Things your distro won't install, but are good
on
Ximian's Back
·
· Score: 1
Another cool thing: according to this screenshot (I apologise for contributing further to Ximian's/.ing but I have no mirroring capability), you can get the XD installer to install acroread, RealPlayer, flash, Java and the Ximian (MS web) fonts.
There was a recent distro (I forget which one) that, as its first screen, had a "Download all the things we can't distribute" menu. I have recently gone through the "Install all the Mozilla plugins for Red Hat 9" stage, and even with years of Linux experience, come up with things I've had to strace and dependencies you can't be sure about and Sun Java vs Blackdown Java etc...
This is another step forward for Everyperson Linux. If I couldn't get RP working, even as just a browser plugin, I'm sure that my parents or non geek friends couldn't!
But this does point out the obvious gap between 'Distributions that want to be Free' and 'People who want to make Linux work for the real world.' It's nice to see there are members of both camps. At the end of the day Ximian want the corporate world to buy their desktop, and I'm sure they will.
Ximian Announces Ximian Desktop 2 to Provide Complete Enterprise Desktop for Linux
Major Upgrade Offers Full Application Suite, Enhanced Usability and Robust Windows Interoperability to Enable Enterprise Adoption
BOSTON, MA -- June 2, 2003: Ximian, Inc., the leading provider of desktop and server solutions enabling enterprise Linux adoption, today announced Ximian® Desktop 2, a major new version of its popular Linux desktop software installed by over 1,500,000 users worldwide. Ximian Desktop 2 provides a complete productivity application suite, breakthrough usability features, and seamless Windows interoperability to enable organizations to easily and affordably deploy Linux desktops in mixed Windows/Linux environments. Innovations include an intuitive interface, the Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org for Microsoft Office file-compatible documents, one-click Windows network navigation and easy printer setup to reduce training and support costs. Ximian will demonstrate Ximian Desktop 2 publicly at the Jupiter Media Enterprise Linux Forum in Santa Clara, Calif. on June 5 and 6. The product will be available for purchase and electronic installation the week of June 9.
"Our goal with Ximian Desktop 2 has been to enable enterprise customers to cost-effectively adopt and support Linux desktops," said Nat Friedman, co-founder and vice president of product development at Ximian. "Ximian Desktop 2 is the culmination of direct feedback from strategic design partners including over 25 enterprise customers and business partners worldwide. The result is an enterprise-ready Linux desktop that is easy to use, supports existing Windows infrastructure, and is affordable to manage."
"Siemens Business Services is seeing increasing interest from customers for Linux desktop solutions, especially in the public sector," said Duncan McNutt, senior project manager at Siemens Business Services in Germany. "Our evaluations show that Ximian Desktop 2 can be a great fit for Linux workstation deployments. Its familiar interface for Windows users, full application suite, integration with Windows environments and centralized management through Red Carpet(TM) Enterprise(TM) can help reduce support costs for enterprise customers." Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org Highlights Application Suite
Based on the open source GNOME 2.2 project, Ximian Desktop 2 delivers a tightly integrated suite of applications with robust support for Windows file formats, networks and standards. It starts with the Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org, a significantly enhanced version of the open source productivity suite, which lets users create, edit and save Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint 97/2000/XP documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Ximian improvements to OpenOffice.org include default Microsoft Office file formats, 800 new icons, a host of user interface enhancements, GNOME desktop theme and font consistency, and the ability to seamlessly browse, open and save files on remote file systems.
Ximian Desktop 2 also features Ximian Evolution(TM) 1.4, the new version of the award-winning email and personal information management application that can optionally be integrated with Microsoft Exchange 2000 and other messaging and collaboration servers (see related release, "Ximian Announces New 1.4 Versions of Ximian Evolution, Connector for Microsoft Exchange..."). It also includes the Mozilla-based Galeon web browser along with Microsoft Windows metric compatible fonts and common browser plug-ins to provide access to and faithful rendering of virtually all web content. Ximian Desktop 2 additionally provides built-in Linux software updating with the new Red Carpet 2.0 application.
Other capabilities include:
* drag and drop CD burning
* buil
The real thing that sets Ximian Desktop 2 apart...
on
Ximian's Back
·
· Score: 5, Informative
.. is going to be Evolution 1.4 and Ximian's OpenOffice.org for GTK2.
That, coupled with GIMP 1.3 (the screenshots only appear to show GTK1 GIMP 1.2), will mean that GNOME (specifically GTK2) has all the productivity applications to finally get a consistent look across everything, something Linux has not been able to do until now.
Unlike KDE, they are not all being provided by the KDE project - Mozilla, for example, is GTK2 native now.
The real coup for Ximian will be getting GTK2 into OO.o - if they can do this, then the last minor inconsistencies will only be in applications like mplayer, realplay and xmms, and we've all expected media players to look different for years.
Ximian's starting to look/.'d, but by all accounts this could be out very very soon. And even if you don't like the desktop, Evolution 1.4 and OO.o Ximian Edition will knock your socks off.
A slightly different idea that I was considering today works as follows.
Take the Tagged Message Delivery Agent, a system that will send a challenge message to anyone it doesn't know (isn't in the whitelist), which you have to reply to.
Then change it so anything allowed through on the whitelist is added to the "Not Spam" category, and anything that is challenged is passed through the filter. If it passes, it doesn't get challenged (but also doesn't get added automatically to Not Spam), and if it _doesn't_ pass, then it gets challenged.
Few, if any, false positives, and challenges not sent where they don't need to be. Sounds foolproof enough...
What we really need is a decent tested 'backports of new things to Woody' archive, for people who need a new feature, but also need mission critical stability.
There was a bug in Moz 1.4a (never actually searched for it so I can't give a link) but it would cause Moz to crash whenever I'd try and click on a radio button on a web page.
So, I downloaded a nightly from a couple of weeks ago, and it was great. Divine. No problems at all.
1.4b comes out, and then straight back into crashes at weird places (this time: if I tell/. to display some comments as nested, then reload, it will die without fail. Not sure what causes it - if I get time I'll try and figure out.)
But -- why are nightlies more stable than releases? Or perhaps that is best reworded as "Why aren't releases at least as stable as nightlies?"
A set of tools, such as a data-aware user forms interface, a reporting system and an application server, which provide a development framework for enterprise information technology professionals to write or customise data-aware applications and deploy them effectively across large or small organisations. The GNUe platform boasts an open architecture and easy maintenance. It gives users a modular system and freedom from being stuck with a single-source vendor. GNUe supports multi-language interfaces and non-ASCII character sets.
Looks like this could be the tool that eventually lets you build quick and easy applications on Linux, as Access does on Windows.
There have been tests run (I'm sorry that I don't have the links) that demonstrate a computer with an optimised kernel/libc6 and i386 everything else runs only about 10% slower than a computer with optimised everything.
Gentoo, while a great idea, isn't _that_ much faster than other distributions once this fact is taken into account.
Remember, 20% of the code is run 80% of the time, and you get your big performance increase by optimising that.
Paul McFedries got sent a letter and posted it to the American Dialect Society list for discussion and to find out what people recommended he do. I hardly call that panicing.
Someone else, presumably someone on that list, posted it to/., and then everyone else started making armchair assumptions.
By the time I got to the wordspy page, it referenced Google as being a trademark of google.com.
The main point is that the two cats, whilst being genetically identical at an embrionic stage, look totally different.
Identical twins are that - identical - as much as you treat them differently you can look at them and see the resemblance fairly instantly. These two cats -look- like any two random cats. You wouldn't even pick them as parent and child.
You'd expect a clone and its 'parent' to act differently, sure, but the point that Hollywood wants you to believe is a clone will 'look' identical.
And there's no way of doing this from Linux. You either get a Win2K server, or you define policy on _EVERY_ local machine, which kinda defies the point.
If you have a way of pushing policy to Windows clients from a Samba DC on Linux you will make at least one sysadmin very very happy.
1. Debian (who are a very very big player in the Linux world and currently my distribution of choice) have a very very good package manager and even better distribution system for it (apt). LSB, on the other hand, have decided on Red Hat's RPM as their package of choice. This means either Debian somehow has to be extended (some would read crippled) to work properly with RPM, and then on top of that they have to realign their directory structures to go in line with LSB standards, which will confuse a lot of Debian stalwarts.
Windows installers can copy quite fine with the fact that the system directory on Windows 2000 is \WINNT and the system directory on Windows XP is \WINDOWS. It shouldn't be hard to write Linux installers that can do the same thing - even just looking at environment variables should leave you right 9 times out of 10?
Debian can produce a LSB-compliant distro, but they may choose not to. Or not for a while anyway.
2. Has anyone suggested to Richard Stallman that Free software is renamed Freedom software, so people instantly have a better idea of what it's about?
OSDir.com: What has the debian-sf crew been able to contribute?
Tim: They have replaced most of the strings on the site using the internationalization support that we built into the code, but never really used. So they've got complete translations in English, French, Spanish and Korean. And of course, a really slick and easy installation process.
That almost sounds like the movie "The Thirteeth Floor", a great movie which got put into the B-movie category because it came out in the same year as a movie with much the same theme, and more money. The Thirteenth Floor tells us that humans created a virtual world - a 'simulation' - only to find out that they were simply characters in a simulation themselves. Or, if you follow, this particular simulation that humans of the future indulge in trips into, was the first to actually develop simulation technology themselves.
That's a scary thought. As soon as we can simulate life (any life) completely, we have no way of proving we are not a simulation being run by a higher life form.
Some countries have a free range 2nd-level name space (.to,.it), where others have a regulated list of 2LD's (.uk,.au). Some are even more regulated than that apparently (.us).
It bothers me that the USA think.com == America. And because of this the world thinks it. Within countries like New Zealand, our local domain (CCtld,.nz) is very important. I have no desire to register a.com,.net etc because what I do is not on a global scale and I like the connection it gives me to my home country.
DNS was designed to be a diverse tree structure over possible areas of interest. Within this there are two approaches - break things down into categories (2LD's, co, org, net, mil etc), or create as many 2LD's as possible.
When.maori.nz was recently created, there was a large uproar because of the racial sensitivity of the issue (For those who don't know, approximately 20% of NZers are descended from the indigenous Maori people). The vote passed with 90+% support but no-one I know voted 'yes' for it and the only interest most people had in it was potentially offensive vanity domains and/or cybersquatting. A lot of people thought that the domain simply increases racial segregation between Maori and Pakeha ("white NZers") - which is exactly the thing that Maori are claiming to fight against.
It might be argued that there are less geeks in NZ than Maori people, but
the percentage of geeks on the Internet is (of course) far larger than the percentage of Maori people
"geek" as a term doesn't just have to relate to computer users
There has been some discussion on the Domain Name Commissioner's mailing list (Does anyone else find it funny that we have a DNC? Sounds like Commissioner Gordon. Quick, fire the DNS signal!) about if geeks get.geek.nz, musos will want.muso.nz etc. I'd like to think of it more that "geek" has become a term of endearment meaning someone who is passionate about their subject. You can get computer geeks, sure, but you also get music geeks, gardening geeks, law geeks, whatever. If there is someone you consult for their wisdom before you engage in something, chances are they could be classified as a geek and they could be given.music.geek.nz.
This article is smack on. The reason that the NZ Network Operators' Group are pushing for.geek.nz, while with some "It's pretty cool" reasoning behind it, is because in general the feeling was adding.maori.nz and.bank.nz was a Bad Thing To Do (tm).
While it is obvious that the gap between Pakeha and Maori with access to internet needs to be addressed to bring us together as a society, I don't think that segregation of the name space will help achieve this at all..bank.nz would serve approximately 12 institutions and create issues (should private lending institutions be allowed a.bank.nz - an easier example might be '.paypal.bank.nz') that outweigh it's usefulness. All banks, corporate entities, already have.co.nz domains. Would they have given them up if they were given.bank.nz?.geek.nz, to me, is a bit of a sly protest at this. Hopefully the moratorium on new domains will address this with a policy on what they want to achieve with the DNS structure in New Zealand, but what's done is done.
Oh, and thank you everyone for the sheep jokes, they were most appreciated. Have you ever BEEN to New Zealand?
I just read the article and that stanza annoyed me enough to come to the comments and post something much the same as what you had here...
What has Netscape's open-sourcedness and the Mozilla product done?
Advanced Web browsing on non Microsoft platforms by several light years.
Forced people to start expecting security from Microsoft.
Provided a great cross platform toolkit for web developers and application programmers, for free, as well as being the basis for many other browsers.
It might not have made much of an in-road as a Windows desktop browser, but then again you're fighting Internet Explorer. You're never going to win overnight.
I predict Netscape is never going to go anywhere with the Mozilla source. However, Mozilla has a bright future, and it's importance shouldn't be downplayed. When computers get Linux on the desktop, it's going to be Mozilla they are running.
Look Slashdot, if you're going to post duplicates, and then edit them a few comments later to say "Yep, it's a dupe", why not just delete the article?
The discussion has happened and can continue to happen in the original article. A few people will know you fouled up - but who cares, this way everyone knows you fouled up by duping and aren't doing anything remotely editorial at all!
Whilst we're on the subject, remember that old PCs are still very useful (especially for Grandma, or as a drone off a more powerful server of some sort ala XTerm/terminal servers) and although Microsoft are going to stop supporting these products (since when did anyone ever turn to Microsoft for support anyway?), they're not going to go away.
We're still going to be asked to fix problems for Nana's computer, and we're still going to install Windows 95 on Pentium-class PCs for people who aren't quite ready for Linux on the desktop.
Does this mean changes in copyright restrictions on these products? I'm fairly sure that under New Zealand copyright law, you're allowed to make copies if the company doesn't make a reasonable effort to sell you the product, and if they're not supporting it I'm sure they won't be selling it any more.
(looks at framed MS-DOS 6 box on the wall) The disks come in a "You're important to us, please register" plastic bag. How ironic.
Slashdot Mirror
Another cool thing: according to this screenshot (I apologise for contributing further to Ximian's /.ing but I have no mirroring capability), you can get the XD installer to install acroread, RealPlayer, flash, Java and the Ximian (MS web) fonts.
There was a recent distro (I forget which one) that, as its first screen, had a "Download all the things we can't distribute" menu. I have recently gone through the "Install all the Mozilla plugins for Red Hat 9" stage, and even with years of Linux experience, come up with things I've had to strace and dependencies you can't be sure about and Sun Java vs Blackdown Java etc...
This is another step forward for Everyperson Linux. If I couldn't get RP working, even as just a browser plugin, I'm sure that my parents or non geek friends couldn't!
But this does point out the obvious gap between 'Distributions that want to be Free' and 'People who want to make Linux work for the real world.' It's nice to see there are members of both camps. At the end of the day Ximian want the corporate world to buy their desktop, and I'm sure they will.
These things
http://ximian.com/images/screenshots/desktop/
After beating through the slasdotting, Ximian Desktop 2 will be released June 9, 2003
A OO.o screenshot
Heres the announcement...
Ximian Announces Ximian Desktop 2 to Provide Complete Enterprise Desktop for Linux
Major Upgrade Offers Full Application Suite, Enhanced Usability and Robust Windows Interoperability to Enable Enterprise Adoption
BOSTON, MA -- June 2, 2003: Ximian, Inc., the leading provider of desktop and server solutions enabling enterprise Linux adoption, today announced Ximian® Desktop 2, a major new version of its popular Linux desktop software installed by over 1,500,000 users worldwide. Ximian Desktop 2 provides a complete productivity application suite, breakthrough usability features, and seamless Windows interoperability to enable organizations to easily and affordably deploy Linux desktops in mixed Windows/Linux environments. Innovations include an intuitive interface, the Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org for Microsoft Office file-compatible documents, one-click Windows network navigation and easy printer setup to reduce training and support costs. Ximian will demonstrate Ximian Desktop 2 publicly at the Jupiter Media Enterprise Linux Forum in Santa Clara, Calif. on June 5 and 6. The product will be available for purchase and electronic installation the week of June 9.
"Our goal with Ximian Desktop 2 has been to enable enterprise customers to cost-effectively adopt and support Linux desktops," said Nat Friedman, co-founder and vice president of product development at Ximian. "Ximian Desktop 2 is the culmination of direct feedback from strategic design partners including over 25 enterprise customers and business partners worldwide. The result is an enterprise-ready Linux desktop that is easy to use, supports existing Windows infrastructure, and is affordable to manage."
"Siemens Business Services is seeing increasing interest from customers for Linux desktop solutions, especially in the public sector," said Duncan McNutt, senior project manager at Siemens Business Services in Germany. "Our evaluations show that Ximian Desktop 2 can be a great fit for Linux workstation deployments. Its familiar interface for Windows users, full application suite, integration with Windows environments and centralized management through Red Carpet(TM) Enterprise(TM) can help reduce support costs for enterprise customers."
Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org Highlights Application Suite
Based on the open source GNOME 2.2 project, Ximian Desktop 2 delivers a tightly integrated suite of applications with robust support for Windows file formats, networks and standards. It starts with the Ximian Edition of OpenOffice.org, a significantly enhanced version of the open source productivity suite, which lets users create, edit and save Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint 97/2000/XP documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Ximian improvements to OpenOffice.org include default Microsoft Office file formats, 800 new icons, a host of user interface enhancements, GNOME desktop theme and font consistency, and the ability to seamlessly browse, open and save files on remote file systems.
Ximian Desktop 2 also features Ximian Evolution(TM) 1.4, the new version of the award-winning email and personal information management application that can optionally be integrated with Microsoft Exchange 2000 and other messaging and collaboration servers (see related release, "Ximian Announces New 1.4 Versions of Ximian Evolution, Connector for Microsoft Exchange..."). It also includes the Mozilla-based Galeon web browser along with Microsoft Windows metric compatible fonts and common browser plug-ins to provide access to and faithful rendering of virtually all web content. Ximian Desktop 2 additionally provides built-in Linux software updating with the new Red Carpet 2.0 application.
Other capabilities include:
* drag and drop CD burning
* buil
.. is going to be Evolution 1.4 and Ximian's OpenOffice.org for GTK2.
/.'d, but by all accounts this could be out very very soon. And even if you don't like the desktop, Evolution 1.4 and OO.o Ximian Edition will knock your socks off.
That, coupled with GIMP 1.3 (the screenshots only appear to show GTK1 GIMP 1.2), will mean that GNOME (specifically GTK2) has all the productivity applications to finally get a consistent look across everything, something Linux has not been able to do until now.
Unlike KDE, they are not all being provided by the KDE project - Mozilla, for example, is GTK2 native now.
The real coup for Ximian will be getting GTK2 into OO.o - if they can do this, then the last minor inconsistencies will only be in applications like mplayer, realplay and xmms, and we've all expected media players to look different for years.
(Though, you could go get RhythmBox..)
Ximian's starting to look
A slightly different idea that I was considering today works as follows.
Take the Tagged Message Delivery Agent, a system that will send a challenge message to anyone it doesn't know (isn't in the whitelist), which you have to reply to.
Then change it so anything allowed through on the whitelist is added to the "Not Spam" category, and anything that is challenged is passed through the filter. If it passes, it doesn't get challenged (but also doesn't get added automatically to Not Spam), and if it _doesn't_ pass, then it gets challenged.
Few, if any, false positives, and challenges not sent where they don't need to be. Sounds foolproof enough...
What we really need is a decent tested 'backports of new things to Woody' archive, for people who need a new feature, but also need mission critical stability.
There was a bug in Moz 1.4a (never actually searched for it so I can't give a link) but it would cause Moz to crash whenever I'd try and click on a radio button on a web page.
/. to display some comments as nested, then reload, it will die without fail. Not sure what causes it - if I get time I'll try and figure out.)
So, I downloaded a nightly from a couple of weeks ago, and it was great. Divine. No problems at all.
1.4b comes out, and then straight back into crashes at weird places (this time: if I tell
But -- why are nightlies more stable than releases? Or perhaps that is best reworded as "Why aren't releases at least as stable as nightlies?"
Or for that matter, Duke Nukem Whenever?
GNU Enterprise.
(one of the 3 listed overviews:)
A set of tools, such as a data-aware user forms interface, a reporting system and an application server, which provide a development framework for enterprise information technology professionals to write or customise data-aware applications and deploy them effectively across large or small organisations. The GNUe platform boasts an open architecture and easy maintenance. It gives users a modular system and freedom from being stuck with a single-source vendor. GNUe supports multi-language interfaces and non-ASCII character sets.
Looks like this could be the tool that eventually lets you build quick and easy applications on Linux, as Access does on Windows.
Not all the world runs on your time clock. It's been April Fools Day for almost 16 hours at my time of posting...
There have been tests run (I'm sorry that I don't have the links) that demonstrate a computer with an optimised kernel/libc6 and i386 everything else runs only about 10% slower than a computer with optimised everything.
Gentoo, while a great idea, isn't _that_ much faster than other distributions once this fact is taken into account.
Remember, 20% of the code is run 80% of the time, and you get your big performance increase by optimising that.
Are they really "leaks" if it is open-source software?
Paul McFedries got sent a letter and posted it to the American Dialect Society list for discussion and to find out what people recommended he do. I hardly call that panicing.
/., and then everyone else started making armchair assumptions.
Someone else, presumably someone on that list, posted it to
By the time I got to the wordspy page, it referenced Google as being a trademark of google.com.
I think you're barking up the wrong tree here.
The song is called "The Sounds of Silence", and refers to the little things that you hear when it's 'silent', but of course it isn't really.
Because you can turn off OWA and it still works.
The main point is that the two cats, whilst being genetically identical at an embrionic stage, look totally different.
Identical twins are that - identical - as much as you treat them differently you can look at them and see the resemblance fairly instantly. These two cats -look- like any two random cats. You wouldn't even pick them as parent and child.
You'd expect a clone and its 'parent' to act differently, sure, but the point that Hollywood wants you to believe is a clone will 'look' identical.
And there's no way of doing this from Linux. You either get a Win2K server, or you define policy on _EVERY_ local machine, which kinda defies the point.
If you have a way of pushing policy to Windows clients from a Samba DC on Linux you will make at least one sysadmin very very happy.
1. Debian (who are a very very big player in the Linux world and currently my distribution of choice) have a very very good package manager and even better distribution system for it (apt). LSB, on the other hand, have decided on Red Hat's RPM as their package of choice. This means either Debian somehow has to be extended (some would read crippled) to work properly with RPM, and then on top of that they have to realign their directory structures to go in line with LSB standards, which will confuse a lot of Debian stalwarts.
Windows installers can copy quite fine with the fact that the system directory on Windows 2000 is \WINNT and the system directory on Windows XP is \WINDOWS. It shouldn't be hard to write Linux installers that can do the same thing - even just looking at environment variables should leave you right 9 times out of 10?
Debian can produce a LSB-compliant distro, but they may choose not to. Or not for a while anyway.
2. Has anyone suggested to Richard Stallman that Free software is renamed Freedom software, so people instantly have a better idea of what it's about?
Quoth the article:
:)
OSDir.com: What has the debian-sf crew been able to contribute?
Tim: They have replaced most of the strings on the site using the internationalization support that we built into the code, but never really used. So they've got complete translations in English, French, Spanish and Korean. And of course, a really slick and easy installation process.
Does anyone else find this extremely funny?
That almost sounds like the movie "The Thirteeth Floor", a great movie which got put into the B-movie category because it came out in the same year as a movie with much the same theme, and more money. The Thirteenth Floor tells us that humans created a virtual world - a 'simulation' - only to find out that they were simply characters in a simulation themselves. Or, if you follow, this particular simulation that humans of the future indulge in trips into, was the first to actually develop simulation technology themselves.
That's a scary thought. As soon as we can simulate life (any life) completely, we have no way of proving we are not a simulation being run by a higher life form.
It bothers me that the USA think
DNS was designed to be a diverse tree structure over possible areas of interest. Within this there are two approaches - break things down into categories (2LD's, co, org, net, mil etc), or create as many 2LD's as possible.
When
It might be argued that there are less geeks in NZ than Maori people, but
- the percentage of geeks on the Internet is (of course) far larger than the percentage of Maori people
- "geek" as a term doesn't just have to relate to computer users
There has been some discussion on the Domain Name Commissioner's mailing list (Does anyone else find it funny that we have a DNC? Sounds like Commissioner Gordon. Quick, fire the DNS signal!) about if geeks getThis article is smack on. The reason that the NZ Network Operators' Group are pushing for
While it is obvious that the gap between Pakeha and Maori with access to internet needs to be addressed to bring us together as a society, I don't think that segregation of the name space will help achieve this at all.
Oh, and thank you everyone for the sheep jokes, they were most appreciated. Have you ever BEEN to New Zealand?
What has Netscape's open-sourcedness and the Mozilla product done?
- Advanced Web browsing on non Microsoft platforms by several light years.
- Forced people to start expecting security from Microsoft.
- Provided a great cross platform toolkit for web developers and application programmers, for free, as well as being the basis for many other browsers.
It might not have made much of an in-road as a Windows desktop browser, but then again you're fighting Internet Explorer. You're never going to win overnight.I predict Netscape is never going to go anywhere with the Mozilla source. However, Mozilla has a bright future, and it's importance shouldn't be downplayed. When computers get Linux on the desktop, it's going to be Mozilla they are running.
Look Slashdot, if you're going to post duplicates, and then edit them a few comments later to say "Yep, it's a dupe", why not just delete the article?
The discussion has happened and can continue to happen in the original article. A few people will know you fouled up - but who cares, this way everyone knows you fouled up by duping and aren't doing anything remotely editorial at all!
Renegade was a very popular BBS package derived from the Telegard 2.7 source, developed by a Canadian programmer named Cott Lang.
What amuses me is to look at the 'official Renegade BBS site' and #1 Google hit, which still reads
April 5/00
The Renegade page is currently getting its update. It'll be finished by the weekend at the latest.
Whilst we're on the subject, remember that old PCs are still very useful (especially for Grandma, or as a drone off a more powerful server of some sort ala XTerm/terminal servers) and although Microsoft are going to stop supporting these products (since when did anyone ever turn to Microsoft for support anyway?), they're not going to go away.
We're still going to be asked to fix problems for Nana's computer, and we're still going to install Windows 95 on Pentium-class PCs for people who aren't quite ready for Linux on the desktop.
Does this mean changes in copyright restrictions on these products? I'm fairly sure that under New Zealand copyright law, you're allowed to make copies if the company doesn't make a reasonable effort to sell you the product, and if they're not supporting it I'm sure they won't be selling it any more.
(looks at framed MS-DOS 6 box on the wall) The disks come in a "You're important to us, please register" plastic bag. How ironic.