Personally, I wouldn't mind running Windows gam^H^H^Hprograms on my computer concurrently with Linux. But the really neat feature that a VM would provide would be the ability to try out bleeding-edge operating systems in relative safety and no repartitioning. (yes, there's a huge speed hit, but I don't mind in this case)
..they're going to need it. Technical aspects aside, VMware claimed to have a patent on this idea. Regardless of the validity of the patent, I still think it would be good for them if they had lots of money for lawyers...
(or are they outside the US? I didn't think to check that. Of course, then it'd still be technically illegal for anyone in the US to use it...)
Hmm. Do you want people using Linux or do you want proprietary companies writing software for it? In the second case, you're correct that this is a proble, but I find it hard to believe that anyone will be 'driven away' as a user because people insist on writing free clones of closed programs.
Free software and originality are orthogonal. There are incredibly original free software projects and incredibly non-original ones. It's also a good idea to remember that originality and quality/usefulness are orthogonal; the first people to think of something aren't necessarily the ones to make the most useful implementation of it. Not that I have anything against originality.:-)
It's also worth noting that VMware isn't particularly original either--it's the first piece of software that does what it specifically does, but the concept is old. VMware just happened to be the first group to apply it to Intel (I think most other people weren't interested since (a) it's a major pain because of limitations of Intel hardware and (b) for most legacy apps, OS-level emulation is a better long-term goal, although [ perhaps ] more difficult in the short-term. If you think Wine is a resource hog, imagine running a 32-MB virtual machine on your computer.:-) ) I'd just like to say that there's no shame in being unoriginal as long as you're good and unoriginal. Obviously since they just announced the project we can't judge whether it's good or not...
Why is it a serious problem for Linux? I agree that Communicator 4.x was awful, but Navigator is (barely) bearable until a decent free browser gets out, and I can think of two or three projects offhand besides Mozilla to do this (mnemonic and kfm come to mind). Mozilla just has the biggest advertising budget.
My guess is that there are two reasons (disclaimer: I do program but I don't do HTML, this is just my understanding of the situation): First, parsing HTML is trivial but displaying it is at best difficult for anything more complicated than Lynx. Even for Lynx it's probably not easy (although I haven't looked at how they do it) Formatting is generally a tricky business. Second, there are a bunch of non-HTML things which I can imagine would seriously complicate the situation, such as plugin architecture, JVMs, Javascript, and other such things.
Of course, it is (as usual) possible that I'm completely wrong about all of this.:-)
I just peeked at their site and it looks like they're going into beta soon. Does anyone know how it compares to Mozilla? (I was quite pleased to see *something* on their Web page, they seem to update once every two months...)
I doubt this will be the "death of Mozilla", but it's good to know that there are other projects out there.
That owuld work better if those were non-intersecting groups (eg, militia seems to be a subset of libertarian, while communist would be a subset of socialist and socialist would be a subset of liberal, and those are only the easy cases..)
I take this to mean a system with which I can operate my computer--more generally, a small set of code chunks which together will allow me to bootstrap an operating system onto my computer. In the case of Linux, this probably means the kernel, shellutils and fileutils, getty and login, gzip and tar, and probably ftp, along with some system-specific stuff (mk*fs for example). [ actually, the programs might be statically linked so there would be a little libc in all of them and we could drop it;) ] This set of code is certainly not a bare kernel and probably has a significant FSF contribution, not to mention GNU. It's certainly not just Linux. Linux by itself doesn't let me operate a computer at all, unless you count turning it on and saying "It runs!".:-) The other option is to take everything on the computer and cram it into the OS; I don't like this but it makes sense then to call it Debian. In fact, we have three levels of size here--distribution, OS, kernel. Debian GNU/Linux. The three levels just happen to be separate here (as opposed to how things work in proprietary systems and *BSD), so it's not surprising that people get the term "operating system" mixed up with the other two. (probably the earlier MS-DOS versions were just operating systems and kernels..they came on a few floppys, as I recall, and provided a minimal set of utilities--copy, dir, etc. These days, Microsoft is basically producing a distribution) That said, I call the whole mess Linux just because the GNU/ part is not significant for compatibility (since all systems are GNU), the Debian part is only slightly significant, most people look blank if I tell them I use GNU or Debian, and Linux is shorter.:-)
I can see you haven't grasped the most essential point of human interaction: Stallman's ideas are unpopular. Therefore it is perfectly legitimate for people to attack and discredit him in any way that they feel necessary so that they don't have to be bothered with him any more. Blatant misrepresentations of his statements and flat-out character assasination are perfectly legitimate.
I've been using Debian for a year and I still can't get the help screen to do anything useful. Whenever I press a page key it vanishes. After fighting with it for about thirty minutes the first time I used it I pretty much gave up and just stuck to "+", "-", "_", and "i". It works well enough until Apt gets finished.:-)
--or it should be. We have (IMO) the potential to be among the most user-friendly distributions out there because of the high level of attention to making things work, and generally work transparently. IMO, all that is needed to make Debian palatable to 'clueless users' is:
Smoother installation with autodetection (I believe there's a group working on that?)
Better mail setup--{smail,exim}config is good but it generally leaves me with a non-working sendmail that I have to tweak (and I have a relatively simple setup)
Better X setup - I believe there are efforts being made in this area
More configuration programs; text files aren't *that* hard to generate automatically--probably the best solution is to come up with or find a 'dialog'-like program that allows more complex specification of widgets (I have some ideas here but haven't gotten around to implementing them) and can use arbitrary frontends
Better-advertisment for the documentation collectors like dhelp and dwww; maybe even make them part of the standard install.
Several of those are probably good technical goals anyway (as someone pointed out, you shouldn't have to register all your PCI hardware by hand when it's sitting in/proc/pci, and X setup is a chore even for an experienced Linux user).
Libraries should be transparently installed when a program depending on them is installed, transparently upgraded as necessary, etc, etc. All it should cost is some download time. ( the only problem would be the hardware-specific stuff that might not be available in the distribution )
I didn't see him trying to force it anywhere...mainly he was trying to point out that RMS isn't a complete ego-driven lunatic for considering Linux to be GNU.
(a) I have little doubt that it would be difficult to legitimately use knowledge about the Windows source code in free software projects. I don't want Wine to get tangled in a legal fiasco. (b) It won't be free software in either sense of the term: - Making Windows "open-source" software, which would render it publicly available for use but not for resale. Software writers simply could obtain the source code for products they develop without having to pay a fee.
They're just throwing the term "open-source" around because they've heard it so much recently, IMO. Of course, this would at least be better than the current situation...
Bleh to games for both Linux and Windows.....
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Who in their right mind is going to keep throwing their money down the black gole otherwise known as PC gaming...
Strategy gamers. The PC might not be too well-suited for Quake, but for..say..CivII it's excellent. I don't even want to imagine playing that with a Nintendo controller, not to mention the save-game mess that consoles have...
Daniel
why windows is to blame for my buggy video driver
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..but a driver is in kernel space is it not? Therefore the OS can't really do anything if the driver is flaky (this is the case in Linux as well--X crashes leave the system locked 90% of the time--and in Linux the video drivers aren't even in kernel space, they're just run as root! Luckily, X is more stable [ if slower:-( ] than a lot of Windows video drivers:-) )
Just read the technical one. It's.erm..interesting. As far as I can tell, he pretends to find lots of cool things to say about Linux so that he has more 'credibility' to shoot it down at the end. Consider: Now I must confess my doubts about the Open Source movement...Perhaps the greatest technological feature that Windows posesses is that it can handle programs as old as the first DOS applications. Linux will never do that.
Heard of this funny little thing called DOSEmu? WINE? I'd estimate that Linux is 80-90% of the way to running legacy code, if that's your idea of a good time (the last 10% being the hardest of course...) Some critics say that Linux will fracture into a dozen different incompatible versions...
This has a little more substance--not because of the distributions but because of the possibility of people rewriting the system just to bite their thumb at the FSF. Aside from that, though, it's hard to imagine how such a schism could happen. The distributions are more compatible lately, not less. Developers want to write code, they don't want to solve all the niggling little problems that users come up with.
He works for Microsoft, he should know.;-) That said, the Debian bug tracking system is (IMO) a good place to start looking at how bugs in Linux programs get dealt with. I think those are the only things he mentioned that haven't been hammered to death already.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I wouldn't mind running Windows gam^H^H^Hprograms on my computer concurrently with Linux. But the really neat feature that a VM would provide would be the ability to try out bleeding-edge operating systems in relative safety and no repartitioning. (yes, there's a huge speed hit, but I don't mind in this case)
Daniel
..they're going to need it. Technical aspects aside, VMware claimed to have a patent on this idea. Regardless of the validity of the patent, I still think it would be good for them if they had lots of money for lawyers...
(or are they outside the US? I didn't think to check that. Of course, then it'd still be technically illegal for anyone in the US to use it...)
Daniel
Hmm. Do you want people using Linux or do you want proprietary companies writing software for it? In the second case, you're correct that this is a proble, but I find it hard to believe that anyone will be 'driven away' as a user because people insist on writing free clones of closed programs.
Daniel
Free software and originality are orthogonal. There are incredibly original free software projects and incredibly non-original ones. It's also a good idea to remember that originality and quality/usefulness are orthogonal; the first people to think of something aren't necessarily the ones to make the most useful implementation of it. Not that I have anything against originality. :-)
:-) )
It's also worth noting that VMware isn't particularly original either--it's the first piece of software that does what it specifically does, but the concept is old. VMware just happened to be the first group to apply it to Intel (I think most other people weren't interested since (a) it's a major pain because of limitations of Intel hardware and (b) for most legacy apps, OS-level emulation is a better long-term goal, although [ perhaps ] more difficult in the short-term. If you think Wine is a resource hog, imagine running a 32-MB virtual machine on your computer.
I'd just like to say that there's no shame in being unoriginal as long as you're good and unoriginal. Obviously since they just announced the project we can't judge whether it's good or not...
Daniel
Why is it a serious problem for Linux? I agree that Communicator 4.x was awful, but Navigator is (barely) bearable until a decent free browser gets out, and I can think of two or three projects offhand besides Mozilla to do this (mnemonic and kfm come to mind). Mozilla just has the biggest advertising budget.
:-)
The situation isn't "Mozilla or bust".
Daniel
My guess is that there are two reasons (disclaimer: I do program but I don't do HTML, this is just my understanding of the situation):
:-)
First, parsing HTML is trivial but displaying it is at best difficult for anything more complicated than Lynx. Even for Lynx it's probably not easy (although I haven't looked at how they do it) Formatting is generally a tricky business.
Second, there are a bunch of non-HTML things which I can imagine would seriously complicate the situation, such as plugin architecture, JVMs, Javascript, and other such things.
Of course, it is (as usual) possible that I'm completely wrong about all of this.
Daniel
I just peeked at their site and it looks like they're going into beta soon. Does anyone know how it compares to Mozilla? (I was quite pleased to see *something* on their Web page, they seem to update once every two months...)
I doubt this will be the "death of Mozilla", but it's good to know that there are other projects out there.
Daniel
Perhaps it would be good (at this point) to not worry about integrating the mail and news clients
into the initial release of Mozilla.
Or, better yet, not integrate them at all?
Daniel
That owuld work better if those were non-intersecting groups (eg, militia seems to be a subset of libertarian, while communist would be a subset of socialist and socialist would be a subset of liberal, and those are only the easy cases..)
Daniel
OS: Operating System.
;) ] This set of code is certainly not a bare kernel and probably has a significant FSF contribution, not to mention GNU. It's certainly not just Linux. Linux by itself doesn't let me operate a computer at all, unless you count turning it on and saying "It runs!". :-) The other option is to take everything on the computer and cram it into the OS; I don't like this but it makes sense then to call it Debian. In fact, we have three levels of size here--distribution, OS, kernel. Debian GNU/Linux. :-)
I take this to mean a system with which I can operate my computer--more generally, a small set of code chunks which together will allow me to bootstrap an operating system onto my computer. In the case of Linux, this probably means the kernel, shellutils and fileutils, getty and login, gzip and tar, and probably ftp, along with some system-specific stuff (mk*fs for example). [ actually, the programs might be statically linked so there would be a little libc in all of them and we could drop it
The three levels just happen to be separate here (as opposed to how things work in proprietary systems and *BSD), so it's not surprising that people get the term "operating system" mixed up with the other two. (probably the earlier MS-DOS versions were just operating systems and kernels..they came on a few floppys, as I recall, and provided a minimal set of utilities--copy, dir, etc. These days, Microsoft is basically producing a distribution)
That said, I call the whole mess Linux just because the GNU/ part is not significant for compatibility (since all systems are GNU), the Debian part is only slightly significant, most people look blank if I tell them I use GNU or Debian, and Linux is shorter.
Daniel
I can see you haven't grasped the most essential point of human interaction:
Stallman's ideas are unpopular. Therefore it is perfectly legitimate for people to attack and discredit him in any way that they feel necessary so that they don't have to be bothered with him any more. Blatant misrepresentations of his statements and flat-out character assasination are perfectly legitimate.
</cynicism>
Daniel
I've been using Debian for a year and I still can't get the help screen to do anything useful. Whenever I press a page key it vanishes. After fighting with it for about thirty minutes the first time I used it I pretty much gave up and just stuck to "+", "-", "_", and "i". It works well enough until Apt gets finished. :-)
Daniel
Several of those are probably good technical goals anyway (as someone pointed out, you shouldn't have to register all your PCI hardware by hand when it's sitting in
Daniel
Libraries should be transparently installed when a program depending on them is installed, transparently upgraded as necessary, etc, etc. All it should cost is some download time. ( the only problem would be the hardware-specific stuff that might not be available in the distribution )
Daniel
Have you posted this before? I could swear I've seen this exact same comment on /.
Maybe it's just lack of sleep...
Daniel
What percent of a Linux distro is kernel code?
Daniel
I didn't see him trying to force it anywhere...mainly he was trying to point out that RMS isn't a complete ego-driven lunatic for considering Linux to be GNU.
Daniel
Why would XFree86 want to be part of the GNU project? That would imply it works only w/ GNU software
No, it would imply that it is part of a Free operating system. gcc and fileutils work on Windows.
(I am curious to know what XFree thinks of being part of the GNU system but I can't really imagine that they'd object)
Daniel
(a) I have little doubt that it would be difficult to legitimately use knowledge about the Windows source code in free software projects. I don't want Wine to get tangled in a legal fiasco.
(b) It won't be free software in either sense of the term:
- Making Windows "open-source" software, which would render it publicly available for use but not for resale. Software writers simply could obtain the source code for products they develop without having to pay a fee.
They're just throwing the term "open-source" around because they've heard it so much recently, IMO. Of course, this would at least be better than the current situation...
Daniel
Whose freedom?
Daniel
Who in their right mind is going to keep throwing their money down the black gole otherwise known as PC gaming...
Strategy gamers. The PC might not be too well-suited for Quake, but for..say..CivII it's excellent. I don't even want to imagine playing that with a Nintendo controller, not to mention the save-game mess that consoles have...
Daniel
Daniel [ also no Windows fan ]
I'm trying it out now--one small problem, the first level of replies doesn't get indented in Lynx. Or is this intentional? :-)
Daniel
It looks like the moderators agree with you. ;-)
Daniel
Consider:
Now I must confess my doubts about the Open Source movement...Perhaps the greatest technological feature that Windows posesses is that it can handle programs as old as the first DOS applications. Linux will never do that.
Heard of this funny little thing called DOSEmu? WINE? I'd estimate that Linux is 80-90% of the way to running legacy code, if that's your idea of a good time (the last 10% being the hardest of course...)
Some critics say that Linux will fracture into a dozen different incompatible versions...
This has a little more substance--not because of the distributions but because of the possibility of people rewriting the system just to bite their thumb at the FSF. Aside from that, though, it's hard to imagine how such a schism could happen. The distributions are more compatible lately, not less.
Developers want to write code, they don't want to solve all the niggling little problems that users come up with.
He works for Microsoft, he should know. ;-) That said, the Debian bug tracking system is (IMO) a good place to start looking at how bugs in Linux programs get dealt with.
I think those are the only things he mentioned that haven't been hammered to death already.
Daniel