I seriously beg to differ. Netscape 4.7x is still my primary mail client after years of use. I have not run across a single other client that serves my needs nearly as well. I have looked too!
On Windows I tried Outlook out for about a weeks worth of use. Back to Netscape for a far superior handling of address auto fill. This is especially true when your addresses are coming in off an LDAP server. Tried Calypso, Eudora, Pegasus, and all of them missed some crucial feature I've grown to rely upon Netscape's Messenger for.
On the Unix side of the house the story isn't much better. Mostly using KMail instead of Netscape due to the fact the fonts are a lot more readable. Feature wise, it to just doesn't hold up to Messenger. The other *nix mail clients I've tried couldn't hold a candle to most of the cheesey shareware mail apps over on Windows. Every once in a while I really do like the ability to bold some text, or work a little HTML into my E-Mail. Nothing stable outside of Netscape can do that at this point.
I'm starting to really like the looks of Mozilla's Mail, but damn is it memory hungry. Still, I'd LOVE to have an E-Mail only client that offered the basic functions of Netscape's without all the rest of the browser thrown in.
Now I'll just sit back and wait for a troll to suggest that I need to go and code this.
What version of OS was Microsoft pushing when Mozilla got started anyway? I'm thinking it was Windows 98 first edition. In the mean time they've had 3 major upgrades to that, the last of which was a total overhaul.
Sorry, just something that occurred to me as I was reading this. As Mozilla has been working on this browser, it's primary environment has been a moving target. One of the downsides of how long this is taken I'd imagine.
Let Israel fend for themselves, and not only will the terrorists leave us alone, but Israel will probably do a better job without our help.
Wouldn't that very thing acknowledge a victory for the terrorists? I'm not a big advocate of Israel, but by gosh now is the time more than ever to stand behind it. To not do so gives these cowards a victory they do not deserve.
In exactly what area? Mind you, I'm talking about development, not web serving. I should also mention before going into my rant here that I would dearly love your statement to hold up. Typing this from a FreeBSD desktop now.
Exactly which Linux application is a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or even GoLive? Which Linux app supports syntax hi-lighting half as well as HomeSite or JEdit(available on Linux as well)? How about graphics support comparable to Photoshop, Imageready, or Fireworks? Any FTP clients out there that match up feature and stability wise to FTP Voyager or even Dreamweaver's file manager?
To date I've seen attempts at trying to implement portions of the above, but none that are production quality kind of apps. Perhaps I'm gonna get slammed down to troll for stating this, but as someone who does web development I just don't see any truly compelling applications on the *nix side of the house. In my mind, this is FAR more critical for the future of *nix on the desktop then any office suite, Quicken or Outlook clone.
The market right now doesn't need another platform for the "average" user. It desperately needs one for those who look to publish, create, and develop web content. So long as better apps for this are available for Microsoft's platform, none of the efforts going into the *nix desktop will effect market share one bit. Not even the justice department can make that happen.
It would have been better to develop a simpler, more rock solid, legitimate _alternative_, rather than what comes across as a wannabe clone that misses the mark.
I agree with the basic premise here, but it simply can't be done. In order to be able to import Office documents the application has to be able to support the features and functions of Office applications. Just the nature of the beast. Sure, they could write a word processor that looked more like Wordpad than Word, but then it wouldn't be able to display a.doc file at all from Office 2000.
At the moment it seems that the word processor you're looking for is in work now under KOffice. Heck, KWord is actually usable these days!
Ok so name one feature that Microsoft Word has that StarOffice doesn't
I got to thinking the same thing when a friend of mind needed a spreadsheet app installed on his laptop. He had Word 2000 preinstalled, and had saved a bunch of files with it, and all I had was a copy of Office 97. I figured this would be a prefect place to install StarOffice for his spreadsheet needs.
Turns out what he really needed was the Invoice template for Excel. No such quick templates come pre-installed with StarOffice, and I really didn't have the time to go looking. He ended up getting a copy of Office 2000 after all.
Mind you, this user was actually pretty happy with StarOffice, for what he used of it. Definitely not a power user. It was what would seem to be a relatively simple thing to a more advanced user became a major stumbling block for this one. There's a lot of focusing on these kinds of little things that Microsoft has done that keeps users in the fold. Competing apps need to keep this in mind as they atempt to make converts.
The policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies
Okay, I've asked this question once before of someone spouting this same line. Just where exactly is this "policy"? In talking to a number of developers on the various FreeBSD lists I have never gotten that impression. They're busy folks, and they can be rather short and to the point with comments, but certainly no more so than on Linux lists.
As someone coming from the world of Windows, I started out with RedHat. I was totally convinced at that time that everything I had heard about Unix being too damn hard to learn was true. Fate stepped in and crashed my drive, which is when I decided to try out FreeBSD. Never looked back! As a relative newbie to Unix, I found it FAR simpler to use.
Then I got to looking to put a *nix onto a laptop I've got here. Thought I'd try out Mandrake on it just to see. Very pretty installer, but it didn't know how to talk to my NIC. So I bought a new NIC it did know how to talk to. Then I was having all kinds of weird problems with the GUI network settings. Kept reseting my IP to something different. I decided to have a look at the config files themselves to see if I could edit them manually. Oh God, talk about a sea with no bottom! Mandrake off, FreeBSD on.
FreeBSD was able to talk just fine to the NIC card that Mandrake wasn't. I was able to install more up to date software through the ports tree than I was through that god awful slow RPM database. Lastly, the system config files were short, to the point, and readable by a human without a 3 inch thick book next to me.
In all fairness I did have some problems with recent changes to the pccard code that went into the STABLE branch. That code has mostly been fixed up now, as I'm typing this on the very laptop in question. The fact that I'm up and running now was largely due to direct help from one of the FreeBSD developers on the mobile mailing list.
I want to see this mythical policy! I want to see the comments that show how FreeBSD folks aren't concerned with installation issues, helping newbies get started, or any of the other FUD you're tossing out here. Quoting from a FreeBSD 2.0 bug sheet is not backing you up.
It also makes porting to a new platform dead easy, you can simply use whatever graphical toolkit is already existent on that platfrom, and just write a compatibility layer.
But it's not using native widgets on any platform. A massive amount of time has been spent recreating open dialogs, scroll bars, drop down menus, and all manner of UI objects. My objection to this is that they could have had a dozen native front ends together in the time it's taken to recreate all the various tid bits that Microsoft, Apple, Gtk, and Qt (to name a few) have already done. Galeon was put together with a team of 9 folks in a very short time. K-Meleon for Windows has a team of 4 guys.
In all fairness, I do happen to like the "idea" of what XUL represents. The ability to take what started as a way to do skins and turn it into a platform of it's own has a lot of appeal. The only thing that I'm questioning here is the timing. CSS and XML should have been #1 priorities, with XUL slated for Mozilla 2.0.
The delay here as Mozilla goes about reinventing everything that looks round will prove to be more crippling than a simple technical problem. First off, it's ruined Netscape's name in the browser market for everyone I've talked to who was silly enough to install 6.0. Secondly, it's put everyone else in the field in a catch up position to anything that IE does. It's going to take a LOT more than optimization to recover what was lost.
As a FreeBSD and NT user who designs web pages, layout and font sizes really matter to me. Although I mainly use Konqueror under FreeBSD, it has far more to do with the simpler interface than it's rendering engine. To date, I haven't see any other browser display layout, fonts, and deal with Javascript better than Mozilla.
With that being said, it's still quite apparent that Mozilla is an 800lbs. gorilla when it comes to memory and CPU usage. It has gotten a LOT better in the last few builds. If these kinds of optimization issues were worked out by the next release, I would happily convert myself and others that rely on my judgement on over to Mozilla.
Thing is, even as I type this on ye olde Netscape 4.78 after browsing around to several web pages, NT is reporting about 17M of memory allocated. Just to start Mozilla is 22M, and I haven't gone anywhere yet. To further illustrate the point, I went and opened up the newsgroup readers in each, subscribed to a group, and then pulled in all the headers of that group. NS 4.7 comes in at around 18M after this operation. Mozilla at 40.5M. Not going to bother listing numbers off of FreeBSD as I'm still running 0.9.3 on there.
Personally, it's just frustrating as heck to watch. There we have this Gecko engine was does a truly beautiful job of properly rendering a web page regardless of the platform. Exactly what a browser should do! Wrapped around this is a monster of a UI that even to this day still feels like I'm trying to interact with some bad Java applet. Oh sure it is pretty, but the reaction time even on a 1.2Ghz machine is noticeable.
Looking back, I'm finding myself in total agreement with critics I disagreed with before over one point. XUL. The Mozilla folks repeatedly told us all how much longer it would take to develop this project if they stuck with native OS widgets. I just have to wonder how much time has been wasted while the resources of the Mozilla project could have had Win32, Mac, Qt, GTK versions out the door by now? Certainly projects like Galeon have shown this could have been done.
Mozilla made a wrong turn early on (IMHO) with XUL. Perhaps projects like Galeon can be the saving grace. Problem is, those projects are out on the fringe, while IE is dead center of the web universe defining the standards across the board. Mozilla is FAR more than just a browser at this point. It's the last chance gasp at taking control of web standards and the Internet itself from Microsoft.
You wonder: is Mac OS X the largest unix distro? Go count the figures. Microsoft has a 90 percent marketshare, Apple has 5 percent and all the Unix versions (AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, ***BSD and the many linuxes) combined have another 5 percent marketshare.
Now for something really scary. If OSX is considered a "Unix" due to it's incorporating BSD tools, then what about other OS's doing the same. Oh man, NT uses BSD's TCP/IP stack! AHHHHH! Microsoft has this market too!
* Reality Check *
Okay, before getting flamed into tiny ashes, I do realize there's more to being Unix then the individual tools. I just had to share my scary thought for the day. Just try sleeping nice tonight now!
Yet he felt it necessary to "test" the hole one day later.
Throughout your post you are basing your assumption that he already knew there was a security hole on the server. How exactly does he know that? Do you send letters to webmasters hosting on NT's at random to let them know about security flaws? Unless he were to attempt a write back to the server just excactly how does he know that he can? If he can't, there's no security hole to report.
The guy uses Front Page for crying out loud! We're not talking about Ueber Geek here.
Even if it did, it might very well be possible to get nearly Flash like effects from SVG, VBScript, and some SMIL. MS already has streaming audio via Media Player. I'm not meaning to suggest it would be a pretty solution, but it might just be possible for them to implement within the browser itself without a plug in.
Of course, when you get into Shockwave kinda stuff the bar is raised quite a bit.
A book written for newbies on how to install FreeBSD makes no sense because the policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies.
Apparently I missed something in the handbook. Where exactly is there some "policy" that says anything about not catering to newbies?
Now from what I have read of the FreeBSD community's thoughts, they couldn't care less about such concerns.
Okay, with that level of FUD going on I've got to see some quotes, or at very least some names attached to these "thoughts". Especially with all the efforts now going in to make the port installations even easier, and a new version of sysinstall coming in 4.4, again to make things easier. All the mailing lists are archived on the FreeBSD site, on Google, and lots of stuff sitting on the Usenet right now. Finding these "thoughts" shouldn't be too awfully hard.
By gosh, Microsoft would be proud. Have you considered a job in PR?
I have found FreeBSD to be far more straightforward than the Linux distros I've dealt with.
Will you shut up already! Geesh, you're gonna have all these Linux folks blocking up the FreeBSD servers if you keep talking like that. Where the heck are you going to cvsup from if the entirety of the Linux community starts in on it. Think man!
Ummm, woohoo, uh, Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Yay! Root root, hip hip, and all that. Nothing to see here, move along.
With FreeBSD I have to edit/etc/rc.conf or tinker with ifconfig. Even then I need to make sure my default gateway is set just right. Making such changes can be problematic for a novice. As a part of a popular desktop, it must be easier.
Okay, he did mention the most of the right files and all. Still, he managed to install FreeBSD without ever looking at "sysinstall"? Okay, maybe sysinstall doesn't have all the transparent glossiness there, but by gosh, all the basic network settings can be done right there. A user need not ever know that rc.conf exists!
With this router I can also run DHCP to auto-configure network systems on my private network. Within moments I had connectivity to the internet.
Again, DHCP is an option right in sysinstall. You do not have to go hunting through a 3 foot high stack of how-to's and man pages. This is right within the installer, which you can call back at any time.
With BSD systems you may not even have driver support and therefore have no sound at all.
I've successfuly got going 4 different sound cards with FreeBSD. One of which was built on to the motherboard, two were PCI, and the last was ISA. Each one needed the very same tweak to the kernel. Okay, kernel tweaking may not be for the newbie, but it did work each time.
I won't even get into the troubles this guy had with getting the compiler to work. Again, the real FreeBSD would have been WAY easier.
You're right - mhz rating has NOTHING to do with it.
Wow, lots of folks drinking deeply into the Apple marketing kool-aid. You're right to a point, frequency of the clock alone will not always win out. Thing is, for most computing tasks it really does make all the difference. Try running a long batch routine into a database, or crunch a large set of integer numbers. MHz beats optimization every time.
Where optimization plays a factor is in specific tasks. The Motorola processor handles Photoshop tasks quite well, but is far weaker than a PIII when it comes to gaming. You could run through a stack of various apps on both machines and you'd most likely find that each chip is tuned in for performance on some, and not others. Across the board for generic applications, it's still damn hard to beat raw clock speed.
Have you used OS X? Do you have any idea of its features
I have installed OSX on a G3 box. Most confusing damn thing I've ever done. Spent an hour or more futzing with it until I finally broke down and called Apple tech support. Turned out that I needed to boot up OS9 from CD to create an exactly 8gig partition. This tid bit wasn't mentioned in any of the docs that came with it. Then even the tech support guy didn't know if I needed to make that 8gig partition 8000Meg or 8192Meg to account for proper kilobyte size.
Well, I ended up just making it 8000Meg and it finally installed. Eye candy everywhere. Looked a LOT like KDE meets Win2k to me, with the added doo dad of having a task bar that warps. Yawn.
The user I was setting this up for does graphics work, oddly enough, and has a requirement for a plain gray background. After literally going through every single control panel on this OS several times I was totally unable to locate how in the heck you get rid of the blue swirlly background. Oh yeah, easy as pie.
I'm sure there's a way to get the background to change, but should it require this much effort? Heck, the real FreeBSD isn't anywhere near this difficult to get a GUI up and running. That, and it at least knows how to partition a hard drive all by itself. I know a lot of Apple die hards are screaming troll, but from my personal experience OS9, KDE, Gnome, Win9x, Win2k are all a LOT easier to figure out for a new user than what I saw in OSX.
About the only concept in use that I did like was the use of drop shadows instead of off color window borders. The shadows are a bit too large, but the concept is cool. Outside of that, I guess I'll have a look at 10.1 when it comes out to see if it's worth the time to muck with.
And people who hack other machines to do spoofing usually get to root if they get any normal user account.
Ahh, now that is a good point. On a Unix box you must hack into the root account before gaining access to the raw sockets. On Windows, there's no need to do anything of the sort. Heck, today it'd take you about 15 minutes to work up a hack in MS Word that can write any darn thing it likes into your system registry, no restrictions.
What is scary here is not access to raw sockets. The issue here is unrestricted, no protections, any.scr.bat.doc.vbs or any of the other alphabet soup of scripting engines on Windows will have full rights to do anything! Couple this with the known history concerning the security of products such as Outlook and IE, and you're putting together the formula for a disaster.
Heck, Microsoft has already commented on this very issue. They are already blaming those nasty virus authors for the coming up screw ups. (my apologies for not having a link, read this one a couple of months back.) Even they know it's going to be bad, but yet they are still moving forward with this.
Lastly, keep in mind that we're not talking about NT or 2000 here. Both of those OS's have the ability to run as either an admin or a regular user with limited abilities. We're talking about a version of 2000 that has had it's securities stripped so as to be compatible with ME (aka, Win 95 Version 5).
It's just that it makes me cringe whenever I hear people say that we broke off because of "unfair" taxation.
Makes me cringe too. Makes me damn near go into convulsions when someone trivializes why the colonies revolted against their own government. Taxation was almost a non-issue. What brought the colonial congress together on that hot July day to sign a pact that risked everything these men had was mostly the loss of their rights as British citizens. Everything else stemmed off of that, to include complaining about taxes.
Of course, by the time July rolled around there was already armed conflict. This conflict wasn't about taxes, or many of the other high end concerns that were expressed in the Declaration of Independance. British soldiers had come to confiscate the weaponry of the civilian popluace to try and disarm any chance of revolt. As it turned out, that was the trigger that set off the actual conflict.
There's a reason why the 2nd Amendment is the 2nd one on that list, and not the 10th.
...kinds of numbers that the Win32 market currently does, they'll start porting again. I don't believe that the Linux market is quite there yet.
That's my whole point. No applications from companies like Autodesk (especially taking into account ALL the other companies they've purchased) and you don't have a Linux desktop as a major force in the market place. As much as I enjoy KDE, there are simply too many applications that I require that simply don't have a *nix equivalent. Free or otherwise. The applications available from market leaders is going to dictate where things are at in the next 2 to 3 years.
Going back in time a bit, Microsoft fully appreciated this notion. They wanted to get folks off of DOS and on to Windows. Most of the major players at that time were quite content with their DOS applications, as were the bulk of the users (as hard as that may be to believe). What they needed was a killer application. They found that in Excel. The users came, and along with them the applications. Those vendors that didn't move to Windows early died. Anyone else recall just how prominent dBase was prior to windows? How about WordStar, or even Lotus 123?
At the moment, Linux enjoys 2 killer applications. Apache and Samba. On the desktop there's nothing that really qualifies as "killer" in the way Excel was for those army of DOS users. The strange thing is that even without a killer app the tide is shifting a bit. What's needed today is for someone like an Adobe or Autodesk to push the water over the dam.
I said $25k, but that's the price for the fullblown package which would be useful for fully animated features
I stand corrected on that point. To further clarify what all I was getting at, I didn't mean to knock Maya or the prices they charge. I don't know a darn thing about them, as you might have already assumed. I guess when ya get right down to it, my tangent was the point. The lack of mid-level professional graphics applications, and the hope that the folks who lead in this regard might start into porting apps.
First off, thank you for a really great reply to my post. I was kind of expecting the flame throwers to go on high. A couple of comments just the same...
...people who dont like to pay for software would only worsen this situation.
While I wouldn't agree with their conclusions, I can see where this paranoia comes from. I have to wonder whether this stems from the popularity of their software, or the cost of it. Even still, the perception from a corporate point of view is interesting. How does a free operating system overcome this?
KDE or Gnome, or perhaps just straight up X, etc etc
Simple enough, just support KDE, because that's what I use!:) Seriously though, for applications that are heavily graphics intensive I can imagine the confusion of what to go with here. It seems that a major player actually developing these kinds of apps would throw the Linux desktop hard to either Qt or Gtk? I doubt they'd do very well with just X as there would be a need to get data between different applications, which is exactly the point of KDE and Gnome. I don't think anyone else wants to go down the Mozilla road of reinventing everything that makes up the underlying system.
How long would one continue to thrive if the other had all the really cool graphics applications designed to support it? It'd sure be a bigger boost to either then anything IBM or Sun could manage.
...data-output to printers...
How bad is this situation in reality today? Are there any RIP servers for high end printing? I rather thought the printer driver issue was moving towards being a non-issue. Heck, I thought that was the whole point of the FSF in the first place!:)
Asked why we saw no AMD CPUs Leonard says, ``Linux on Intel provides a strong and consistent platform for the high-end workstation market across several vendors. That's why we're not pursuing things like Linux on Alpha, FreeBSD or proprietary UNIX solutions.'' Leonard adds
What in the wide wide world of sports does Alpha or FreeBSD support have to do with AMD? Mind you, I don't personally care what they run as a processor, I was just curious as the reasons for going with an Intel solution. I would think that Athlons using DDR would really shine doing this kind of rendering work. Pretty much every benchmark I've seen for the Athlon has it screaming through intensive floating point operations. Especially on Linux.
Granted, the version of Maya required to do broadcast-quality work costs in the region of $25,000, but if you're doing broadcast-quality work, chances are you have that kind of budget.
Then again, maybe not. Your mentioning this reminded me of an article I had read in Wired a while back. Had to go through my stacks of mags to find it. Anyhow, this is the story of one fella who managed to produce some very cheap graphics that were film quality.
The sad part is that the bulk of his work was done on an NT box several years ago. If this same fella were to try and pull off the kind of work he did on NT back then with Linux today, he wouldn't have gotten anything done. He wouldn't have been able to afford it!
The point of my blabbering here is that there seems to be a number of nice apps filling in the low end of the spectrum for Linux. The Dreamworks article illustrates the fact that there's some serious porting going on at the upper end. What's missing is all that stuff in between those two extremes.
What I don't understand is why companies like Macromedia, Autodesk, and Adobe don't recognize the market niche that their product line would fill in? If any of them made moves to seriously support Linux, between their wide variety of products and market leadership, both Apple and Microsoft would be getting REALLY nervous about the desktop market. Just the sales to the entertainment industry alone would seem to justify the move.
Moving away from my tangent... $25,000 is a pretty steep investment for an independant studio. It'd be great to see Linux pushing the envelope in the mid to lower range movie projects as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a hint: They're not very good at it!
I seriously beg to differ. Netscape 4.7x is still my primary mail client after years of use. I have not run across a single other client that serves my needs nearly as well. I have looked too!
On Windows I tried Outlook out for about a weeks worth of use. Back to Netscape for a far superior handling of address auto fill. This is especially true when your addresses are coming in off an LDAP server. Tried Calypso, Eudora, Pegasus, and all of them missed some crucial feature I've grown to rely upon Netscape's Messenger for.
On the Unix side of the house the story isn't much better. Mostly using KMail instead of Netscape due to the fact the fonts are a lot more readable. Feature wise, it to just doesn't hold up to Messenger. The other *nix mail clients I've tried couldn't hold a candle to most of the cheesey shareware mail apps over on Windows. Every once in a while I really do like the ability to bold some text, or work a little HTML into my E-Mail. Nothing stable outside of Netscape can do that at this point.
I'm starting to really like the looks of Mozilla's Mail, but damn is it memory hungry. Still, I'd LOVE to have an E-Mail only client that offered the basic functions of Netscape's without all the rest of the browser thrown in.
Now I'll just sit back and wait for a troll to suggest that I need to go and code this.
What version of OS was Microsoft pushing when Mozilla got started anyway? I'm thinking it was Windows 98 first edition. In the mean time they've had 3 major upgrades to that, the last of which was a total overhaul.
Sorry, just something that occurred to me as I was reading this. As Mozilla has been working on this browser, it's primary environment has been a moving target. One of the downsides of how long this is taken I'd imagine.
Let Israel fend for themselves, and not only will the terrorists leave us alone, but Israel will probably do a better job without our help.
Wouldn't that very thing acknowledge a victory for the terrorists? I'm not a big advocate of Israel, but by gosh now is the time more than ever to stand behind it. To not do so gives these cowards a victory they do not deserve.
Linux dominates in the web development arena).
In exactly what area? Mind you, I'm talking about development, not web serving. I should also mention before going into my rant here that I would dearly love your statement to hold up. Typing this from a FreeBSD desktop now.
Exactly which Linux application is a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver, FrontPage, or even GoLive? Which Linux app supports syntax hi-lighting half as well as HomeSite or JEdit(available on Linux as well)? How about graphics support comparable to Photoshop, Imageready, or Fireworks? Any FTP clients out there that match up feature and stability wise to FTP Voyager or even Dreamweaver's file manager?
To date I've seen attempts at trying to implement portions of the above, but none that are production quality kind of apps. Perhaps I'm gonna get slammed down to troll for stating this, but as someone who does web development I just don't see any truly compelling applications on the *nix side of the house. In my mind, this is FAR more critical for the future of *nix on the desktop then any office suite, Quicken or Outlook clone.
The market right now doesn't need another platform for the "average" user. It desperately needs one for those who look to publish, create, and develop web content. So long as better apps for this are available for Microsoft's platform, none of the efforts going into the *nix desktop will effect market share one bit. Not even the justice department can make that happen.
It would have been better to develop a simpler, more rock solid, legitimate _alternative_, rather than what comes across as a wannabe clone that misses the mark.
.doc file at all from Office 2000.
I agree with the basic premise here, but it simply can't be done. In order to be able to import Office documents the application has to be able to support the features and functions of Office applications. Just the nature of the beast. Sure, they could write a word processor that looked more like Wordpad than Word, but then it wouldn't be able to display a
At the moment it seems that the word processor you're looking for is in work now under KOffice. Heck, KWord is actually usable these days!
Ok so name one feature that Microsoft Word has that StarOffice doesn't
I got to thinking the same thing when a friend of mind needed a spreadsheet app installed on his laptop. He had Word 2000 preinstalled, and had saved a bunch of files with it, and all I had was a copy of Office 97. I figured this would be a prefect place to install StarOffice for his spreadsheet needs.
Turns out what he really needed was the Invoice template for Excel. No such quick templates come pre-installed with StarOffice, and I really didn't have the time to go looking. He ended up getting a copy of Office 2000 after all.
Mind you, this user was actually pretty happy with StarOffice, for what he used of it. Definitely not a power user. It was what would seem to be a relatively simple thing to a more advanced user became a major stumbling block for this one. There's a lot of focusing on these kinds of little things that Microsoft has done that keeps users in the fold. Competing apps need to keep this in mind as they atempt to make converts.
The policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies
Okay, I've asked this question once before of someone spouting this same line. Just where exactly is this "policy"? In talking to a number of developers on the various FreeBSD lists I have never gotten that impression. They're busy folks, and they can be rather short and to the point with comments, but certainly no more so than on Linux lists.
As someone coming from the world of Windows, I started out with RedHat. I was totally convinced at that time that everything I had heard about Unix being too damn hard to learn was true. Fate stepped in and crashed my drive, which is when I decided to try out FreeBSD. Never looked back! As a relative newbie to Unix, I found it FAR simpler to use.
Then I got to looking to put a *nix onto a laptop I've got here. Thought I'd try out Mandrake on it just to see. Very pretty installer, but it didn't know how to talk to my NIC. So I bought a new NIC it did know how to talk to. Then I was having all kinds of weird problems with the GUI network settings. Kept reseting my IP to something different. I decided to have a look at the config files themselves to see if I could edit them manually. Oh God, talk about a sea with no bottom! Mandrake off, FreeBSD on.
FreeBSD was able to talk just fine to the NIC card that Mandrake wasn't. I was able to install more up to date software through the ports tree than I was through that god awful slow RPM database. Lastly, the system config files were short, to the point, and readable by a human without a 3 inch thick book next to me.
In all fairness I did have some problems with recent changes to the pccard code that went into the STABLE branch. That code has mostly been fixed up now, as I'm typing this on the very laptop in question. The fact that I'm up and running now was largely due to direct help from one of the FreeBSD developers on the mobile mailing list.
I want to see this mythical policy! I want to see the comments that show how FreeBSD folks aren't concerned with installation issues, helping newbies get started, or any of the other FUD you're tossing out here. Quoting from a FreeBSD 2.0 bug sheet is not backing you up.
It also makes porting to a new platform dead easy, you can simply use whatever graphical toolkit is already existent on that platfrom, and just write a compatibility layer.
But it's not using native widgets on any platform. A massive amount of time has been spent recreating open dialogs, scroll bars, drop down menus, and all manner of UI objects. My objection to this is that they could have had a dozen native front ends together in the time it's taken to recreate all the various tid bits that Microsoft, Apple, Gtk, and Qt (to name a few) have already done. Galeon was put together with a team of 9 folks in a very short time. K-Meleon for Windows has a team of 4 guys.
In all fairness, I do happen to like the "idea" of what XUL represents. The ability to take what started as a way to do skins and turn it into a platform of it's own has a lot of appeal. The only thing that I'm questioning here is the timing. CSS and XML should have been #1 priorities, with XUL slated for Mozilla 2.0.
The delay here as Mozilla goes about reinventing everything that looks round will prove to be more crippling than a simple technical problem. First off, it's ruined Netscape's name in the browser market for everyone I've talked to who was silly enough to install 6.0. Secondly, it's put everyone else in the field in a catch up position to anything that IE does. It's going to take a LOT more than optimization to recover what was lost.
Here's to hoping that it can recover.
As a FreeBSD and NT user who designs web pages, layout and font sizes really matter to me. Although I mainly use Konqueror under FreeBSD, it has far more to do with the simpler interface than it's rendering engine. To date, I haven't see any other browser display layout, fonts, and deal with Javascript better than Mozilla.
With that being said, it's still quite apparent that Mozilla is an 800lbs. gorilla when it comes to memory and CPU usage. It has gotten a LOT better in the last few builds. If these kinds of optimization issues were worked out by the next release, I would happily convert myself and others that rely on my judgement on over to Mozilla.
Thing is, even as I type this on ye olde Netscape 4.78 after browsing around to several web pages, NT is reporting about 17M of memory allocated. Just to start Mozilla is 22M, and I haven't gone anywhere yet. To further illustrate the point, I went and opened up the newsgroup readers in each, subscribed to a group, and then pulled in all the headers of that group. NS 4.7 comes in at around 18M after this operation. Mozilla at 40.5M. Not going to bother listing numbers off of FreeBSD as I'm still running 0.9.3 on there.
Personally, it's just frustrating as heck to watch. There we have this Gecko engine was does a truly beautiful job of properly rendering a web page regardless of the platform. Exactly what a browser should do! Wrapped around this is a monster of a UI that even to this day still feels like I'm trying to interact with some bad Java applet. Oh sure it is pretty, but the reaction time even on a 1.2Ghz machine is noticeable.
Looking back, I'm finding myself in total agreement with critics I disagreed with before over one point. XUL. The Mozilla folks repeatedly told us all how much longer it would take to develop this project if they stuck with native OS widgets. I just have to wonder how much time has been wasted while the resources of the Mozilla project could have had Win32, Mac, Qt, GTK versions out the door by now? Certainly projects like Galeon have shown this could have been done.
Mozilla made a wrong turn early on (IMHO) with XUL. Perhaps projects like Galeon can be the saving grace. Problem is, those projects are out on the fringe, while IE is dead center of the web universe defining the standards across the board. Mozilla is FAR more than just a browser at this point. It's the last chance gasp at taking control of web standards and the Internet itself from Microsoft.
You wonder: is Mac OS X the largest unix distro? Go count the figures. Microsoft has a 90 percent marketshare, Apple has 5 percent and all the Unix versions (AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, ***BSD and the many linuxes) combined have another 5 percent marketshare.
Now for something really scary. If OSX is considered a "Unix" due to it's incorporating BSD tools, then what about other OS's doing the same. Oh man, NT uses BSD's TCP/IP stack! AHHHHH! Microsoft has this market too!
* Reality Check *
Okay, before getting flamed into tiny ashes, I do realize there's more to being Unix then the individual tools. I just had to share my scary thought for the day. Just try sleeping nice tonight now!
So... if he weighs as much as a duck, he's made of wood.
And therefore...
Yet he felt it necessary to "test" the hole one day later.
Throughout your post you are basing your assumption that he already knew there was a security hole on the server. How exactly does he know that? Do you send letters to webmasters hosting on NT's at random to let them know about security flaws? Unless he were to attempt a write back to the server just excactly how does he know that he can? If he can't, there's no security hole to report.
The guy uses Front Page for crying out loud! We're not talking about Ueber Geek here.
But won't removing also kill Flash...
Even if it did, it might very well be possible to get nearly Flash like effects from SVG, VBScript, and some SMIL. MS already has streaming audio via Media Player. I'm not meaning to suggest it would be a pretty solution, but it might just be possible for them to implement within the browser itself without a plug in.
Of course, when you get into Shockwave kinda stuff the bar is raised quite a bit.
A book written for newbies on how to install FreeBSD makes no sense because the policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies.
Apparently I missed something in the handbook. Where exactly is there some "policy" that says anything about not catering to newbies?
Now from what I have read of the FreeBSD community's thoughts, they couldn't care less about such concerns.
Okay, with that level of FUD going on I've got to see some quotes, or at very least some names attached to these "thoughts". Especially with all the efforts now going in to make the port installations even easier, and a new version of sysinstall coming in 4.4, again to make things easier. All the mailing lists are archived on the FreeBSD site, on Google, and lots of stuff sitting on the Usenet right now. Finding these "thoughts" shouldn't be too awfully hard.
By gosh, Microsoft would be proud. Have you considered a job in PR?
I have found FreeBSD to be far more straightforward than the Linux distros I've dealt with.
Will you shut up already! Geesh, you're gonna have all these Linux folks blocking up the FreeBSD servers if you keep talking like that. Where the heck are you going to cvsup from if the entirety of the Linux community starts in on it. Think man!
Ummm, woohoo, uh, Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Yay! Root root, hip hip, and all that. Nothing to see here, move along.
With FreeBSD I have to edit /etc/rc.conf or tinker with ifconfig. Even then I need to make sure my default gateway is set just right. Making such changes can be problematic for a novice. As a part of a popular desktop, it must be easier.
Okay, he did mention the most of the right files and all. Still, he managed to install FreeBSD without ever looking at "sysinstall"? Okay, maybe sysinstall doesn't have all the transparent glossiness there, but by gosh, all the basic network settings can be done right there. A user need not ever know that rc.conf exists!
With this router I can also run DHCP to auto-configure network systems on my private network. Within moments I had connectivity to the internet.
Again, DHCP is an option right in sysinstall. You do not have to go hunting through a 3 foot high stack of how-to's and man pages. This is right within the installer, which you can call back at any time.
With BSD systems you may not even have driver support and therefore have no sound at all.
I've successfuly got going 4 different sound cards with FreeBSD. One of which was built on to the motherboard, two were PCI, and the last was ISA. Each one needed the very same tweak to the kernel. Okay, kernel tweaking may not be for the newbie, but it did work each time.
I won't even get into the troubles this guy had with getting the compiler to work. Again, the real FreeBSD would have been WAY easier.
You're right - mhz rating has NOTHING to do with it.
Wow, lots of folks drinking deeply into the Apple marketing kool-aid. You're right to a point, frequency of the clock alone will not always win out. Thing is, for most computing tasks it really does make all the difference. Try running a long batch routine into a database, or crunch a large set of integer numbers. MHz beats optimization every time.
Where optimization plays a factor is in specific tasks. The Motorola processor handles Photoshop tasks quite well, but is far weaker than a PIII when it comes to gaming. You could run through a stack of various apps on both machines and you'd most likely find that each chip is tuned in for performance on some, and not others. Across the board for generic applications, it's still damn hard to beat raw clock speed.
Have you used OS X? Do you have any idea of its features
I have installed OSX on a G3 box. Most confusing damn thing I've ever done. Spent an hour or more futzing with it until I finally broke down and called Apple tech support. Turned out that I needed to boot up OS9 from CD to create an exactly 8gig partition. This tid bit wasn't mentioned in any of the docs that came with it. Then even the tech support guy didn't know if I needed to make that 8gig partition 8000Meg or 8192Meg to account for proper kilobyte size.
Well, I ended up just making it 8000Meg and it finally installed. Eye candy everywhere. Looked a LOT like KDE meets Win2k to me, with the added doo dad of having a task bar that warps. Yawn.
The user I was setting this up for does graphics work, oddly enough, and has a requirement for a plain gray background. After literally going through every single control panel on this OS several times I was totally unable to locate how in the heck you get rid of the blue swirlly background. Oh yeah, easy as pie.
I'm sure there's a way to get the background to change, but should it require this much effort? Heck, the real FreeBSD isn't anywhere near this difficult to get a GUI up and running. That, and it at least knows how to partition a hard drive all by itself. I know a lot of Apple die hards are screaming troll, but from my personal experience OS9, KDE, Gnome, Win9x, Win2k are all a LOT easier to figure out for a new user than what I saw in OSX.
About the only concept in use that I did like was the use of drop shadows instead of off color window borders. The shadows are a bit too large, but the concept is cool. Outside of that, I guess I'll have a look at 10.1 when it comes out to see if it's worth the time to muck with.
And people who hack other machines to do spoofing usually get to root if they get any normal user account.
.scr .bat .doc .vbs or any of the other alphabet soup of scripting engines on Windows will have full rights to do anything! Couple this with the known history concerning the security of products such as Outlook and IE, and you're putting together the formula for a disaster.
Ahh, now that is a good point. On a Unix box you must hack into the root account before gaining access to the raw sockets. On Windows, there's no need to do anything of the sort. Heck, today it'd take you about 15 minutes to work up a hack in MS Word that can write any darn thing it likes into your system registry, no restrictions.
What is scary here is not access to raw sockets. The issue here is unrestricted, no protections, any
Heck, Microsoft has already commented on this very issue. They are already blaming those nasty virus authors for the coming up screw ups. (my apologies for not having a link, read this one a couple of months back.) Even they know it's going to be bad, but yet they are still moving forward with this.
Lastly, keep in mind that we're not talking about NT or 2000 here. Both of those OS's have the ability to run as either an admin or a regular user with limited abilities. We're talking about a version of 2000 that has had it's securities stripped so as to be compatible with ME (aka, Win 95 Version 5).
It's just that it makes me cringe whenever I hear people say that we broke off because of "unfair" taxation.
Makes me cringe too. Makes me damn near go into convulsions when someone trivializes why the colonies revolted against their own government. Taxation was almost a non-issue. What brought the colonial congress together on that hot July day to sign a pact that risked everything these men had was mostly the loss of their rights as British citizens. Everything else stemmed off of that, to include complaining about taxes.
Of course, by the time July rolled around there was already armed conflict. This conflict wasn't about taxes, or many of the other high end concerns that were expressed in the Declaration of Independance. British soldiers had come to confiscate the weaponry of the civilian popluace to try and disarm any chance of revolt. As it turned out, that was the trigger that set off the actual conflict.
There's a reason why the 2nd Amendment is the 2nd one on that list, and not the 10th.
...kinds of numbers that the Win32 market currently does, they'll start porting again. I don't believe that the Linux market is quite there yet.
That's my whole point. No applications from companies like Autodesk (especially taking into account ALL the other companies they've purchased) and you don't have a Linux desktop as a major force in the market place. As much as I enjoy KDE, there are simply too many applications that I require that simply don't have a *nix equivalent. Free or otherwise. The applications available from market leaders is going to dictate where things are at in the next 2 to 3 years.
Going back in time a bit, Microsoft fully appreciated this notion. They wanted to get folks off of DOS and on to Windows. Most of the major players at that time were quite content with their DOS applications, as were the bulk of the users (as hard as that may be to believe). What they needed was a killer application. They found that in Excel. The users came, and along with them the applications. Those vendors that didn't move to Windows early died. Anyone else recall just how prominent dBase was prior to windows? How about WordStar, or even Lotus 123?
At the moment, Linux enjoys 2 killer applications. Apache and Samba. On the desktop there's nothing that really qualifies as "killer" in the way Excel was for those army of DOS users. The strange thing is that even without a killer app the tide is shifting a bit. What's needed today is for someone like an Adobe or Autodesk to push the water over the dam.
I said $25k, but that's the price for the fullblown package which would be useful for fully animated features
I stand corrected on that point. To further clarify what all I was getting at, I didn't mean to knock Maya or the prices they charge. I don't know a darn thing about them, as you might have already assumed. I guess when ya get right down to it, my tangent was the point. The lack of mid-level professional graphics applications, and the hope that the folks who lead in this regard might start into porting apps.
First off, thank you for a really great reply to my post. I was kind of expecting the flame throwers to go on high. A couple of comments just the same...
...people who dont like to pay for software would only worsen this situation.
:) Seriously though, for applications that are heavily graphics intensive I can imagine the confusion of what to go with here. It seems that a major player actually developing these kinds of apps would throw the Linux desktop hard to either Qt or Gtk? I doubt they'd do very well with just X as there would be a need to get data between different applications, which is exactly the point of KDE and Gnome. I don't think anyone else wants to go down the Mozilla road of reinventing everything that makes up the underlying system.
...data-output to printers...
:)
While I wouldn't agree with their conclusions, I can see where this paranoia comes from. I have to wonder whether this stems from the popularity of their software, or the cost of it. Even still, the perception from a corporate point of view is interesting. How does a free operating system overcome this?
KDE or Gnome, or perhaps just straight up X, etc etc
Simple enough, just support KDE, because that's what I use!
How long would one continue to thrive if the other had all the really cool graphics applications designed to support it? It'd sure be a bigger boost to either then anything IBM or Sun could manage.
How bad is this situation in reality today? Are there any RIP servers for high end printing? I rather thought the printer driver issue was moving towards being a non-issue. Heck, I thought that was the whole point of the FSF in the first place!
What in the wide wide world of sports does Alpha or FreeBSD support have to do with AMD? Mind you, I don't personally care what they run as a processor, I was just curious as the reasons for going with an Intel solution. I would think that Athlons using DDR would really shine doing this kind of rendering work. Pretty much every benchmark I've seen for the Athlon has it screaming through intensive floating point operations. Especially on Linux.
Granted, the version of Maya required to do broadcast-quality work costs in the region of $25,000, but if you're doing broadcast-quality work, chances are you have that kind of budget.
Then again, maybe not. Your mentioning this reminded me of an article I had read in Wired a while back. Had to go through my stacks of mags to find it. Anyhow, this is the story of one fella who managed to produce some very cheap graphics that were film quality.
The Back-Door Director
The sad part is that the bulk of his work was done on an NT box several years ago. If this same fella were to try and pull off the kind of work he did on NT back then with Linux today, he wouldn't have gotten anything done. He wouldn't have been able to afford it!
The point of my blabbering here is that there seems to be a number of nice apps filling in the low end of the spectrum for Linux. The Dreamworks article illustrates the fact that there's some serious porting going on at the upper end. What's missing is all that stuff in between those two extremes.
What I don't understand is why companies like Macromedia, Autodesk, and Adobe don't recognize the market niche that their product line would fill in? If any of them made moves to seriously support Linux, between their wide variety of products and market leadership, both Apple and Microsoft would be getting REALLY nervous about the desktop market. Just the sales to the entertainment industry alone would seem to justify the move.
Moving away from my tangent... $25,000 is a pretty steep investment for an independant studio. It'd be great to see Linux pushing the envelope in the mid to lower range movie projects as well.