Re:...probably 2-3x what Be would take
on
Linux BIOS
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· Score: 1
I used to have Be on that machine, it was about 2 minutes. I remember that the HD detect part of the boot (I forget the real name) was taking a long time. That box really does have some strange hardware, but the kernel now has C-Media support, so I don't care.
LessTif eventually reached Motif compatibility. Many, many, people use it instead of Motif, even with OpenMotif avalible. If we can do that with Harmony, no matter how long it takes, we would start being used by a lot of people. Once Harmony is almost caught up to QT, we've won. Can you picture TrollTech and the KDE team immediatly releasing new versions of their products every time Harmony fixes whatever compatiblity is broken by the new version of QT?
They just can't work that fast. At worst, the Harmony releases would lag a few weeks behind. And they just can't run ahead that quickly. As soon as they broke Harmony, we'd catch right up.
Remember, we have source, unlike LessTif. Harmony programmers could find out how QT worked, and develop their own version. TrollTech can't take the source away, or they will anger so many people that Harmony will get even more support.
We can catch up quick and stay caught up. If people get behind this, there is no way Harmony can lose.
I told you there were easier ways. To tell you the truth, I get a little nervous using any utility that touches those parts of the disk. This way, if something goes wrong, I just skip the LoadLin line in the autoexec.bat (the only line, actually) and edit it to load a different kernel. If something goes wrong with one of those utilities, you fall back on floppy disks and voodoo and all kinds of bad stuff. I've been using this for a few years and it works fast and well.
You other people go ahead and use fancy mulit-boot loaders and whatever. I'll just keep on using this.
No, you are free to report bugs and give suggestions, the same as anybody. But Corel is reporting as bugs where their arbitrary idea of a UI differs from the KDE team's. If your opinion is that KDE should have the right-click menu attached to the middle mouse button instead of the right one, is that a bug? Do you report it?
No, you do not (I hope not, at least). You're an adult (or close enough, at least). You can just change the code. If Corel wants to change KDE's interface to conform to their expectations, they should do it themselves instead of trying to force the world to change along with them.
This isn't feedback. This is Corel trying to get KDE to change their opinions to match Corel's by reporting where the KDE team's opinions differ from Corel's as problems that need to be fixed. This is Corel trying to get the KDE team to do what they want instead of just changing the version of KDE they distribute to do what they want. There's already a Corel Explorer. Why not just make the rest of a Corel KDE instead of telling the KDE team they need to do it? If the KDE team likes it, they can change the main version. If Corel wants to tell the team what it thinks KDE should be like, they should suggest not consider it a problem that the KDE team needs to solve.
Personally, I don't use KDE and rarely use Gnome (I have been Enlightened) but I know there are a lot of people who do use KDE. It would be easier to use Harmony to replace QT than to convert KDE to GTK+, and doing so would make KDE free(er) software. I think that for the people who use KDE, or would like to use it (the man who offered the $3000 for example) would benefit from a free KDE. So I think that Harmony would be a Good Thing, even though I personally would not use it.
I compile new kernels frequently (two yesterday, one today so far) and I don't like running LILO every time I want to use a new kernel. I know there are eaisier ways, but I just keep a GNU FreeDOS partition (about 10MB) with the kernels I'm using at the time and a script to change to a specific kernel, copying it into the DOS partition if nessecary. LoadLin does the rest.
Boot time is approx. 1 min, 900MHz P3 (current kernel is 2.4.0-test1-ac19)
It still has a chance! I've mentioned before that "Harmony Needs Support," but no one seems to listen. If Harmony could be revived from it's slumber (there doesn't seem to be any more work being done on it; correct me if I'm wrong), then we could create a version of KDE that would solve the GPL/QPL problems by avoiding the QPL altogether. I know that this is slightly unkosher, but the actions of the KDE project are even worse. Even if they keep using new QT features, we can keep duplicating them.
KDE fans: don't give up: support Harmony for a better desktop!
Now ever since MSFT crushed Corel's Wordperfect with Word the Corel people have wanted revenge on MSFT one way or the other.
By the time Corel bought WP from Novell, it was already crushed by MS. It wasn't Corel's until a little while ago. WP 6 was the version that lost major market share, and that was mostly Novell.
If they'd wanted to, they could've just started uploading changes to CVS, but they didn't. They filed reports about them, and gave the community the chance to discuss them.
Yeah, uploading them would have been worse, but was the "chance to discuss" the changes any better? Did they do this out of the goodness of their hearts? Or are they trying to turn KDE into the product Corel wants, but unwilling to do work? I see this as another case of a company that thinks they can get the Free Software (KDE really isn't libre, but oh well) community to do their work for them so that they don't have to foot the bill for the product they sell.
Corel is a company that has contributed to the free software community more than others, and it's not as bad as a lot of other "mainstream" companies that have "contributed." But, please! You aren't the only people working on this project! Your idea of UI bugs is not everyone's!
Oh yes. It isn't as bad now, but years ago, X was awful. It was bloated, slow, and prone to breaking. The main reason I would want to switch would be that these problems are mostly still there, it's just that the hardware is powerful enough that they aren't as bad. Sometimes I think about running Emacs from X, but then I think, why bother? Any system that promises to do everything X can do, better, has my support. I've been watching Berlin for a long time, and now that it's getting somewhere, I'm starting to get optimistic that I can finally kiss X goodbye (actually, I was planning to use rm -r, but, hey.)
Yes, a picture can be property. But those pictures are works of art, and can take a lot of work to create. If you took your camera to the Ford showroom and took a snapshot of the shinny new car sitting up there on the pedestal, you take nothing away from Ford. You didn't steal anything, you didn't waste their time, nothing. A screenshot can't be property unless it is a work of art that is the result of effort. Probably in this case somebody just clicked a few buttons and then Save As.... You can't take something away from Adobe by doing that.
Sir, how can a screenshot be a trade secret? What can Adobe's competitors learn from these screenshots that would help them duplicate Adobe's work?
And the "trade secret" thing is debatable here, anyway. The point is that these screenshots can't be a trade secret, no matter what, aren't under a NDA or something, and so MNN has the right to publish.
This may suprise some {people, DMCA/UCTIA advocates, borg} but in these great United States we have something called freedom of the press. If MNN signed no agreement (and that's their story), then they have the constitutional right to publish.
Whatever Adobe's motivation, it is against the natural right of the press to freely publish whatever they want to. Since MNN has not (again, from what I have seen) waived their right to publish this information, that applies to this case. Adobe's action is wrong. That's all there is to it
No, no, that was meant as a joke! The reason it's so pleasant was because I thought you had a very good point and I wanted to tell you so. I actually worried that you would take me seriously.
I always try to answer people who reply to my comments, and talk about their point if I agree with it or debate it if I don't. I try to be nice to flamers, too, but it is much eaisier not to rave at people who I agree with.
Wonderful! Our mission to Mars will get there twice as fast! Go upgrade the ship! Inform the team! This is great!
Wait a minute. There is no ship, there is no ISS, there is no team. It was supposed to be done, on its way, or at least close, but there is only a steadily diminishing effort being put forth by underfunded space agencies who are only becoming more underfunded. We aren't really trying to reach Mars, or even Earth orbit. The only real long-term space settlement is Mir. Why was it allowed to fall into disrepair in the first place? If there was money for maintenence, this wouldn't have happened. But Russia doesn't have enough money for everything, and no one is helping them. The dream is moving forward, but it is dying.
Decades ago, an observer of the Apollo mission announce that "Now we must go to Mars!" But there have been so many setbacks, so many buget cuts... politicians do what will get them reelected. And the people who are reelecting them don't care enough about space to want their governments to spend valuble tax dollars on it. Most of the news about actual work in space today relates to commercial ventures. That's sad.
We can only do so much with one planet. All the scientific advancement in the world can only go so far. Sure, a society could eventually be created that would be adapted to living forever on Earth and Earth only, but that's just not in human nature. Space is the future, and it will provide for the advancement of humanity far better than one poor planet on its own ever could. We can only go so far before we've taken all we can from the Earth and it decays even faster than it is now.
We need to embrace the space program, not act like short sighted prairie dogs (are prairie dogs shortsighted?). Convince your friends. Then maybe we can get back on track (or at least try... we were supposed to have a colony on Mars by now....)
Seriously, I am aware of that, but the point of this discussion is that the user wants to know about a library which already exists. I strongly agree that new libraries should be GPLd unless there is a reason to do otherwise, but this library is pre-existing and may be under the LGPL. I used the term as a generic since a large number of libraries fall into this catagory.
And, if you really want to go further into the issure, there is a point you didn't bring up. LGPL no longer stands for Library General Public License, it now stands for Lesser General Public License. The change was made to clarify the situation you mention.
Thanks for pointing that out, though. It's an important thing to mention in most any discussion of the LGPL.
The Windows kernel leaves the DOS kernel running but inactive. My point was, has been, and it that it uses DOS to boot Windows, which runs on top of DOS even though by now it does not use DOS for much of anything, since (as I said several times) almost all of those functions are built into the Windows kernel, which is doing most (almost all) of the work, even though it is neither the only kernel nor the lowest level kernel running. I have and can reproduce messages in Windows that show clear evidence of this. For instance, Win98 just dumped me into a DOS screen with a ARF message yesterday. This were not "funky drivers" but core DOS/Windows (it was hard to tell which part was causing that error) kernel functions. It wasn't any strange hardware, but a special system device. Those do not use drives; they live entirely inside the kernel and may or may not correspond to actual hardware.
While Windows is running, it looks like this: DOS (idle, superseeded by the running programs most of the time) -> Windows (a program that has code to talk to hardware and bypass DOS) -> Windows applications.
Again, if you read what I have written, the virtual kernel is quoted, as I was using it as an analogy. I am trying to think of words to describe these concepts, and often come short. The fact I am trying to get accross is that Windows runs on top of DOS. It no longer uses DOS for much, because it has code to handle those functions. But DOS is there.
If what you say is true, that Windows runs as a virtual kernel over DOS, then most tasks that require access to hardware would have to go through DOS. This is not what I said; it is the opposite. Look at my Zip drive example: my argument was that the Zip drive is controled entirely by the Windows program running on top of DOS rather than by DOS and that they are seperate from an engineering perspective for that reason.
The only point I was trying to make is that Windows and DOS are not the same although they are sold together, that the Windows kernel has not been updated recently even though drivers for it have, and that Linux is better because it's model is consistant and stable while the Windows model is fragmentary because things are never replaced but just hooked into by other things to make them work. I never said Windows relied on DOS, my point was that it tried to avoid that and replace the DOS it runs on top of.
Seriously though, it wouldn't take much work at all. Most of the actual hardware added to a Mac is external and depends more on the bus connecting it to the CPU than the CPU's type. Internal hardware is PC-compatible on a Mac these days, anyway (PCI slots, IDE drives. you can buy a PC Voodoo card and make it work on the MacOS if you download the drivers.) Very doable.
Picture this: 386, DOS 6.22 (no Windows), WP5.1. I know a guy for whom this was an upgrade a few years ago. He's now using a P120, Win98, and he had me set it up so that it would stop at DOS before going into Windows. Guess why....
The reason that GPL code is avalible is so that other coders can look at it and use it for whatever they need to. If you want to use a GPLed library to save yourself the trouble of rewriting it, then do so. If you would rather create a compatible libray, then you have the abilities to do so (which is one of the freedoms that free software is about) although this is less effecient, since there is no real reason to do so. You can just modify the library to suit your needs.
If you would like to learn how to write good code, then go right ahead! Code is avalible so that people can learn how it works and how they can use it, and you are making a contribution of sorts by adding one more bright person (I assume you are bright, at least) to the ranks of those who will make the right choice about code.
The problem comes in when someone wants to learn from code so they can turn around and make their own version of that code that is restricted or something. While it is impolite and inefficient to duplicate effort (note that adding features != duplication; collaboration is another freedom that makes free software free), this is an insult. It says that you are taking someone's work, put a minimal amount of effort into changing it around so that they no longer control it, and binding it in irons so that you get a reward. We people work hard, and it's kind of like stealing, only legal (sort of, anyway).
GPL stands for General Public License (not GNU Public License, as some think, look it up) because it was created so the General Public would have the freedom to use code to improve their work and to put work into improving that code. Sharing code is the fundemental principle of the GPL, and if you can learn from this code, go on ahead.
Just don't abuse what you've learned. Keep your code free, because it's only fair. A system based on sharing depends on the people who are doing the sharing.
I play text adventures on my Palm all the time. Sometimes I use the stylus, but I usually use the keyboard I bought (GoType). The interface on the interpreter is kind of clumsy, and so's the font, but otherwise I'm good.
Reading through all of the comments on this article, I noticed a pattern. Many (even most) of the comments complain that a certain algorithm wasn't included, or that the choices are bad, or whatever. Well, no Top 10 list is perfect. This is just the Top 10 that these people came up with. Obiviously, it was affected by their specialities and their opinions. No top 10 list can cover everything, so they had to leave something out, no matter how hard they tried. No top 10 list can include everthing, so they had to pick and choose.
These are just what they came up with. Don't complain that they "forgot one". Instead, just write your own. A lot of these comments say that "it should have been in there" when it would have been good enough to say "I'd have put this in there." This list is a starting point, not the ending one.
Personally, I favour the suggestion I saw about polling Slashdot. Maybe an Ask Slashdot article: What's Your favourite?
Slashdot Mirror
I used to have Be on that machine, it was about 2 minutes. I remember that the HD detect part of the boot (I forget the real name) was taking a long time. That box really does have some strange hardware, but the kernel now has C-Media support, so I don't care.
They just can't work that fast. At worst, the Harmony releases would lag a few weeks behind. And they just can't run ahead that quickly. As soon as they broke Harmony, we'd catch right up.
Remember, we have source, unlike LessTif. Harmony programmers could find out how QT worked, and develop their own version. TrollTech can't take the source away, or they will anger so many people that Harmony will get even more support.
We can catch up quick and stay caught up. If people get behind this, there is no way Harmony can lose.
You other people go ahead and use fancy mulit-boot loaders and whatever. I'll just keep on using this.
No, you do not (I hope not, at least). You're an adult (or close enough, at least). You can just change the code. If Corel wants to change KDE's interface to conform to their expectations, they should do it themselves instead of trying to force the world to change along with them.
This isn't feedback. This is Corel trying to get KDE to change their opinions to match Corel's by reporting where the KDE team's opinions differ from Corel's as problems that need to be fixed. This is Corel trying to get the KDE team to do what they want instead of just changing the version of KDE they distribute to do what they want. There's already a Corel Explorer. Why not just make the rest of a Corel KDE instead of telling the KDE team they need to do it? If the KDE team likes it, they can change the main version. If Corel wants to tell the team what it thinks KDE should be like, they should suggest not consider it a problem that the KDE team needs to solve.
But if that won't do (a compatibility layer would probably be smaller, too, if a little less reliable) than yours is a very good idea.
Personally, I don't use KDE and rarely use Gnome (I have been Enlightened) but I know there are a lot of people who do use KDE. It would be easier to use Harmony to replace QT than to convert KDE to GTK+, and doing so would make KDE free(er) software. I think that for the people who use KDE, or would like to use it (the man who offered the $3000 for example) would benefit from a free KDE. So I think that Harmony would be a Good Thing, even though I personally would not use it.
Boot time is approx. 1 min, 900MHz P3 (current kernel is 2.4.0-test1-ac19)
KDE fans: don't give up: support Harmony for a better desktop!
By the time Corel bought WP from Novell, it was already crushed by MS. It wasn't Corel's until a little while ago. WP 6 was the version that lost major market share, and that was mostly Novell.
I fear that this has upset the balence.
Yeah, uploading them would have been worse, but was the "chance to discuss" the changes any better? Did they do this out of the goodness of their hearts? Or are they trying to turn KDE into the product Corel wants, but unwilling to do work? I see this as another case of a company that thinks they can get the Free Software (KDE really isn't libre, but oh well) community to do their work for them so that they don't have to foot the bill for the product they sell.
Corel is a company that has contributed to the free software community more than others, and it's not as bad as a lot of other "mainstream" companies that have "contributed." But, please! You aren't the only people working on this project! Your idea of UI bugs is not everyone's!
Oh yes. It isn't as bad now, but years ago, X was awful. It was bloated, slow, and prone to breaking. The main reason I would want to switch would be that these problems are mostly still there, it's just that the hardware is powerful enough that they aren't as bad. Sometimes I think about running Emacs from X, but then I think, why bother? Any system that promises to do everything X can do, better, has my support. I've been watching Berlin for a long time, and now that it's getting somewhere, I'm starting to get optimistic that I can finally kiss X goodbye (actually, I was planning to use rm -r, but, hey.)
Personally, I think that if they're going to give something away for free they ought to take the risk that someone will make money using it.
Yes, a picture can be property. But those pictures are works of art, and can take a lot of work to create. If you took your camera to the Ford showroom and took a snapshot of the shinny new car sitting up there on the pedestal, you take nothing away from Ford. You didn't steal anything, you didn't waste their time, nothing. A screenshot can't be property unless it is a work of art that is the result of effort. Probably in this case somebody just clicked a few buttons and then Save As.... You can't take something away from Adobe by doing that.
And the "trade secret" thing is debatable here, anyway. The point is that these screenshots can't be a trade secret, no matter what, aren't under a NDA or something, and so MNN has the right to publish.
Whatever Adobe's motivation, it is against the natural right of the press to freely publish whatever they want to. Since MNN has not (again, from what I have seen) waived their right to publish this information, that applies to this case. Adobe's action is wrong. That's all there is to it
I always try to answer people who reply to my comments, and talk about their point if I agree with it or debate it if I don't. I try to be nice to flamers, too, but it is much eaisier not to rave at people who I agree with.
Wait a minute. There is no ship, there is no ISS, there is no team. It was supposed to be done, on its way, or at least close, but there is only a steadily diminishing effort being put forth by underfunded space agencies who are only becoming more underfunded. We aren't really trying to reach Mars, or even Earth orbit. The only real long-term space settlement is Mir. Why was it allowed to fall into disrepair in the first place? If there was money for maintenence, this wouldn't have happened. But Russia doesn't have enough money for everything, and no one is helping them. The dream is moving forward, but it is dying.
Decades ago, an observer of the Apollo mission announce that "Now we must go to Mars!" But there have been so many setbacks, so many buget cuts... politicians do what will get them reelected. And the people who are reelecting them don't care enough about space to want their governments to spend valuble tax dollars on it. Most of the news about actual work in space today relates to commercial ventures. That's sad.
We can only do so much with one planet. All the scientific advancement in the world can only go so far. Sure, a society could eventually be created that would be adapted to living forever on Earth and Earth only, but that's just not in human nature. Space is the future, and it will provide for the advancement of humanity far better than one poor planet on its own ever could. We can only go so far before we've taken all we can from the Earth and it decays even faster than it is now.
We need to embrace the space program, not act like short sighted prairie dogs (are prairie dogs shortsighted?). Convince your friends. Then maybe we can get back on track (or at least try... we were supposed to have a colony on Mars by now....)
Seriously, I am aware of that, but the point of this discussion is that the user wants to know about a library which already exists. I strongly agree that new libraries should be GPLd unless there is a reason to do otherwise, but this library is pre-existing and may be under the LGPL. I used the term as a generic since a large number of libraries fall into this catagory.
And, if you really want to go further into the issure, there is a point you didn't bring up. LGPL no longer stands for Library General Public License, it now stands for Lesser General Public License. The change was made to clarify the situation you mention.
Thanks for pointing that out, though. It's an important thing to mention in most any discussion of the LGPL.
While Windows is running, it looks like this:
DOS (idle, superseeded by the running programs most of the time) -> Windows (a program that has code to talk to hardware and bypass DOS) -> Windows applications.
Again, if you read what I have written, the virtual kernel is quoted, as I was using it as an analogy. I am trying to think of words to describe these concepts, and often come short. The fact I am trying to get accross is that Windows runs on top of DOS. It no longer uses DOS for much, because it has code to handle those functions. But DOS is there.
If what you say is true, that Windows runs as a virtual kernel over DOS, then most tasks that require access to hardware would have to go through DOS.
This is not what I said; it is the opposite. Look at my Zip drive example: my argument was that the Zip drive is controled entirely by the Windows program running on top of DOS rather than by DOS and that they are seperate from an engineering perspective for that reason.
The only point I was trying to make is that Windows and DOS are not the same although they are sold together, that the Windows kernel has not been updated recently even though drivers for it have, and that Linux is better because it's model is consistant and stable while the Windows model is fragmentary because things are never replaced but just hooked into by other things to make them work. I never said Windows relied on DOS, my point was that it tried to avoid that and replace the DOS it runs on top of.
Seriously though, it wouldn't take much work at all. Most of the actual hardware added to a Mac is external and depends more on the bus connecting it to the CPU than the CPU's type. Internal hardware is PC-compatible on a Mac these days, anyway (PCI slots, IDE drives. you can buy a PC Voodoo card and make it work on the MacOS if you download the drivers.) Very doable.
Picture this: 386, DOS 6.22 (no Windows), WP5.1. I know a guy for whom this was an upgrade a few years ago. He's now using a P120, Win98, and he had me set it up so that it would stop at DOS before going into Windows. Guess why....
If you would like to learn how to write good code, then go right ahead! Code is avalible so that people can learn how it works and how they can use it, and you are making a contribution of sorts by adding one more bright person (I assume you are bright, at least) to the ranks of those who will make the right choice about code.
The problem comes in when someone wants to learn from code so they can turn around and make their own version of that code that is restricted or something. While it is impolite and inefficient to duplicate effort (note that adding features != duplication; collaboration is another freedom that makes free software free), this is an insult. It says that you are taking someone's work, put a minimal amount of effort into changing it around so that they no longer control it, and binding it in irons so that you get a reward. We people work hard, and it's kind of like stealing, only legal (sort of, anyway).
GPL stands for General Public License (not GNU Public License, as some think, look it up) because it was created so the General Public would have the freedom to use code to improve their work and to put work into improving that code. Sharing code is the fundemental principle of the GPL, and if you can learn from this code, go on ahead.
Just don't abuse what you've learned. Keep your code free, because it's only fair. A system based on sharing depends on the people who are doing the sharing.
I play text adventures on my Palm all the time. Sometimes I use the stylus, but I usually use the keyboard I bought (GoType). The interface on the interpreter is kind of clumsy, and so's the font, but otherwise I'm good.
These are just what they came up with. Don't complain that they "forgot one". Instead, just write your own. A lot of these comments say that "it should have been in there" when it would have been good enough to say "I'd have put this in there." This list is a starting point, not the ending one.
Personally, I favour the suggestion I saw about polling Slashdot. Maybe an Ask Slashdot article: What's Your favourite?