go after the Brown Department of Computer Science. The primary intro course here requires the students to build a Tetris clone. It'd be..interesting..to see whether this self-styled 'Tetris Company' is confident enough to take on a university rather than some student who can't afford to defend himself..
(I remember seeing this before..the most amusing thing is where they refer to the creation of anything remotely similar to Tetris as 'piracy' and claim that these games are made from 'inferior materials'..)
But the fact is that the ease-of-setup and ease-of-use on a Linux box, for non-technical people, has helped make Windows the dominant OS.
Umm, that suggests that Linux was actively competing with Windows for users. When Win3.1 came out I think Linux had what, a thousand users? Even until the last few years Linux wasn't even a blip on Microsoft's radar. Linux never lost the battle..it hasn't even started yet.
A lot of comments here seem to suggest that we should simply ignore any political or ideological beliefs we hold..just "shut up and code". There are so many things wrong with this viewpoint that I don't know where to begin..but my point here is this: show me an apolitical action. Go ahead, pull an apolitical action out of a hat and dangle it in the air. You can't. A deliberatly apolitical action is simply a statement of another political position. So quit pretending that you're high-and-mighty and above the squabbling--the real reason most people here are complaining about the so-called 'fanatics' is because not because those 'fanatics' mix politics and code but because the complainers do not agree with those politics. Trying to shut up the opposing side is simply facist and, ironically, against the ideals that the Libertarians (who seem to be the largest proponents of 'shut up and code') claim to support. Not everyone will agree with your particular position. Get over it. Don't act like they're a 'looney tune' or 'stupid' or 'egotistical' (and those are some of the milder epithets I've heard applied here). Deal with the ideas--random flammage might give you a sense of accomplishment but it really does make it look like you've run out of clues and are just flailing. So: Keep talking--and code.
Worse yet, the crunchy-granola crowd would hi-jack the open-source movement and turn it into the free-software movement. That?s fine and dandy for dusty academics living on NSF grants, but Ayn Rand would never approve of such munificence.
I must have missed Ayn Rand's conversion to a deity. Anyway, this sentence was where I stopped reading..the mention of Ayn Rand's name is a good clue that the author is immune to logic..hope I didn't miss anything as amusing as the rest of his 'article'.
A very coherent, well-spoken interview. I'm glad to see that he mentioned user-friendliness several times, I've been concerned about Debian's installation/initial setup problems for a while now. If they do gnome-apt right and resolve the UI issues, the futue will be very good...
I doubt that his parents could have done even that much in Linux a few years ago. Things are moving fast. Today, they can use it..tomorrow, maintain it?
(btw..I don't really know many people who can 'maintain' Win95 or MacOS either, usually they come around to be or another resident computer nerd and ask for help. So my conclusion is that no software is easy to use.;) )
There are extremely few exceptions to the rule that everyone enjoys coding more than packaging, testing, or documenting.
Have you ever used Debian? They consider undocumented or poorly packaged software to be a bug. Some package maintainers seem to be more committed to quashing problems in their packages than other but overall stuff gets done.
And they are most assuredly not a commercial entity.
RedHat's Web page lists ports to Intel, Alpha, and Sparc.
Debian's Web page lists ports to Intel, Alpha, Sparc, UltraSparc, ARM, Motorola 68k, MIPS, PPC, the Hurd and Beowulf. And Debian isn't even a commercial entity (I know--but some people feel that being a commercial entity should result in better products so I felt I'd mention this;) )
Don't know about the other distros, but that doesn't sound like 'superiority'..
??? You are confusing 'is unable to...' with 'does not...'. Linux is perfectly capable of supporting more hardware, it just doesn't.:-) This isn't a design issue, it's a political issue. Companies don't want to put the effort into a driver for a platform that's not 'mainstream' and don't want to release the specs to let anyone else. But the infrastructure for most stuff (excluding some oddball input devices and so on..I don't know anyone who has a force-feedback joystick anyway..) is there.
Ech. I still don't see why Debian, which has the simplest, most robust, most *brainless* software installation of any linux distro (that I have tried), gets lumped in with Slackware as a "Techie-only" distro. Being a techie myself, I can't comment on Debian's friendliness;); my impression, though, is that while I spent a few more hours than RedHat users that I know installing my base system, I spend an order of magnitude less time trying to keep it up to date and working.
*sigh*. They mentioned KDE and not GNOME earlier in the article. They were using both as representative examples of Unix GUIs. They didn't even mention GNUStep, anyone want to flame them for that?
Goddamnit, what makes you think that a person who has all the power is going to voluntarily deny himself of that power when it is so easy to hide his abuse.
..so he does..and then the camera on him picks it up and he's out of office faster than you can say something very short.
People think that the government will be the one to create a 1984-type scenario, and look to the private sector for salvation. I think that if any such thing occurs (which would be..let's say..unfortunate;) ) it's much more likely to be caused by companies jockeying for power, money and 'intellectual property' than by politicians hunting for votes. This article is, of course, a perfect example...
They weren't comparing thouroughput, they were comparing the time it took to configure the system. Which doesn't have *anything* to do with modem speed. (well, I guess configuring a 1980s 1200 baud modem might be difficult these days, but...)
it. You don't like the Qt license, then go Gnome and revel in your supposed superiority over the rest of us.
Right now, I'm thankful I have a decent, STABLE system like KDE (unlike the bug-ridden crashfest known as Gnome...say, what functions failed to resolve in libgtk today?). You don't mind a constantly crashing desktop? Have fun.
I don't have a problem that Gnome exists, unlike you Gnome fanatics
You haven't answered the question. What is this magical wand that Be has waved? Every time someone tells me about the BeOS they say "multithreaded multithreaded multithreaded" and if I ask them what they mean, I get a puzzled look. I'm really curious to find out because it sounds like a nifty feature and I want to know more about it. But everyone just says, "Your app automatically gets muitithreaded". Multithreaded apps have a significantly different structure, both logically and programmatically, from singlethreaded apps; the only thing I can think of that wouldn't cause tons of deadlocks and races is that Be does all non-blocking IO and GUI stuff asynchronously in another thread. So what is the incredible architectural change that couldn't be replicated by building a real GUI for Unix that actually has multithreaded libraries, and then multithreading the widget sets (and rewriting them to spawn lots of threads;) )? I just don't get it either. Could someone explain to me explicitly how this magic feature works?
Actually, I guess one obstacle to this in Unix would be the limited number of threads on a lot of systems..
what I want to know is, how easy is it to make a platform-agnostic GTK app, or, in other words, one that will run on linux, win32, and other platforms.
AFAIK, any application which just uses calls from GTK+, GLIB, and GDK can be ported to any platform which has those libs without modifications. That doesn't guarantee what happens if you use Unixisms or Winisms in the rest of your code though..;-)
Every time I install a new version (because there is this new program I want to try out that need this new version), some of my other programs breaks.
(a) Development libraries don't maintain backwards compatability. (b) If your programs are breaking, I'm afraid it's your own fault..multiple versions of GTK+ can live side-by-side quite peacably. (I have 1.0.6, 1.1.5, 1.1.6, 1.1.7, 1.1.8, 1.1.9, 1.1.10, 1.1.11, 1.1.13, and 1.1.14 installed) And all I did was "./autogen.sh && make && make install". (for the ones that weren't installed by my package manager).
Clues are a recommended accessory when using development software.
Yes. The thing is, when you upgrade libc, you have to recompile everything that depends on it. It's much better to use a package system where each package maintainer is responsible for recompiling his/her own package and everyone can download the updates. I know that I can't really leave my computer compiling everything from source..Gnome takes all morning, the whole system would probably take a week or so and be broken for a month.:-)
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go after the Brown Department of Computer Science. The primary intro course here requires the students to build a Tetris clone. It'd be..interesting..to see whether this self-styled 'Tetris Company' is confident enough to take on a university rather than some student who can't afford to defend himself..
(I remember seeing this before..the most amusing thing is where they refer to the creation of anything remotely similar to Tetris as 'piracy' and claim that these games are made from 'inferior materials'..)
Daniel
But the fact is that the ease-of-setup and ease-of-use on a Linux box, for non-technical people, has helped make Windows the dominant OS.
Umm, that suggests that Linux was actively competing with Windows for users. When Win3.1 came out I think Linux had what, a thousand users? Even until the last few years Linux wasn't even a blip on Microsoft's radar. Linux never lost the battle..it hasn't even started yet.
Daniel
A lot of comments here seem to suggest that we should simply ignore any political or ideological beliefs we hold..just "shut up and code". There are so many things wrong with this viewpoint that I don't know where to begin..but my point here is this: show me an apolitical action. Go ahead, pull an apolitical action out of a hat and dangle it in the air. You can't. A deliberatly apolitical action is simply a statement of another political position. So quit pretending that you're high-and-mighty and above the squabbling--the real reason most people here are complaining about the so-called 'fanatics' is because not because those 'fanatics' mix politics and code but because the complainers do not agree with those politics. Trying to shut up the opposing side is simply facist and, ironically, against the ideals that the Libertarians (who seem to be the largest proponents of 'shut up and code') claim to support.
Not everyone will agree with your particular position. Get over it. Don't act like they're a 'looney tune' or 'stupid' or 'egotistical' (and those are some of the milder epithets I've heard applied here). Deal with the ideas--random flammage might give you a sense of accomplishment but it really does make it look like you've run out of clues and are just flailing.
So: Keep talking--and code.
Daniel
Worse yet, the crunchy-granola crowd would hi-jack the open-source movement
and turn it into the free-software movement. That?s fine and dandy for dusty
academics living on NSF grants, but Ayn Rand would never approve of such
munificence.
I must have missed Ayn Rand's conversion to a deity. Anyway, this sentence was where I stopped reading..the mention of Ayn Rand's name is a good clue that the author is immune to logic..hope I didn't miss anything as amusing as the rest of his 'article'.
Daniel
A very coherent, well-spoken interview. I'm glad to see that he mentioned user-friendliness several times, I've been concerned about Debian's installation/initial setup problems for a while now. If they do gnome-apt right and resolve the UI issues, the futue will be very good...
Daniel
I doubt that his parents could have done even that much in Linux a few years ago. Things are moving fast. Today, they can use it..tomorrow, maintain it?
;) )
(btw..I don't really know many people who can 'maintain' Win95 or MacOS either, usually they come around to be or another resident computer nerd and ask for help. So my conclusion is that no software is easy to use.
Daniel
There are extremely few exceptions to the rule that everyone enjoys coding more than packaging, testing, or documenting.
Have you ever used Debian? They consider undocumented or poorly packaged software to be a bug. Some package maintainers seem to be more committed to quashing problems in their packages than other but overall stuff gets done.
And they are most assuredly not a commercial entity.
Daniel
NPR?
RedHat's Web page lists ports to Intel, Alpha, and Sparc.
Debian's Web page lists ports to Intel, Alpha, Sparc, UltraSparc, ARM, Motorola 68k, MIPS, PPC, the Hurd and Beowulf. And Debian isn't even a commercial entity (I know--but some people feel that being a commercial entity should result in better products so I felt I'd mention this
Don't know about the other distros, but that doesn't sound like 'superiority'..
And what's a Compaq Armada?
Daniel
??? You are confusing 'is unable to...' with 'does not...'. Linux is perfectly capable of supporting more hardware, it just doesn't. :-) This isn't a design issue, it's a political issue. Companies don't want to put the effort into a driver for a platform that's not 'mainstream' and don't want to release the specs to let anyone else. But the infrastructure for most stuff (excluding some oddball input devices and so on..I don't know anyone who has a force-feedback joystick anyway..) is there.
Daniel
Daniel
Ech. I still don't see why Debian, which has the simplest, most robust, most *brainless* software installation of any linux distro (that I have tried), gets lumped in with Slackware as a "Techie-only" distro. Being a techie myself, I can't comment on Debian's friendliness ;); my impression, though, is that while I spent a few more hours than RedHat users that I know installing my base system, I spend an order of magnitude less time trying to keep it up to date and working.
Daniel
*sigh*. They mentioned KDE and not GNOME earlier in the article. They were using both as representative examples of Unix GUIs. They didn't even mention GNUStep, anyone want to flame them for that?
Some days...
Daniel
Goddamnit,
..so he does..and then the camera on him picks it up and he's out of office faster than you can say something very short.
what makes you think that a person who has all the power is going to
voluntarily deny himself of that power when it is so easy to hide his abuse.
Daniel
IIRC, Emacs is just the core LISP environment and editor..all those other things are separate programs that happen to run inside Emacs.
Daniel
..I suppose that proprietary software (for example, Win2000 or Netscape 4.x) is less bloated?
Daniel
People think that the government will be the one to create a 1984-type scenario, and look to the private sector for salvation. I think that if any such thing occurs (which would be..let's say..unfortunate ;) ) it's much more likely to be caused by companies jockeying for power, money and 'intellectual property' than by politicians hunting for votes. This article is, of course, a perfect example...
Daniel
They weren't comparing thouroughput, they were comparing the time it took to configure the system. Which doesn't have *anything* to do with modem speed. (well, I guess configuring a 1980s 1200 baud modem might be difficult these days, but...)
Daniel
it. You don't like
the Qt license, then go Gnome and revel in your supposed
superiority over the rest of us.
Right now, I'm thankful I have a
decent, STABLE system like KDE (unlike the bug-ridden
crashfest known as Gnome...say, what functions failed to resolve
in libgtk today?). You don't mind a constantly crashing desktop?
Have fun.
I don't have a
problem that Gnome exists, unlike you Gnome fanatics
Make your mind up.
Daniel
You haven't answered the question. What is this magical wand that Be has waved? Every time someone tells me about the BeOS they say "multithreaded multithreaded multithreaded" and if I ask them what they mean, I get a puzzled look. I'm really curious to find out because it sounds like a nifty feature and I want to know more about it. But everyone just says, "Your app automatically gets muitithreaded". Multithreaded apps have a significantly different structure, both logically and programmatically, from singlethreaded apps; the only thing I can think of that wouldn't cause tons of deadlocks and races is that Be does all non-blocking IO and GUI stuff asynchronously in another thread. So what is the incredible architectural change that couldn't be replicated by building a real GUI for Unix that actually has multithreaded libraries, and then multithreading the widget sets (and rewriting them to spawn lots of threads ;) )? I just don't get it either. Could someone explain to me explicitly how this magic feature works?
Actually, I guess one obstacle to this in Unix would be the limited number of threads on a lot of systems..
Daniel
what I want to know is, how easy is it to make a platform-agnostic GTK app, or, in other words, one that will run on linux, win32, and other platforms.
;-)
AFAIK, any application which just uses calls from GTK+, GLIB, and GDK can be ported to any platform which has those libs without modifications. That doesn't guarantee what happens if you use Unixisms or Winisms in the rest of your code though..
Daniel
Another platform to play FreeCiv on ;)
Daniel
Every time I install a new version (because there is this new program I want to try out that need this new version), some of my other programs breaks.
(a) Development libraries don't maintain backwards compatability.
(b) If your programs are breaking, I'm afraid it's your own fault..multiple versions of GTK+ can live side-by-side quite peacably. (I have 1.0.6, 1.1.5, 1.1.6, 1.1.7, 1.1.8, 1.1.9, 1.1.10, 1.1.11, 1.1.13, and 1.1.14 installed) And all I did was "./autogen.sh && make && make install". (for the ones that weren't installed by my package manager).
Clues are a recommended accessory when using development software.
Daniel
Yes. The thing is, when you upgrade libc, you have to recompile everything that depends on it. It's much better to use a package system where each package maintainer is responsible for recompiling his/her own package and everyone can download the updates. I know that I can't really leave my computer compiling everything from source..Gnome takes all morning, the whole system would probably take a week or so and be broken for a month. :-)
Daniel
"apt-get update && apt-get upgrade'
Yeah, but this means I can make my sister's Web pages (which she creates in Windows and stores on my computer) look nice. :-)
Daniel