Gosh, I guess upping the intelligence of the bad guys to the level of dealing with someone competent in protecting themselves is out of the question for you then? Keeping all the characters stupid is not the only option a screen writer has!
One reasonable example, The Matrix. Neither protagonist nor antagonist needed to be "dumbed" down to fit the plot. In fact, both sides got smarter through the movie, increasing the tension in the plot.
Dumbing down the characters to fit a plot is one of the worst things that can happen to a story line, though it's one of the easier ways out for boiler plate script writing. This single aspect alone explains much of the total, and complete crap that has been hitting the theaters for the last couple of years.
Having not yet seen "Panic Room", I can only fill in from the Katz review here. Taking this from where you started, what if Ms. Foster's character had a weapon and the room was put together in a competent manner? We'd need smarter bad guys! Maybe they'd go away for a while then come back. There's a dozen ways I could think of at the moment that these antagonists could have been portrayed to deal with those defenses to equal things out.
You really don't need idiocy in order to make a film entertaining. It's only required to keep less than adequate screen writers employed.
Following your lead here I tried "brutal massacres" on Alta Vista. What a hoot!
"Extend Your Search:" "Comparison shop for brutal massacres" "Find brutal massacres at eBay! Register now!" "Search for brutal massacres in your local yellow pages"
Well, I'd like to read more of this/. thread, but I'm off to go comparison shopping thanks to Alta Vista! Boy, I hope I get a good deal.
I've noticed that if you type in "http://..." into the Google toolbar you get taken directly to that page
Way back when I used to change the default home page of the browsers I installed to Yahoo instead of Netscape to dodge all the pop-up ads NS decided was good marketing. The interesting thing about this was how many of my users really didn't make a distinction between the Yahoo search bar and the real location bar. Amazing the kind of stuff you catch when standing behind a user verbally instructing them.
Google has probably seen quite a few of these kinds of searches, and compensated for them.
Also, with IE 4+, I think it's possible to use the address bar as a search engine, but you have to wade through menus to get to choose Google, and then you get a Microsoft-ized version of Google in that "Explorer Bar". I personally don't like it.
Mozilla allows you to make Google your default search from both the location bar and the side panel. Additionally, you can hi-light any text, right-click, and be offered a search on that text in Google. No stacks of menus to go through. There's a lot of Google integration throughout Mozilla. Probably one of it's key killer features for end users.
Konqueror does it much nicer in my opinion. In the URL bar simply type gg: whatever (for google)
I'm of the opinion that Konq does handle this a bit better, but Moz can be set up for very similar functionality. Open up your "Manage Bookmarks" screen on a recent build and give a look at the properties on one of the links. In there you can configure "Keywords" that act like what Konq does, only without the ":" in there.
There's some more info on this buried somewhere on the Mozilla site. Caught a link about this myself not to long ago right here on/. in one of the posts.
As I stated, I rather prefer Konq's approach to this, as you don't need to create a stack of otherwise bogus bookmarks for the URL shortcuts. Essentially they do about the same thing though.
Teoma is going to have one heck of a time ramping up to the kind of processing that Google is doing, if for no other reason than the kind of money they're going to need to put Redmond's way. Have a look. It's no wonder they couldn't put together the financial resources.
Now, let's just pretend that the technology that Teoma is using is roughly equivalent to Google's. Google is up to what now, 7000 servers? That's 7000 copies of Win2k, each including a full Internet hosting license, which is a fair bit more than your usual in house licensing.
Did they write their own DB, or are they fully into the MS world with SQL Server? We're talking about some serious bucks here that cannot be devoted to expanding hardware.
On the other hand, Google can devote 100% of their cash investments to hardware and research. Adding a brand new > 1G box with a couple of monster drives costs maybe $600-$700.
I've actually gotten together a spare box to play with a bit. Slapped Suse on there to goof around with. It sure are perty and all, but I found myself kinda confused about how to install apps that weren't a part of the CD's. Disclaimer: not a dig on Suse, just that I'm very new to it.
When I get done futzing around with Suse I'll probably slap Debian on there for a bit. Been hearing a lot of comparisons to FreeBSD concerning that distro, so I know I'm long overdue in checking it out. Heck, just got finished reading an interesting article about Debian in Linux Journal.
My only real concern about Debian is that it seems to have a fairly small set of apps that are all prepped for apt-get versus FreeBSD's portupgrade. There's a LOT of FreeBSD ports, of darn near all the latest stuff that I'm interested in. Maybe I'm in for a pleasent surprise.
Funny, I switched from RedHat to FreeBSD due to a seemingly endless line of RPM dependancy issues, config files that seem to defy all logic, and a directory structure that feels like your totally lost in a video game maze.
but some packages are still "broke" because of the way that FreeBSD is.
276 packages installed here on my primary workstation. Full implementation of Samba, KDE, Gnome, Apache, MySQL, and lots and lots of other stuff. Each and every package in there is working as expected. Oh, and when one of those packages comes out with a new version...
portupgrade samba
...and it just handles ALL the rest. No subscription fees to RedHat to get access to a non-sucky FTP server.
(For example, the SMBD package doesn't work as a domain controller because you can't have a dollar sign in a user name in freebsd.
Umm, why would you want a dollar sign in the user name?? When doing NT style networking you place the dollar sign in the share name, which works just peachy.
There is no smbclient or smbmount, so you can't even think of doing that.)
SMB support is right in the kernel! Yes, smbmount exists natively in FreeBSD. smbclient isn't native, as it's a part of the Samba package. As it should be I might add.
It's a pretty good and fast operating system, but I've switched back to the more popular one for more features and support.
Probably for the best. Either you haven't used FreeBSD in the last 2-3 years, or you didn't properly research the subjects you were having troubles with.
Wish I saw this post prior to mine on an earlier thread. Mozilla is still doing this very same thing by default. At least with Moz you can turn it off though.
Thing is, how many folks realize this is even happening? Whatever is being sent it's subtle, even for a dial-up connection.
Don't use it. Uninstall NS6 and use Mozilla instead.
By chance would you happen to have the "Related Sites" tab enabled (as is by default) in your installation of Mozilla? Don't care if you've ever used the side bar or not, as it doesn't matter.
Even Moz sends back some kind of information Alexa. Came to discover this one day using my laptop off-line on a web site I had running locally. Couldn't figure out why I kept getting these intermittent "Can't connect to network" messages. Had me going nuts, thinking there was some glitch with my site code.
I haven't a clue what kind of information Alexa is having sent to them. I do know that if you turn that tab off, Moz stops feeding information that way.
You've pointed out that IPv4 has DiffServ / TOS bits, but backbone router ISPs don't universally support them.
If those routers are IPv6 compliant the MUST support QoS bits. The reason they don't today is because it's not specifically a part of the IPv4 spec.
Adopting IPv6 won't change that - it's a policy issue on the part of the ISP.
No, it's not. The backbone routers will be making these decisions. The ISP's will be able to purchase the right to resell QoS bits to customers. This isn't some wiz bangy feature you can add. It's built directly into the protocol itself to do this! Heck, that's specifically why those bits are in there.
It will make some kinds of features easier to implement, such as giving people...
First off, this has nothing at all to do with giving anyone anything. This is a scheme to prioritize packets on a highest bidder basis. Voice over IP is a red herring tossed out there to get folks into seeing how maybe their web traffic really isn't as important as voice traffic.
Today the telcos provide one very large portion of the Internet backbone. Do you really think their interests lay in providing cheaper voice service? It's just not realistic. What's more, it's not needed! Voice traffic across phone lines is already heavily digitized to make it so efficient as to require a tiny fraction of the employees needed just 10 years ago.
---
As you can probably tell, IPv6 scares the hell out of me. When corporations can prioritize the packets coming off their servers above those of individually owned machines, kiss anything that once may have been considered beautiful about the Internet goodbye. Nothing left but a flashing billboard on the browser highway.
It's in there and working quite nicely. Just in a slightly different place to accomodate multiple profiles.
composer usability (like publishing)
The "publishing" feature in Communicator stunk. I suppose it was okay if all you ever worked on was a single site.
Moz's composer looks to be leaps and bounds above what was in 4.7x feature wise. There are some major stability issues with it from what I've seen though.
similar pages button
It's in there, as one of the side panel options. Works nicer than the drop down button from 4.7x, and it pulls from the same source.
refresh bookmarks
Haven't a clue what that is. I do know that Moz's bookmark manager is a good bit more functional than what NS 4.7x had. Unfortunately, it is WAY slower.
Ya might try clicking around Moz a bit. Seems that you're missing some of those key things that really in there.
Why didnt they make KDE3 backward compatible with KDE2?
As I recall from earlier stories (PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong here, it's been a while) the KDE folks were looking at binary incompatibility no matter what due to a new gcc that was due out. I don't pretend to understand the mechanics, but apparently everything was going to require a recompile anyway.
Probably mentioned in some mailing list archive someplace. They figgered that if ever there was a good time to break compatibility, now was that time. The long term game plan is to have the underlying architecture of KDE 3.0 support new versions for the next 3 years or so.
I've seen it mentioned a number of times exactly how aware the KDE crew is to this breakage. Heck, there's still KDE 1.2 apps that haven't been bumped up yet! Hopefully, this will be the last of these kinds of upgrades for a while... assuming the game plan works out that is. 3 years is a darn long time for KDE.
...increased modularization of the code, UI changes, functionality additions, build system enhancements, cleaning of the code, testing, feature additions, performance tuning, XUL/XPCOM etc documentation, stability improvements, and legal issues.
For me, I'd have to put performance as the #1 reason why I don't use Mozilla more often than I do. On my FreeBSD box it renders beautifully, handles Javascript issues without a hitch, and generally works pretty sweet.
With all that being said, I still mostly use Konqueror. Konq doesn't render as well and is awful at JS. Why do I go to it more often than Moz? Konq takes less than a 1/3'rd of the time to get started! I click on that little world icon and a browser will be on screen in a reasonable amount of time. Also, I find that it uses a lot less memory after extended use in comparison to Moz.
I have to imagine that a similar issue attracts folks to Opera. From what I've seen, Opera doesn't render nearly as well as Moz. What it does do is load up wicked quick.
One last disclaimer, I am seeing some really great speed improvements on the Windows side of the house. Fairly quick startups, and the widgets seem to react far closer to real time. Not sure if it's a fair comparison, as I mainly use FreeBSD on a P-II laptop where Windows is on an Athlon 1.2G. On the slower machine you can really see the speed diff between the browsers though.
the catalog part is still in beta, but it's really amazing.
I hadn't really looked at that part of Google until your post. Based on a couple of searches I did, didn't seem all that amazing to me. More like white knuckle frightening!!
This must be that level of technology that is too easily taken for magic. There are just too many perfectly rational reasons why this "shouldn't" work at all!
Of course, the problem with this guy's (the article) opinions is that it does smak of segregation and other asty thoughts, but he should be given a fair consideration
To be perfectly fair, I don't believe he stated his opinions on whether evolutionary theory not applying to western civilization was good or bad. He may have opinions on this, but they weren't in the article. All that was in there was an observation that Darwin's basic rules don't seem to apply any longer due to a variety of reasons.
I may not agree with the conclusions personally, but I can't assign anything more sinister than a difference of opinion to the notion that evolution has effectively been turned off.
You're talking about ports, while the author was talking about the core OS.
Of course I'm talking about the port installs. The reason I replied was that the original post had a VERY misleading statement about bash and GNU utilities being unavailable in FreeBSD. It would be way too easy to assume you couldn't even get these things to run had they no experience with FreeBSD.
If core OS means that you can install these things initially when you install the OS, then FreeBSD does that as well! Just like a Linux distro install you can select packages to be added along with the rest of the OS.
As a Linux distro is really not much more than the kernel and selected packages I could just as easily state that GNU utilities aren't a "part" of any of those either. Certainly they aren't a part of Linux, as Linux only includes a kernel if we wanted to get all kinds of nit picky.
1) I believe that the latest rpm system DOES detect libraries on your system like QT even if they have not been installed through rpm. It does this by running ldd or ldconfig or something. Also if you know you have it on your system you can use the --nodeps to install it. You can also get the source rpm and install that which you can then edit the spec of. Also the newest rpm can handle some tar.gz files if they are built with rpm in mind with the --tarbuild command (I think this is it).
Of course RPM's can detect when something isn't there. Can it actually do something about it? I recall when I was using RedHat I ran into a dependancy problem where some ".so" file couldn't be found. Hours of hunting turned up no answers. The RPM just kept reminding me that I didn't have it.
In contrast, I've never had this problem on FreeBSD, after what I'm guessing must be at least over a hundred different installation performed with the ports system. This whole process has even gotten significantly smarter with the "portupgrade" routines.
Even if RPM could detect and install dependencies, it would still pale in comparison to the ports system. There's no real QA for RPM's as they are put together by anyone. To get a port added to FreeBSD a user submits proposed changes to a maintainer to commit to the CVS repository. It actually gets looked at and tried out for the specific platform it's going on prior to everyone getting it. After all that if it still has problems, there's a single place to go to inform folks that there's a problem.
The whole concept of installing applications involves a hiearchy of people who have demonstrated profiency in doing so correctly. There is simply no equivalent to it in the Linux world.
As for comparing it to a Windows installer, the PHP port is an outstanding example of what is possible. Upon starting it's "make install" the user is provided a screen to check off which features he/she wants, dynamically creates the proper config line, then insures all the needed dependancies are there, installs them if needed, then completes the PHP compile. It really is a beautiful thing to watch in motion.
Installing applications is a HUGE difference between FreeBSD and the rest of the crowd. It's power, stability, and versatility are too often overly simplified by comparing to lesser capable systems.
There's no escaping the simple truth: FreeBSD is a failure.
Ahh man. I got mod'd down as a troll for agreeing with the fella that said you'd be around. Keep up the good work! A FreeBSD article just isn't a FreeBSD article without the "FreeBSD is Dead" guy.
frankly the installer on 4.4 was buggy to say the least.
It's not so much buggy as it is non-intuitive. Unlike the Linux installers I've seen, it doesn't provide a good step by step wizard for what things you do next. I guess you could call that buggy, but it's not like it doesn't work.
Robert Watson recently commented on this in an interview on OS News. There's apparently work being done now to get a more straight forward, and quite possibly pertier, installer up and ready for FreeBSD 5.0.
It's actually a great interview, worthy of it's own thread.
I normally don't comment on moderations, but what in the heck got the above message mod'd to a troll? Not only was nothing insulting in that post, he hit on some great points.
Having to deal with Linux emulated Java does suck. It doesn't integrate well with desktop apps that are compiled to run native on FreeBSD, like Konqueror or Mozilla. It's out of date, thus impacting stand alone apps like JEdit and server side apps as well. It'll be nice to see that Linux emulated Java yanked from the port tree. This is NOT about whether Linux is good or bad.
The "third-party" script being referred to is an implementation of even greater automation with installing and updating apps. The two key commands involved are "portupgrade" and "portinstall". For you Debian kinda folks this should look awful familiar...
portinstall gnome
portupgrade gimp
Essentially, an even smarter handling of apps building up from the infrastructure of the ports tree rather than trying to replace it. It works smooooooth too. apt-get, eat your heart out:)
Coupled with cvsup for keeping things all up to the minute, FreeBSD does rock!
Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.
The FreeBSD folks have already done this, in very plain language.
For myself, I'm doing a cvsup now as I write this. Make world gonna start to cooking tomorrow night. I'm probably about 2 weeks behind the release as I try to update fairly regularly with the latest stuff.
The really good part about this is that all that stuff that's been held back for release is now gonna start flowing back into the ports tree and src directories. Yummy!
Slashdot Mirror
Police arrive, credits roll.
Gosh, I guess upping the intelligence of the bad guys to the level of dealing with someone competent in protecting themselves is out of the question for you then? Keeping all the characters stupid is not the only option a screen writer has!
One reasonable example, The Matrix. Neither protagonist nor antagonist needed to be "dumbed" down to fit the plot. In fact, both sides got smarter through the movie, increasing the tension in the plot.
Dumbing down the characters to fit a plot is one of the worst things that can happen to a story line, though it's one of the easier ways out for boiler plate script writing. This single aspect alone explains much of the total, and complete crap that has been hitting the theaters for the last couple of years.
Having not yet seen "Panic Room", I can only fill in from the Katz review here. Taking this from where you started, what if Ms. Foster's character had a weapon and the room was put together in a competent manner? We'd need smarter bad guys! Maybe they'd go away for a while then come back. There's a dozen ways I could think of at the moment that these antagonists could have been portrayed to deal with those defenses to equal things out.
You really don't need idiocy in order to make a film entertaining. It's only required to keep less than adequate screen writers employed.
Especially for male users!
Following your lead here I tried "brutal massacres" on Alta Vista. What a hoot!
/. thread, but I'm off to go comparison shopping thanks to Alta Vista! Boy, I hope I get a good deal.
"Extend Your Search:"
"Comparison shop for brutal massacres"
"Find brutal massacres at eBay! Register now!"
"Search for brutal massacres in your local yellow pages"
Well, I'd like to read more of this
I've noticed that if you type in "http://..." into the Google toolbar you get taken directly to that page
Way back when I used to change the default home page of the browsers I installed to Yahoo instead of Netscape to dodge all the pop-up ads NS decided was good marketing. The interesting thing about this was how many of my users really didn't make a distinction between the Yahoo search bar and the real location bar. Amazing the kind of stuff you catch when standing behind a user verbally instructing them.
Google has probably seen quite a few of these kinds of searches, and compensated for them.
Also, with IE 4+, I think it's possible to use the address bar as a search engine, but you have to wade through menus to get to choose Google, and then you get a Microsoft-ized version of Google in that "Explorer Bar". I personally don't like it.
Mozilla allows you to make Google your default search from both the location bar and the side panel. Additionally, you can hi-light any text, right-click, and be offered a search on that text in Google. No stacks of menus to go through. There's a lot of Google integration throughout Mozilla. Probably one of it's key killer features for end users.
Konqueror does it much nicer in my opinion. In the URL bar simply type gg: whatever (for google)
/. in one of the posts.
I'm of the opinion that Konq does handle this a bit better, but Moz can be set up for very similar functionality. Open up your "Manage Bookmarks" screen on a recent build and give a look at the properties on one of the links. In there you can configure "Keywords" that act like what Konq does, only without the ":" in there.
There's some more info on this buried somewhere on the Mozilla site. Caught a link about this myself not to long ago right here on
As I stated, I rather prefer Konq's approach to this, as you don't need to create a stack of otherwise bogus bookmarks for the URL shortcuts. Essentially they do about the same thing though.
Teoma is going to have one heck of a time ramping up to the kind of processing that Google is doing, if for no other reason than the kind of money they're going to need to put Redmond's way. Have a look. It's no wonder they couldn't put together the financial resources.
Now, let's just pretend that the technology that Teoma is using is roughly equivalent to Google's. Google is up to what now, 7000 servers? That's 7000 copies of Win2k, each including a full Internet hosting license, which is a fair bit more than your usual in house licensing.
Did they write their own DB, or are they fully into the MS world with SQL Server? We're talking about some serious bucks here that cannot be devoted to expanding hardware.
On the other hand, Google can devote 100% of their cash investments to hardware and research. Adding a brand new > 1G box with a couple of monster drives costs maybe $600-$700.
It sounds like you really needed to try Debian.
I've actually gotten together a spare box to play with a bit. Slapped Suse on there to goof around with. It sure are perty and all, but I found myself kinda confused about how to install apps that weren't a part of the CD's. Disclaimer: not a dig on Suse, just that I'm very new to it.
When I get done futzing around with Suse I'll probably slap Debian on there for a bit. Been hearing a lot of comparisons to FreeBSD concerning that distro, so I know I'm long overdue in checking it out. Heck, just got finished reading an interesting article about Debian in Linux Journal.
My only real concern about Debian is that it seems to have a fairly small set of apps that are all prepped for apt-get versus FreeBSD's portupgrade. There's a LOT of FreeBSD ports, of darn near all the latest stuff that I'm interested in. Maybe I'm in for a pleasent surprise.
I switched from FreeBSD back to RedHat
Funny, I switched from RedHat to FreeBSD due to a seemingly endless line of RPM dependancy issues, config files that seem to defy all logic, and a directory structure that feels like your totally lost in a video game maze.
but some packages are still "broke" because of the way that FreeBSD is.
276 packages installed here on my primary workstation. Full implementation of Samba, KDE, Gnome, Apache, MySQL, and lots and lots of other stuff. Each and every package in there is working as expected. Oh, and when one of those packages comes out with a new version...
portupgrade samba
...and it just handles ALL the rest. No subscription fees to RedHat to get access to a non-sucky FTP server.
(For example, the SMBD package doesn't work as a domain controller because you can't have a dollar sign in a user name in freebsd.
Umm, why would you want a dollar sign in the user name?? When doing NT style networking you place the dollar sign in the share name, which works just peachy.
There is no smbclient or smbmount, so you can't even think of doing that.)
SMB support is right in the kernel! Yes, smbmount exists natively in FreeBSD. smbclient isn't native, as it's a part of the Samba package. As it should be I might add.
It's a pretty good and fast operating system, but I've switched back to the more popular one for more features and support.
Probably for the best. Either you haven't used FreeBSD in the last 2-3 years, or you didn't properly research the subjects you were having troubles with.
Wish I saw this post prior to mine on an earlier thread. Mozilla is still doing this very same thing by default. At least with Moz you can turn it off though.
Thing is, how many folks realize this is even happening? Whatever is being sent it's subtle, even for a dial-up connection.
Don't use it. Uninstall NS6 and use Mozilla instead.
By chance would you happen to have the "Related Sites" tab enabled (as is by default) in your installation of Mozilla? Don't care if you've ever used the side bar or not, as it doesn't matter.
Even Moz sends back some kind of information Alexa. Came to discover this one day using my laptop off-line on a web site I had running locally. Couldn't figure out why I kept getting these intermittent "Can't connect to network" messages. Had me going nuts, thinking there was some glitch with my site code.
I haven't a clue what kind of information Alexa is having sent to them. I do know that if you turn that tab off, Moz stops feeding information that way.
You've pointed out that IPv4 has DiffServ / TOS bits, but backbone router ISPs don't universally support them.
If those routers are IPv6 compliant the MUST support QoS bits. The reason they don't today is because it's not specifically a part of the IPv4 spec.
Adopting IPv6 won't change that - it's a policy issue on the part of the ISP.
No, it's not. The backbone routers will be making these decisions. The ISP's will be able to purchase the right to resell QoS bits to customers. This isn't some wiz bangy feature you can add. It's built directly into the protocol itself to do this! Heck, that's specifically why those bits are in there.
It will make some kinds of features easier to implement, such as giving people...
First off, this has nothing at all to do with giving anyone anything. This is a scheme to prioritize packets on a highest bidder basis. Voice over IP is a red herring tossed out there to get folks into seeing how maybe their web traffic really isn't as important as voice traffic.
Today the telcos provide one very large portion of the Internet backbone. Do you really think their interests lay in providing cheaper voice service? It's just not realistic. What's more, it's not needed! Voice traffic across phone lines is already heavily digitized to make it so efficient as to require a tiny fraction of the employees needed just 10 years ago.
---
As you can probably tell, IPv6 scares the hell out of me. When corporations can prioritize the packets coming off their servers above those of individually owned machines, kiss anything that once may have been considered beautiful about the Internet goodbye. Nothing left but a flashing billboard on the browser highway.
roaming user
Not there.
ldap addressing
It's in there and working quite nicely. Just in a slightly different place to accomodate multiple profiles.
composer usability (like publishing)
The "publishing" feature in Communicator stunk. I suppose it was okay if all you ever worked on was a single site.
Moz's composer looks to be leaps and bounds above what was in 4.7x feature wise. There are some major stability issues with it from what I've seen though.
similar pages button
It's in there, as one of the side panel options. Works nicer than the drop down button from 4.7x, and it pulls from the same source.
refresh bookmarks
Haven't a clue what that is. I do know that Moz's bookmark manager is a good bit more functional than what NS 4.7x had. Unfortunately, it is WAY slower.
Ya might try clicking around Moz a bit. Seems that you're missing some of those key things that really in there.
Why didnt they make KDE3 backward compatible with KDE2?
As I recall from earlier stories (PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong here, it's been a while) the KDE folks were looking at binary incompatibility no matter what due to a new gcc that was due out. I don't pretend to understand the mechanics, but apparently everything was going to require a recompile anyway.
Probably mentioned in some mailing list archive someplace. They figgered that if ever there was a good time to break compatibility, now was that time. The long term game plan is to have the underlying architecture of KDE 3.0 support new versions for the next 3 years or so.
I've seen it mentioned a number of times exactly how aware the KDE crew is to this breakage. Heck, there's still KDE 1.2 apps that haven't been bumped up yet! Hopefully, this will be the last of these kinds of upgrades for a while... assuming the game plan works out that is. 3 years is a darn long time for KDE.
...increased modularization of the code, UI changes, functionality additions, build system enhancements, cleaning of the code, testing, feature additions, performance tuning, XUL/XPCOM etc documentation, stability improvements, and legal issues.
For me, I'd have to put performance as the #1 reason why I don't use Mozilla more often than I do. On my FreeBSD box it renders beautifully, handles Javascript issues without a hitch, and generally works pretty sweet.
With all that being said, I still mostly use Konqueror. Konq doesn't render as well and is awful at JS. Why do I go to it more often than Moz? Konq takes less than a 1/3'rd of the time to get started! I click on that little world icon and a browser will be on screen in a reasonable amount of time. Also, I find that it uses a lot less memory after extended use in comparison to Moz.
I have to imagine that a similar issue attracts folks to Opera. From what I've seen, Opera doesn't render nearly as well as Moz. What it does do is load up wicked quick.
One last disclaimer, I am seeing some really great speed improvements on the Windows side of the house. Fairly quick startups, and the widgets seem to react far closer to real time. Not sure if it's a fair comparison, as I mainly use FreeBSD on a P-II laptop where Windows is on an Athlon 1.2G. On the slower machine you can really see the speed diff between the browsers though.
the catalog part is still in beta, but it's really amazing.
I hadn't really looked at that part of Google until your post. Based on a couple of searches I did, didn't seem all that amazing to me. More like white knuckle frightening!!
This must be that level of technology that is too easily taken for magic. There are just too many perfectly rational reasons why this "shouldn't" work at all!
Of course, the problem with this guy's (the article) opinions is that it does smak of segregation and other asty thoughts, but he should be given a fair consideration
To be perfectly fair, I don't believe he stated his opinions on whether evolutionary theory not applying to western civilization was good or bad. He may have opinions on this, but they weren't in the article. All that was in there was an observation that Darwin's basic rules don't seem to apply any longer due to a variety of reasons.
I may not agree with the conclusions personally, but I can't assign anything more sinister than a difference of opinion to the notion that evolution has effectively been turned off.
You're talking about ports, while the author was talking about the core OS.
Of course I'm talking about the port installs. The reason I replied was that the original post had a VERY misleading statement about bash and GNU utilities being unavailable in FreeBSD. It would be way too easy to assume you couldn't even get these things to run had they no experience with FreeBSD.
If core OS means that you can install these things initially when you install the OS, then FreeBSD does that as well! Just like a Linux distro install you can select packages to be added along with the rest of the OS.
As a Linux distro is really not much more than the kernel and selected packages I could just as easily state that GNU utilities aren't a "part" of any of those either. Certainly they aren't a part of Linux, as Linux only includes a kernel if we wanted to get all kinds of nit picky.
1) I believe that the latest rpm system DOES detect libraries on your system like QT even if they have not been installed through rpm. It does this by running ldd or ldconfig or something. Also if you know you have it on your system you can use the --nodeps to install it. You can also get the source rpm and install that which you can then edit the spec of. Also the newest rpm can handle some tar.gz files if they are built with rpm in mind with the --tarbuild command (I think this is it).
Of course RPM's can detect when something isn't there. Can it actually do something about it? I recall when I was using RedHat I ran into a dependancy problem where some ".so" file couldn't be found. Hours of hunting turned up no answers. The RPM just kept reminding me that I didn't have it.
In contrast, I've never had this problem on FreeBSD, after what I'm guessing must be at least over a hundred different installation performed with the ports system. This whole process has even gotten significantly smarter with the "portupgrade" routines.
Even if RPM could detect and install dependencies, it would still pale in comparison to the ports system. There's no real QA for RPM's as they are put together by anyone. To get a port added to FreeBSD a user submits proposed changes to a maintainer to commit to the CVS repository. It actually gets looked at and tried out for the specific platform it's going on prior to everyone getting it. After all that if it still has problems, there's a single place to go to inform folks that there's a problem.
The whole concept of installing applications involves a hiearchy of people who have demonstrated profiency in doing so correctly. There is simply no equivalent to it in the Linux world.
As for comparing it to a Windows installer, the PHP port is an outstanding example of what is possible. Upon starting it's "make install" the user is provided a screen to check off which features he/she wants, dynamically creates the proper config line, then insures all the needed dependancies are there, installs them if needed, then completes the PHP compile. It really is a beautiful thing to watch in motion.
Installing applications is a HUGE difference between FreeBSD and the rest of the crowd. It's power, stability, and versatility are too often overly simplified by comparing to lesser capable systems.
But I think when migrating to BSD most linux users don't realize that the GNU utils arn't there anymore.
Ahh, you mean like this tiny sampling of GNU applications?
This is a big thing, same with the bash shell.
Are you referring to, like, bash?? Perhaps you didn't know how to properly install it?
You say you've actually used FreeBSD???
There's no escaping the simple truth: FreeBSD is a failure.
Ahh man. I got mod'd down as a troll for agreeing with the fella that said you'd be around. Keep up the good work! A FreeBSD article just isn't a FreeBSD article without the "FreeBSD is Dead" guy.
frankly the installer on 4.4 was buggy to say the least.
It's not so much buggy as it is non-intuitive. Unlike the Linux installers I've seen, it doesn't provide a good step by step wizard for what things you do next. I guess you could call that buggy, but it's not like it doesn't work.
Robert Watson recently commented on this in an interview on OS News. There's apparently work being done now to get a more straight forward, and quite possibly pertier, installer up and ready for FreeBSD 5.0.
It's actually a great interview, worthy of it's own thread.
I normally don't comment on moderations, but what in the heck got the above message mod'd to a troll? Not only was nothing insulting in that post, he hit on some great points.
:)
Having to deal with Linux emulated Java does suck. It doesn't integrate well with desktop apps that are compiled to run native on FreeBSD, like Konqueror or Mozilla. It's out of date, thus impacting stand alone apps like JEdit and server side apps as well. It'll be nice to see that Linux emulated Java yanked from the port tree. This is NOT about whether Linux is good or bad.
The "third-party" script being referred to is an implementation of even greater automation with installing and updating apps. The two key commands involved are "portupgrade" and "portinstall". For you Debian kinda folks this should look awful familiar...
portinstall gnome
portupgrade gimp
Essentially, an even smarter handling of apps building up from the infrastructure of the ports tree rather than trying to replace it. It works smooooooth too. apt-get, eat your heart out
Coupled with cvsup for keeping things all up to the minute, FreeBSD does rock!
FreeBSD get Slashdotted? What, you think they're hosting on Windows or something?
Move along unfunny troll, move along.
Hey now, you forgot all about the "Slashdot isn't Freshmeat" bitcher.
Not to fear I suppose, the clown and the bitcher will be around eventually. Death, taxes, and trolls.
Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.
The FreeBSD folks have already done this, in very plain language.
For myself, I'm doing a cvsup now as I write this. Make world gonna start to cooking tomorrow night. I'm probably about 2 weeks behind the release as I try to update fairly regularly with the latest stuff.
The really good part about this is that all that stuff that's been held back for release is now gonna start flowing back into the ports tree and src directories. Yummy!