I cannot believe that post got a 5 for Insightful. I further cannot believe some of the replies that actually agree with this.
Time for a reality check. (And yeah I love Linux, it's the best since sliced bread, blah blah.)
First of all, Linus Torvals isn't an ideologist. He's a pragmatic programmer. All the talk about equating Linus with peace, love and Utopia is hogwash. If you want to do that, then nominate Richard Stallman. Stallman is the one responsible for all the freedom Linux has, and not very indirectly for the great success it has had.
But you know what? Forget the previous point. The Time poll is about people that have actually had a tangible influence. World wide. In everyday people's lives. Get a grip. Linux is a piece of software. It has not prevented world hunger. It has not shaped the economies of countries around the world; it hasn't created countries (some of the other people in the list are indirectly responsible for this!); it has not caused or prevented mass murder; it has not caused or prevented entire cultures and races from deadly conflict going back hundreds if not thousands of years. Etc etc.
Yes, there is good ideology behind Linux. Yes, Linux has influenced millions of people world wide. But the actual tangible impact is only in the software world. And the real world is much, much bigger than that. To those that really think Linus deserves to be above people like Mother Theresa, Yitzhak Rabin, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill, shame on you. Get out from behind the computer; spend some time in front of non-technophiles; and read up on history and what is going on in the world.
Disclaimer: I apologize for the holier-than-thou tone. Seriously. I am not a history expert, and definitely need to follow much more of my own advice. ----------
Yes! I miss my Model I TRS-80 so much, I'd give anything [almost] to have it again. Anyone else remember 128x48 resolution? Blinking asterisks while loading programs from tape? The thrill of upgrading the hardware so the machine can display lower case letters? (I thought they were so cute!) The memory upgrade from 16K to 64K? Making 5 1/4" floppies double sided with a hole puncher?
Ok, so I need to get a life... back to my PII 400, 21" 1600x1200 display, and 256M of RAM... %-) ----------
I have to agree, that initial web page is the most horrible, annoying web page I have ever seen. I didn't bother looking at the rest of the site, if that's what the first page is like, I don't ever care to visit that site again.
I can understand wanting to be artistic and different, but that page is just plain excruciatingly painful. ----------
Is the Aeron chair really much better for you? I mean, to avoid things like carpal tunnel and other problems? I might be willing to get one if I knew for sure it would help, but for that kind of money, I'm perfectly happy with my $75 basic chair. ----------
I'm really rooting for Mozilla, but is it really necessary for it to have a newsreader, email client, and other code that doesn't have to do with actually rendering HTML?
I don't mind if it comes extra; the only reason I'm concered about it for Mozilla is that working on those features might distract the team from focusing on the #1 goal: being a web browser.
It is entirely possible that even if these features were stripped, and only added later, the code would take just as long to reach production quality, because there are already enough people on this, and throwing more bodies won't necessarily make it better. I can't help but think though that they could have moved along much faster if they had just focused on getting the pure web browser functionality first, then started worrying about plugging in extra things like email, news, and HTML authoring.
Can someone who is familiar with the code or the development team comment on this? I don't mean this as flamebait; I'm just echoing a previous poster's concerns along these lines. Would focusing on just web browsing have helped much, or are the real issues totally unrelated to this and adding the extra stuff doesn't really slow things down that much at all? ----------
Wouldn't Minidisc also server as prior art? I believe they encode (compress) music digitally. Minidiscs have been around long before 1995; I definitely got my first Minidisc player in 12/1995. ----------
Sun has an interesting white paper on the advantages of app servers and Enterprise Java Beans here.
Can someone with real-world experience with both application servers and more standard technologies (CGI, Perl, JSP, servlets, etc.) compare what advantages app servers and/or EJB really bring to the table? I am developing my first app server project now (Enhydra), and see some definite advantages, but not a huge number of them, at least for now.
BTW, please don't mention MySQL, or database comparisons... the database backend doesn't matter in the discussion of app servers/EJB vs not. ----------
My understanding is that the Linux name was *not* picked by Linus himself... I forget what name he had originally for it. One of the ftp maintainers of the system early on suggested Linux, and it stuck.
In other words: when a company engages in anti-competitive practices, then violates a consent decree they signed to stop doing it, the answer is to let them make billions off of it, because sooner or later they'll get clumsy and not be able to do it anymore.
I'm not sure I buy that.
Agree 100%. The original argument that they should be allowed to continue their behavior until they fall on their own is completely ridiculous.
I mean, who needs police? We should just let criminals steal anything and everything they want, and someday when they realize how horrible society is like that, they'll change. Uh-huh. ----------
You are absolutely wrong. And not just because 2.2.10 is a stable kernel release, not a development release.
Anybody can contribute to kernel development, whether stable or dev. It is absolutely wrong to think that only people who can code and find/fix bugs can contribute. All that is needed is the ability to file a useful bug report. That's all.
Obviously being able to submit a patch fixing the bug is even better, but that's not a requirement to being useful.
Where you might remotely have a point is if someone uses a dev kernel and expects everything to work beautifully. People downloading dev kernels should expect problems. But they don't have to be coders to be able to report them. ----------
It is fun to watch linux users reconfigure their systems every 72 hours though. Most linux users spend more time configuring their systems than using them.
What a snotty troll comment.
Personally, I take great pleasure in spending endless hours tweaking my system. I wouldn't want it any other way.
The same thing can happen with your oh-so-superior FreeBSD. As a matter of fact, very, very little time is spent tweaking the kernel for me; most of it is on programs on top of the kernel. If I were using your precious FreeBSD, it would be exactly the same thing.
P.S. No disrespect meant towards FreeBSD, only towards this silly little troll... ----------
RedHat 6.0 xterm problems fixed; see RedHat errata
on
Red Hat Growing Pains
·
· Score: 1
The utemper errata on RedHat's site fixes the problem where xterms wouldn't die on logout. ----------
I agree with a previous poster, most of RedHat 6.0's instability is really with GNOME and Enlightenment.
On that note, I'm really curious as to what's going on with GNOME development right now. For a couple months, they were making releases like mad, fixing bugs left and right. Since GNOME 1.0, it has slowed down quite a bit. So, what are the GNOME folks focusing on? Enhancements or bug fixes? I would hope that they are working bug fixes rather than enhancements; stability should still be GNOME's #1 priority for the next couple of months. However, I don't really see too many releases coming out. "Release often" isn't necessarily a sign of bugs getting fixed, but it can sure be one.
Final note to the RedHat and GNOME folks: PLEASE make RPMs readily available! I found the above site by pure luck, and I believe those RPMs are built by someone not officially associated with either RedHat or GNOME. It is very difficult if not almost impossible to build GNOME updates if your base GNOME is from RPMs, especially if you have RedHat 6.0 which has special RedHat tweaks. Your #1 problem right now is stability, and unless you make it easy for people to upgrade to more stable versions, complaints of buggy software will hound both of you for a long time to come. ----------
Of course Redhat could have distribution KDE/QT in the Application cdrom in the past also so it is not part of the core distribution.
That's irrelevant. Distribution has nothing to do with this argument. It's about whether KDE or other apps are core system components.
You can take X and distribute it on another CD and it's still a core system component. You can distribute the kernel RPMs and the GNU utilities RPMs on different CDs, and they are all core system components. Heck, you could take each separate directory in the filesystem and distribute it on a different CD, and that has nothing to do with the central argument.
Again: KDE is a core system component. Therefore it must be free, otherwise Linux is in great jeopardy. (Yes, thankfully this is the case now.) ----------
It makes sense to mention KDE because his whole point is that RedHat stood up for free software by refusing to include KDE while there were serious issues with its license. It is clear that this is no longer an issue; his last paragraph in this section says so clearly. It is only relevant to his article because it represents RedHat's stance on free software in the past, which is important to evaluate RedHat's stance on free software in the present.
About Netscape, BRU, and RealVideo: these are very different from KDE. They are not core system components. RedHat is not against commercial software being used on Linux; after all, they used to sell Applixware, they are making deals with commercial distributors, and they still include an "Applications CD" with the $80 RedHat 6.0 that includes many commercial apps.
The difference is that you can have as many commercial apps on top of the OS, and that's not a problem. The real problem is if any core component of Linux is not free... then it becomes possible for an external entity to take control or subvert Linux in some way.
Again, this is apparently no longer an issue with KDE, but the point is that KDE is fundamentally different from typical applications, which is why it's not hypocritical or wrong in any way of RedHat to have discriminated against a non-free KDE/Qt while being kosher with other commercial apps. Yes, we all understand that from a very technical standpoint, KDE, GNOME and the window manager (even X) can be considered to be just other applications on top of the kernel. But they are critical enough to the overall use of the system that they can be considered a more integral part of Linux as a whole than Netscape or other "standard" apps. ----------
RedHat 6.0 has worked pretty well for me. I've only noticed a couple of minor, annoying bugs. Of course everybody's mileage will vary...
Now my apologies for something slightly off-topic but very useful. For all you GNOME and RedHat users: I just discovered an extremely useful place where you can find RPM updates of GNOME:
This site is extremely useful; I don't know why GNOME and RedHat don't publicize and mirror the RPMs that are built there. (Miguel, are you listening?:)
If you have RedHat 5.x, there are SRPMS there too which you can use to build these 6.0 RPMS for your system:
One of my main complaints with RedHat (and GNOME) is that they don't put enough effort into providing updated RPMs for key system components. Especially for GNOME, for which stability has always been the key complaint.
Actually, I think the key thing (or one of them) was that Microsoft could not pass the compatibility tests because they refused to implement JNI and RMI. I'm pretty sure that's all part of the public tests... ----------
So, what exactly is new here? To me, the Judge just said "snow is white, grass is green, and MS can create Java clean room implementations". All three things are facts which have been known for a long time.
Microsoft's current products embody Sun's intellectual property.
Another non-issue. Isn't that what the entire contract was about, the fact that Microsoft was licensing Java technology from Sun? So therefore it obviously follows that Microsoft products have Sun's Java technology in them?
Issue of Microsoft violating Sun's "Java" trademark.
This to me seems also like an extremely straightforward point. Sun only allows certain Java products to officially use the logo and Java trademark; these are ones that pass their compatibility tests at minimum, and most likely ones that are based on their actual intellectual property. Clean room implementations do not a priori fit this category, so they can't officially bear the Java logo or name. (Unless Sun of course decides to explicitly give them this right.)
So, if Microsoft follows Sun's rules, they can bear the logo and name, if they don't, they can't. This applies regardless of clean room implementation or not.
This also seems to be another clear-cut issue unaffected by Judge Whyte's rulings (except peripherally, meaning that determining Microsoft violated the contract with Sun also means determining Microsoft violated use of the Java trademark).
The only significant thing here is that Judge Whyte has decided that Microsoft violated the Java license by not passing the compatibility tests. Why the emphasis? Because this is what the trial is about in the first place! (See here.)
This trial was not originally about clean room implementations; it's been known from the beginning that is acceptable. It's only about whether Microsoft had a contractual obligation to comply with the full Java spec and Sun's compatibility tests. From that regard, Judge Whyte's "preliminary rulings" are equivalent to deciding the trial: Microsoft is guilty. ----------
I've used ApplixWare (AW) and Star Office (SO) 5.0 before.
Between the two, I'd recommend Star Office, **IF** you have gobs of RAM (minimum 64M) and a fairly speedy processor to go with it. It's more polished, and I think it deals better with fonts, though given that it's running on X (the "it's 1999 and I still don't have built-in TrueType font support by default" window system), there's only so much you can expect.
I'd be curious to hear other people's opinions on this too...
P.S. Yes I know you can get TrueType font renderizers for X, my RedHat 6.0 XFree86 came with one installed. But it was an extra feature RedHat was nice enough to through in, and even with that X doesn't have a great way to deal with such fonts, or font scalability, transparently.
P.P.S. On ONE occasion Applix nuked the file I was editing when I tried to save it... only once over a period of about a year, but still, fyi... ----------
For 5.0, RedHat 6.0 has an RPM of Star Office which works just fine. It's not installed by default, it's on the Applications CD.
I wish I could find out if 5.1 works or not on my RedHat 6.0 system, but as another/.er already stated, the download area says that its closed. ----------
Slashdot Mirror
Time for a reality check. (And yeah I love Linux, it's the best since sliced bread, blah blah.)
First of all, Linus Torvals isn't an ideologist. He's a pragmatic programmer. All the talk about equating Linus with peace, love and Utopia is hogwash. If you want to do that, then nominate Richard Stallman. Stallman is the one responsible for all the freedom Linux has, and not very indirectly for the great success it has had.
But you know what? Forget the previous point. The Time poll is about people that have actually had a tangible influence. World wide. In everyday people's lives. Get a grip. Linux is a piece of software. It has not prevented world hunger. It has not shaped the economies of countries around the world; it hasn't created countries (some of the other people in the list are indirectly responsible for this!); it has not caused or prevented mass murder; it has not caused or prevented entire cultures and races from deadly conflict going back hundreds if not thousands of years. Etc etc.
Yes, there is good ideology behind Linux. Yes, Linux has influenced millions of people world wide. But the actual tangible impact is only in the software world. And the real world is much, much bigger than that. To those that really think Linus deserves to be above people like Mother Theresa, Yitzhak Rabin, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill, shame on you. Get out from behind the computer; spend some time in front of non-technophiles; and read up on history and what is going on in the world.
Disclaimer: I apologize for the holier-than-thou tone. Seriously. I am not a history expert, and definitely need to follow much more of my own advice.
----------
Ok, so I need to get a life... back to my PII 400, 21" 1600x1200 display, and 256M of RAM... %-)
----------
I can understand wanting to be artistic and different, but that page is just plain excruciatingly painful.
----------
Is the Aeron chair really much better for you? I mean, to avoid things like carpal tunnel and other problems? I might be willing to get one if I knew for sure it would help, but for that kind of money, I'm perfectly happy with my $75 basic chair.
----------
Well, Bob Metcalfe predicted the total collapse of the Internet in 1995. True to form, he literally ate his own words in 1997 when he admitted his earlier mistake.
----------
I don't mind if it comes extra; the only reason I'm concered about it for Mozilla is that working on those features might distract the team from focusing on the #1 goal: being a web browser.
It is entirely possible that even if these features were stripped, and only added later, the code would take just as long to reach production quality, because there are already enough people on this, and throwing more bodies won't necessarily make it better. I can't help but think though that they could have moved along much faster if they had just focused on getting the pure web browser functionality first, then started worrying about plugging in extra things like email, news, and HTML authoring.
Can someone who is familiar with the code or the development team comment on this? I don't mean this as flamebait; I'm just echoing a previous poster's concerns along these lines. Would focusing on just web browsing have helped much, or are the real issues totally unrelated to this and adding the extra stuff doesn't really slow things down that much at all?
----------
Wouldn't Minidisc also server as prior art? I believe they encode (compress) music digitally. Minidiscs have been around long before 1995; I definitely got my first Minidisc player in 12/1995.
----------
Can someone with real-world experience with both application servers and more standard technologies (CGI, Perl, JSP, servlets, etc.) compare what advantages app servers and/or EJB really bring to the table? I am developing my first app server project now (Enhydra), and see some definite advantages, but not a huge number of them, at least for now.
BTW, please don't mention MySQL, or database comparisons... the database backend doesn't matter in the discussion of app servers/EJB vs not.
----------
Anybody else can confirm this?
----------
Agree 100%. The original argument that they should be allowed to continue their behavior until they fall on their own is completely ridiculous.
I mean, who needs police? We should just let criminals steal anything and everything they want, and someday when they realize how horrible society is like that, they'll change. Uh-huh.
----------
Anybody can contribute to kernel development, whether stable or dev. It is absolutely wrong to think that only people who can code and find/fix bugs can contribute. All that is needed is the ability to file a useful bug report. That's all.
Obviously being able to submit a patch fixing the bug is even better, but that's not a requirement to being useful.
Where you might remotely have a point is if someone uses a dev kernel and expects everything to work beautifully. People downloading dev kernels should expect problems. But they don't have to be coders to be able to report them.
----------
Personally, I take great pleasure in spending endless hours tweaking my system. I wouldn't want it any other way.
The same thing can happen with your oh-so-superior FreeBSD. As a matter of fact, very, very little time is spent tweaking the kernel for me; most of it is on programs on top of the kernel. If I were using your precious FreeBSD, it would be exactly the same thing.
P.S. No disrespect meant towards FreeBSD, only towards this silly little troll...
----------
The utemper errata on RedHat's site fixes the problem where xterms wouldn't die on logout.
----------
I agree with a previous poster, most of RedHat 6.0's instability is really with GNOME and Enlightenment.
On that note, I'm really curious as to what's going on with GNOME development right now. For a couple months, they were making releases like mad, fixing bugs left and right. Since GNOME 1.0, it has slowed down quite a bit. So, what are the GNOME folks focusing on? Enhancements or bug fixes? I would hope that they are working bug fixes rather than enhancements; stability should still be GNOME's #1 priority for the next couple of months. However, I don't really see too many releases coming out. "Release often" isn't necessarily a sign of bugs getting fixed, but it can sure be one.
Final note to the RedHat and GNOME folks: PLEASE make RPMs readily available! I found the above site by pure luck, and I believe those RPMs are built by someone not officially associated with either RedHat or GNOME. It is very difficult if not almost impossible to build GNOME updates if your base GNOME is from RPMs, especially if you have RedHat 6.0 which has special RedHat tweaks. Your #1 problem right now is stability, and unless you make it easy for people to upgrade to more stable versions, complaints of buggy software will hound both of you for a long time to come.
----------
That's irrelevant. Distribution has nothing to do with this argument. It's about whether KDE or other apps are core system components.
You can take X and distribute it on another CD and it's still a core system component. You can distribute the kernel RPMs and the GNU utilities RPMs on different CDs, and they are all core system components. Heck, you could take each separate directory in the filesystem and distribute it on a different CD, and that has nothing to do with the central argument.
Again: KDE is a core system component. Therefore it must be free, otherwise Linux is in great jeopardy. (Yes, thankfully this is the case now.)
----------
I look there all the time, those packages are mostly almost two months out of date...
----------
It makes sense to mention KDE because his whole point is that RedHat stood up for free software by refusing to include KDE while there were serious issues with its license. It is clear that this is no longer an issue; his last paragraph in this section says so clearly. It is only relevant to his article because it represents RedHat's stance on free software in the past, which is important to evaluate RedHat's stance on free software in the present.
About Netscape, BRU, and RealVideo: these are very different from KDE. They are not core system components. RedHat is not against commercial software being used on Linux; after all, they used to sell Applixware, they are making deals with commercial distributors, and they still include an "Applications CD" with the $80 RedHat 6.0 that includes many commercial apps.
The difference is that you can have as many commercial apps on top of the OS, and that's not a problem. The real problem is if any core component of Linux is not free... then it becomes possible for an external entity to take control or subvert Linux in some way.
Again, this is apparently no longer an issue with KDE, but the point is that KDE is fundamentally different from typical applications, which is why it's not hypocritical or wrong in any way of RedHat to have discriminated against a non-free KDE/Qt while being kosher with other commercial apps. Yes, we all understand that from a very technical standpoint, KDE, GNOME and the window manager (even X) can be considered to be just other applications on top of the kernel. But they are critical enough to the overall use of the system that they can be considered a more integral part of Linux as a whole than Netscape or other "standard" apps.
----------
Opinion heard... it would be nice if you substantiated it. Why is it so badly designed?
----------
Isn't Mandrake just RedHat plus a few other goodies? How much more stable can it be than RedHat, if it's just based off of it?
This isn't a flame, I'm just curiuos.
----------
Now my apologies for something slightly off-topic but very useful. For all you GNOME and RedHat users: I just discovered an extremely useful place where you can find RPM updates of GNOME:
This site is extremely useful; I don't know why GNOME and RedHat don't publicize and mirror the RPMs that are built there. (Miguel, are you listening? :)
If you have RedHat 5.x, there are SRPMS there too which you can use to build these 6.0 RPMS for your system:
One of my main complaints with RedHat (and GNOME) is that they don't put enough effort into providing updated RPMs for key system components. Especially for GNOME, for which stability has always been the key complaint.
Enjoy...
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Yeah, I agree, so much for seeing Inprise tools ported to Linux... oh well.
----------
Actually, I think the key thing (or one of them) was that Microsoft could not pass the compatibility tests because they refused to implement JNI and RMI. I'm pretty sure that's all part of the public tests...
----------
Duh! Can we say Kaffe? Japhar? Can we say "Sun has explicitly stated that this is ok for a very long time, even when HP threatened to do the same thing"?
So, what exactly is new here? To me, the Judge just said "snow is white, grass is green, and MS can create Java clean room implementations". All three things are facts which have been known for a long time.
Another non-issue. Isn't that what the entire contract was about, the fact that Microsoft was licensing Java technology from Sun? So therefore it obviously follows that Microsoft products have Sun's Java technology in them?
This to me seems also like an extremely straightforward point. Sun only allows certain Java products to officially use the logo and Java trademark; these are ones that pass their compatibility tests at minimum, and most likely ones that are based on their actual intellectual property. Clean room implementations do not a priori fit this category, so they can't officially bear the Java logo or name. (Unless Sun of course decides to explicitly give them this right.)
So, if Microsoft follows Sun's rules, they can bear the logo and name, if they don't, they can't. This applies regardless of clean room implementation or not.
This also seems to be another clear-cut issue unaffected by Judge Whyte's rulings (except peripherally, meaning that determining Microsoft violated the contract with Sun also means determining Microsoft violated use of the Java trademark).
The only significant thing here is that Judge Whyte has decided that Microsoft violated the Java license by not passing the compatibility tests. Why the emphasis? Because this is what the trial is about in the first place! (See here.)
This trial was not originally about clean room implementations; it's been known from the beginning that is acceptable. It's only about whether Microsoft had a contractual obligation to comply with the full Java spec and Sun's compatibility tests. From that regard, Judge Whyte's "preliminary rulings" are equivalent to deciding the trial: Microsoft is guilty.
----------
Between the two, I'd recommend Star Office, **IF** you have gobs of RAM (minimum 64M) and a fairly speedy processor to go with it. It's more polished, and I think it deals better with fonts, though given that it's running on X (the "it's 1999 and I still don't have built-in TrueType font support by default" window system), there's only so much you can expect.
I'd be curious to hear other people's opinions on this too...
P.S. Yes I know you can get TrueType font renderizers for X, my RedHat 6.0 XFree86 came with one installed. But it was an extra feature RedHat was nice enough to through in, and even with that X doesn't have a great way to deal with such fonts, or font scalability, transparently.
P.P.S. On ONE occasion Applix nuked the file I was editing when I tried to save it... only once over a period of about a year, but still, fyi...
----------
For 5.0, RedHat 6.0 has an RPM of Star Office which works just fine. It's not installed by default, it's on the Applications CD.
I wish I could find out if 5.1 works or not on my RedHat 6.0 system, but as another /.er already stated, the download area says that its closed.
----------