigger market segment.
Since when do you have to pay Troll Tech for developing KDE applications?
It is impossible to say which or if any one of the two will "win", maybe they will both win and have about 50% of the desktop each.
:-).
But what about the opposite, if it was Qt which was "left in the dark" instead of GTK? Many people/developers don't like the GPL. Therefore I think it could harm Linux just as much. But right now both are (AFAIK) getting more users, so it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Personally I would like to see one desktop win soon (no matter what people say about choice), it is the applications that matters.
If there only where one desktop (Gnome or KDE), there would be less "dublicate apps" as you have now, where you find many apps where the only diffences is the first letter ("Kapp" or "Gapp") and the functionality is mostly the same.
That actually limits your choice - if you had one desktop environment, you could choose whichever suits your needs best (without having to take desktop environments conditions in consideration).
It would remove much of the "competition focus" from the desktop environmens to the apps. which I think would be a *Good thing*.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I fail to see that you loose much of a choice by having only one desktop environment. You will loose a lot of confusion and a bit of the competition between KDE and GNOME, but you will (IMHO) gain much more (and this will get me marked as flamebait
KDE2 and GNOME uses different technologies for embedding applications - look at the upcomming Koffice and the Konqueror browser - you will (more or less) be able to embed all KDE2 applications objects in those, but not GNOME apps.
It's the same the other way around.
What you says about Real Player just confirms my theory - what if a lot of other software products does the same, but only in KDE?
It will give the user a lot more hassle if they choose GNOME, and therefore most users will choose KDE where it "just works out of the box".
I don't have any preferences - I started using KDE because it was much more mature and stable than GNOME, but right now I'm using the latest Helix GNOME as my default desktop.
I'm waiting for KDE2, which could be a winner, alone because of Konqueror - if the browser part is fast and actually useful, then they may have a winner.