What has come of the Slashdot crowd? All grown up? This can't be. Normally there should be at least a couple fake biddings after a Slashdot front page story.
I just want to use this forum to thank the developers of scribus for this fine app.
I did some desktop publishing back in school with Adobe Pagemaker, but I don't have a usable Windoze box around anymore. So last fall I checked if there were any desktop publishing tools for Linux available when I wanted to create a "birthday paper" for my dad's 60's birthday.
apt-get install scribus
And the program had everything I needed and not a single thing too much. It was usable without much learning and I was able to produce a profesional looking paper practically over the weekend.
It even had support for automatic hipernation in German language.
I long dreaded the day this would come. Now it is official, guys, we are superfluous now.
That's it. Dead meat. Face it! What would the girls need a guy for. I guess now we have to come with something fast, or the guys born now will soon become the last of their gender. Please think of something quick.
And don't be so lame as to go: Spider Squashers (what do You think they will come up with next: Spider Squashing Robots).
There seems to be some great confusion over what the guy said and how it got interpreted. I guess what he means is that he is politcally srongly opposed to the current US govt and that he thinks he should do more about that and therefore stepped down. He also is a little of an attention whore, because he feels there is too little discussion in the community about the use of Linux for "bad" things. Somewhat like the discussion on firearms that led to the implementation of savety measures to make sure that it can't be used by "bad" guys.
1. There are not as many cards as there are chipsets. And for a card to work most of the time You only need to support the chipset. The problem is that most drivers are called by their chipsets and it is hard to find the correct driver for your card if you don't know the chipset (lspci often works better than looking at the card, because I often don't know what I am looking for). But it is still sometimes not trivial to find the correct driver with lspci information on hand. That all doesn't apply for joe user anyways, since Mandrake, Knoppix and the pack support them all out of the box.
2. Would Linux really become better if all companies would write their own drivers? Windows problems often get blamed on Microsoft when some crappy sound driver crashes a computer often, because some guy was too cheap to spend more than 8 bucks for the soundcard for the US $ 3000 Computer, since he doesn't need sound that much. I am sure that some of those are You guys among the slashdot crowd. Buying a cool new toy to compile faster, and since You never play You don't need a soundcard. But maybe sometime You need one, so You pop in the cheapest You can find. Same for Windows guys. Then Windows gets blamed for the bluescreen.
So do You really want to install a binary only driver from some crappy shop?
It would be the best if they would just open the specs.
On a sidenote I was considering getting an expensive soundcard for some creative stuff. And there was a card with drivers from the company and there was this really cheap offer for the Terratec EWX 24/96. Terratec doesn't develope drivers for Linux nor does it hand out any specs, but the Alsa driver is very stable. Guess which product I purchased!
Maybe there is no reason to offer a commercial streaming media player in Linux, but they have a download for an rpm or tar.gz of some Realplayer 8. There is also a Debian package that can install the rpm. But in 1 out of 3 cases the player just crashes on startup! Other than that even though I have the plugin in my browser it won't play the streams. And mplayer now plays downloaded real media files if you downlad the codec from the mplayer website. So it is completely useless, even without the spy + adware it carries on Windows.
Nowdays there is a streaming solution for Windows Media Player. There might be a reason why the people adopt that one for their content instead of the Real solution. It might just be that the client really, really, sucks big time!
If Real would make a client that actually does what it should (not crash, play streams) at least decently.
There is no competition it seems. No competition leads to crappy products. See Microsoft for that one.
Right! Exactly! Competition is what markets thrieve upon. This is what gets value to the customer and the lack of it is what makes Microsoft.
Microsoft already suffers from the many problems that the lack of competition means for a company. Everyone needs some competition. Otherwise they will go bad.
OS/2 was the last competition Microsoft ever had. That was when they came out with Windows 95. There has not been any innovation on the desktop OS since Windows 95.
What is the difference between 95 and XP to the User? Sure there are some things here and there, also XP supports newer hardware, but other than that? Nothing! So Microsoft will eventually go down the way the railroad tycoons went down in the US a couple decades ago. You will see.
Apart from that the Gnome vs. KDE competition is great! It drives innovation. It keeps people going, comparing, making things better.
I am not all for markets, but here we see a clear example where competition works!
I would also recommend VMWare, but apart from that if You really, really need seperate computers take a look at VIA's line of Mini-Itx boards.
They don't perform very good, but You don't want to play UT 2004 in them anyways. They also don't perform very well for the buck, but they have everything onboard. On a small board that is. This way You could purchase them while in the UK and ship 'em over for not much money.
The M and CL series use DDR-Ram whereas the V series still uses SD-Ram. So You should get M or CL. The CL is slightly more expensive, but You get 2 nic adapters onboard. The CL6000 is fanless, but only has a C3 processor, whereas the CL10000 sports an Eden ESP with full SSE2 support, but also has a noisy fan.
Those are also cheaper than a Shuttle with a P4. And a lot quieter if You go CL6000.
Finally we have found the holy grail that for so many years all Linux users and developers have sought after:
It is exactly what Linux needs to become a serious contender for Joe User's desktop.
I wonder how many times have we read that on Slashdot. I wonder how this one slipped past the editors again. And it is boring, not important and proven wrong. There has never been, is not and will never be exactly what Linux needs to become a serious contender for Joe User's desktop. Let alone a single little thing being exactly what Linux needs to become a serious contender for Joe User's desktop.
Apart from that I dread this technology where glibc will have to be included in every app. The beauty of free software is the fragmentation. Everyone makes a little app that is perfect at what it does and small enough that one person can write and maintain it. And bigger apps just bundle them together like libs (think of all the GUI cd burning apps that are frontends to at least cdrecord, mkisofs and cdparanoia, if not to many more small apps). Also the ability to upgrade and keep the custom settings and data for one the new one in.foo is something Windows is trying to copy in XP now, but many programs still have their own idea about where to store custom data.
And that is only half of what is wrong with this post (I am sorry, but I did't even RTFA). Please don't get me started on NFS.
And I would like to share a few things to anyone who is interested:
First of all: China is changing a such a rapid pace that no Cisco routers that are used to block a couple websites will have any major impact. We are talking of about 100 million people rapidly moving up the social ladder. The communist party just aknowledged that they have to do something about the rest (more than 900 million btw), many of them on the way trying to get on board with the first group.
That said I would like to share some insight into history. Even though we know oppresive regimes are bad and the usual American only pokes at Communism with a 9 foot pole the regime served the majority of the Chinese people pretty well in the past 40-50 years. The cultural revolution was a major setback and the party says it was very wrong. Apart from that they had some great success at poverty reduction during the 70s and 80s.
Compare that to what You know about India, which has had a stable democracy during most of that time or South America which has been under US influence since the infamous "Teddy". IMHO India lags behind China on the rights of the woman (in practial terms, theoratically all Communist coutries should be heaven for women, which never was) over all for example. I am sure You will find more.
At the moment the US govt. is using the "human rights tool" to apply pressure to China on the international diplomatic level. You know it, they know it and everyone else knows it too. (Saudi Arabia and human rights... US allies... )
Still we have an issue with free speech in China, since a corrupt govt. that has nothing left to justify its hold on power (they promote market economics for heavens sake) is trying to keep the country out of major shakeups. Remember what happened to Russia after the change? Live expectency is still going down there. Anyways, there are people in the party that try to move towards democracy, but that is not easy and they don't want civil war.
That said the most important problems that China is facing at the moment are corruption and trying not to loose the 900 million people on the way to wealth and prosperity. That is what the party is saying. IMHO the biggest problem is for the officials to stay on top of this huge moving mass that China represents at the moment. And it is gaining speed.
Exactly because of that the central government is trying to promote free speech to get more accurate reports from the various parts of China, since the official channels are slow and always change facts around so the local govt. looks good.
I've always said I don't mind RFID tags as long as there are no laws mandating them.
I would probably choose to buy the product without a tag. And when I buy products that have them, I remove them.
But what concerns me is a law (and I could see this happening) that forbids anyone to remove RFID tags. That would scare the crap out of me. But up until that point, I'll handle the tags myself.
--------- Is Karma really that easy? http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=101 578&cid =8657013
Because I would get sick and angry. The American govt. and many American institutions always talk in favour of free trade and try other nations to come into the WTO. But while talking like the biggest supporters of globalisation abroad (maybe because of jobs they talk different at home) the US has never been very supportive of free trade.
They only allow free trade when it serves their interest. This is not to say they are the only ones, because the EU also protects their markets wherever they can.
Only Americans seem to think that the US allows free trade, which it doesn't. The only countries that swallowed this load of crap and opened their boarders to foreign products were developing and least developed nations.
While the EU and the US heavily protect their markets (mainly through subsidies, 'cause they can afford to) in some areas China is now doing the same in other areas.
What China is doing is bad, but they are just following up on the example set by the US.
'It's pretty difficult to respond to this. He's so out of touch,' said Phipps. 'To even begin one must first address the error in his world view: He has taken quotes given by Scott McNealy to analysts and attacked them as if they were spoken to the Open Source community.
Raymond takes McNealy's comments out of context.
That is not correct. Simon Phipps doesn't accuse ESR of taking McNealy'c comments our of context. Phipps only implies that McNealy says different things depending on wether he is talking to one group or the other and ESR should only listen to the things he says to the group he belongs to.
In Hollywood movies the Native Americans accused those people of talking with two tongues, though I have never seen a person with two tongues and I doubt that McNealy has more than one.
I have been reading warnings like this in other stories about the source code leak on Slashdot as well.
"Don't look at it, it will taint You and Microsoft will take over Linux!"
Some even suggested that this is a plot by Microsoft to taint oss developers and later claim in court that Linux is now property of Microsoft.
What has happened???? The Slashdot crowed used to consist of people proud to wear decss t-shirts. Now all cowardly put their heads down and bow to Microsoft and its powerful lawyers wielding the DMCA.
What happened to the country freedom of speech seemed so important?
Nvidia is the only large company that put out drivers for their chip themselves. They would maybe have to do some modifications, but wouldn't need to start all over again. Also they only support x86 with a crappy driver. There is an excellent open source nvidia driver.
The only reason I use the nvidia driver is that I happen to use x86 hardware and sometimes play games that need 3d acceleration. But there is a very limited number of games out there that nativly run on Linux and need 3d acceleration. The next card will be Ati anyways, because then I won't have to taint my kernel.
Yes, I am a happy Debian Sarge user (Debian still uses 4.2.1 for Sarge/testing so I am still licking my fingers for the good stuff in 4.3)
I don't know much about Windows, but this doesn't look like a Microsoft Windows source tree at all. At least not how I would imagine it. Lines from the file list:
win2k/private/inet/mshtml/src/f3/rsrc/unix/ win 2k/private/inet/mshtml/src/f3/rsrc/unix/gnumake file win2k/private/inet/mshtml/src/f3/crt/ppc/ ( what on earth could ppc mean? there is a line with x86 a couple lines below to give u a hint, windows on mac next or what?) win2k/private/inet/urlmon/compress/gzip/ And I didn't even went through a fourth of the list. Why don't we ask the guys from Wine or from ReactOS. They should be able to tell u how WinNT Source could probabely look like.
That is a very old method i developed with my friends. We would only open the door after a "secret" knock sequence. We had seen this on TV and thought this would be cool. We jeopardized the security regularly when we said "wrong knock" after someone else knocked. Usually parents. Then they would say "open up". And we had to comply.
So Your child will be a bully instead of a victim? Great choice. That will spare Your kid from the horrors it will bestow upon others during his/her school career.
They have seen the success of Debian and decided that they will have to rely on somthing similar. Maybe the enterprise edition will rely on Fedora someday.
Anyways, I don't understand why they throw away the marketing effect of having a cool community desktop. Maybe they saw that the cool Debian name didn't work in the enterprise.
Slashdot Mirror
If it doesn't shoot through water it won't hit another ship of low flying airplane until it is very near, because earth has a little bend to it.
If it does shoot through... damn, they would rock in deep water.
What has come of the Slashdot crowd? All grown up? This can't be. Normally there should be at least a couple fake biddings after a Slashdot front page story.
I just want to use this forum to thank the developers of scribus for this fine app.
I did some desktop publishing back in school with Adobe Pagemaker, but I don't have a usable Windoze box around anymore. So last fall I checked if there were any desktop publishing tools for Linux available when I wanted to create a "birthday paper" for my dad's 60's birthday.
apt-get install scribus
And the program had everything I needed and not a single thing too much. It was usable without much learning and I was able to produce a profesional looking paper practically over the weekend.
It even had support for automatic hipernation in German language.
I long dreaded the day this would come. Now it is official, guys, we are superfluous now.
That's it. Dead meat. Face it! What would the girls need a guy for. I guess now we have to come with something fast, or the guys born now will soon become the last of their gender. Please think of something quick.
And don't be so lame as to go: Spider Squashers (what do You think they will come up with next: Spider Squashing Robots).
There seems to be some great confusion over what the guy said and how it got interpreted. I guess what he means is that he is politcally srongly opposed to the current US govt and that he thinks he should do more about that and therefore stepped down. He also is a little of an attention whore, because he feels there is too little discussion in the community about the use of Linux for "bad" things.
Somewhat like the discussion on firearms that led to the implementation of savety measures to make sure that it can't be used by "bad" guys.
So before You go moderating please RTFA!!!
2 things need to be said about that
1. There are not as many cards as there are chipsets. And for a card to work most of the time You only need to support the chipset. The problem is that most drivers are called by their chipsets and it is hard to find the correct driver for your card if you don't know the chipset (lspci often works better than looking at the card, because I often don't know what I am looking for).
But it is still sometimes not trivial to find the correct driver with lspci information on hand. That all doesn't apply for joe user anyways, since Mandrake, Knoppix and the pack support them all out of the box.
2. Would Linux really become better if all companies would write their own drivers? Windows problems often get blamed on Microsoft when some crappy sound driver crashes a computer often, because some guy was too cheap to spend more than 8 bucks for the soundcard for the US $ 3000 Computer, since he doesn't need sound that much. I am sure that some of those are You guys among the slashdot crowd. Buying a cool new toy to compile faster, and since You never play You don't need a soundcard. But maybe sometime You need one, so You pop in the cheapest You can find.
Same for Windows guys. Then Windows gets blamed for the bluescreen.
So do You really want to install a binary only driver from some crappy shop?
It would be the best if they would just open the specs.
On a sidenote I was considering getting an expensive soundcard for some creative stuff. And there was a card with drivers from the company and there was this really cheap offer for the Terratec EWX 24/96. Terratec doesn't develope drivers for Linux nor does it hand out any specs, but the Alsa driver is very stable. Guess which product I purchased!
Realplayer in Linux sucks big time.
Maybe there is no reason to offer a commercial streaming media player in Linux, but they have a download for an rpm or tar.gz of some Realplayer 8. There is also a Debian package that can install the rpm. But in 1 out of 3 cases the player just crashes on startup! Other than that even though I have the plugin in my browser it won't play the streams. And mplayer now plays downloaded real media files if you downlad the codec from the mplayer website. So it is completely useless, even without the spy + adware it carries on Windows.
Nowdays there is a streaming solution for Windows Media Player. There might be a reason why the people adopt that one for their content instead of the Real solution. It might just be that the client really, really, sucks big time!
If Real would make a client that actually does what it should (not crash, play streams) at least decently.
There is no competition it seems. No competition leads to crappy products. See Microsoft for that one.
Ever heard that competition is good?
Right! Exactly! Competition is what markets thrieve upon. This is what gets value to the customer and the lack of it is what makes Microsoft.
Microsoft already suffers from the many problems that the lack of competition means for a company. Everyone needs some competition. Otherwise they will go bad.
OS/2 was the last competition Microsoft ever had. That was when they came out with Windows 95. There has not been any innovation on the desktop OS since Windows 95.
What is the difference between 95 and XP to the User? Sure there are some things here and there, also XP supports newer hardware, but other than that? Nothing! So Microsoft will eventually go down the way the railroad tycoons went down in the US a couple decades ago. You will see.
Apart from that the Gnome vs. KDE competition is great! It drives innovation. It keeps people going, comparing, making things better.
I am not all for markets, but here we see a clear example where competition works!
I would also recommend VMWare, but apart from that if You really, really need seperate computers take a look at VIA's line of Mini-Itx boards.
They don't perform very good, but You don't want to play UT 2004 in them anyways. They also don't perform very well for the buck, but they have everything onboard. On a small board that is. This way You could purchase them while in the UK and ship 'em over for not much money.
The M and CL series use DDR-Ram whereas the V series still uses SD-Ram. So You should get M or CL. The CL is slightly more expensive, but You get 2 nic adapters onboard. The CL6000 is fanless, but only has a C3 processor, whereas the CL10000 sports an Eden ESP with full SSE2 support, but also has a noisy fan.
Those are also cheaper than a Shuttle with a P4. And a lot quieter if You go CL6000.
Ouups, I just realized I most likely made myself a fool and a late April 1st prank.
Finally we have found the holy grail that for so many years all Linux users and developers have sought after:
.foo is something Windows is trying to copy in XP now, but many programs still have their own idea about where to store custom data.
It is exactly what Linux needs to become a serious contender for Joe User's desktop.
I wonder how many times have we read that on Slashdot. I wonder how this one slipped past the editors again. And it is boring, not important and proven wrong. There has never been, is not and will never be exactly what Linux needs to become a serious contender for Joe User's desktop. Let alone a single little thing being exactly what Linux needs to become a serious contender for Joe User's desktop.
Apart from that I dread this technology where glibc will have to be included in every app. The beauty of free software is the fragmentation. Everyone makes a little app that is perfect at what it does and small enough that one person can write and maintain it. And bigger apps just bundle them together like libs (think of all the GUI cd burning apps that are frontends to at least cdrecord, mkisofs and cdparanoia, if not to many more small apps). Also the ability to upgrade and keep the custom settings and data for one the new one in
And that is only half of what is wrong with this post (I am sorry, but I did't even RTFA). Please don't get me started on NFS.
'nuff said
And I would like to share a few things to anyone who is interested:
... US allies ... )
First of all: China is changing a such a rapid pace that no Cisco routers that are used to block a couple websites will have any major impact.
We are talking of about 100 million people rapidly moving up the social ladder. The communist party just aknowledged that they have to do something about the rest (more than 900 million btw), many of them on the way trying to get on board with the first group.
That said I would like to share some insight into history. Even though we know oppresive regimes are bad and the usual American only pokes at Communism with a 9 foot pole the regime served the majority of the Chinese people pretty well in the past 40-50 years. The cultural revolution was a major setback and the party says it was very wrong. Apart from that they had some great success at poverty reduction during the 70s and 80s.
Compare that to what You know about India, which has had a stable democracy during most of that time or South America which has been under US influence since the infamous "Teddy".
IMHO India lags behind China on the rights of the woman (in practial terms, theoratically all Communist coutries should be heaven for women, which never was) over all for example. I am sure You will find more.
At the moment the US govt. is using the "human rights tool" to apply pressure to China on the international diplomatic level. You know it, they know it and everyone else knows it too. (Saudi Arabia and human rights
Still we have an issue with free speech in China, since a corrupt govt. that has nothing left to justify its hold on power (they promote market economics for heavens sake) is trying to keep the country out of major shakeups. Remember what happened to Russia after the change? Live expectency is still going down there. Anyways, there are people in the party that try to move towards democracy, but that is not easy and they don't want civil war.
That said the most important problems that China is facing at the moment are corruption and trying not to loose the 900 million people on the way to wealth and prosperity. That is what the party is saying. IMHO the biggest problem is for the officials to stay on top of this huge moving mass that China represents at the moment. And it is gaining speed.
Exactly because of that the central government is trying to promote free speech to get more accurate reports from the various parts of China, since the official channels are slow and always change facts around so the local govt. looks good.
I've always said I don't mind RFID tags as long as there are no laws mandating them.
1 578&cid =8657013
I would probably choose to buy the product without a tag. And when I buy products that have them, I remove them.
But what concerns me is a law (and I could see this happening) that forbids anyone to remove RFID tags. That would scare the crap out of me. But up until that point, I'll handle the tags myself.
---------
Is Karma really that easy?
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10
Because I would get sick and angry. The American govt. and many American institutions always talk in favour of free trade and try other nations to come into the WTO. But while talking like the biggest supporters of globalisation abroad (maybe because of jobs they talk different at home) the US has never been very supportive of free trade.
They only allow free trade when it serves their interest. This is not to say they are the only ones, because the EU also protects their markets wherever they can.
Only Americans seem to think that the US allows free trade, which it doesn't. The only countries that swallowed this load of crap and opened their boarders to foreign products were developing and least developed nations.
While the EU and the US heavily protect their markets (mainly through subsidies, 'cause they can afford to) in some areas China is now doing the same in other areas.
What China is doing is bad, but they are just following up on the example set by the US.
So when the reps start complaining the dems go "Hey, look at the good example W and hist daughters set".
Welcome to 2004
(all emphasis mine)
'It's pretty difficult to respond to this. He's so out of touch,' said Phipps. 'To even begin one must first address the error in his world view: He has taken quotes given by Scott McNealy to analysts and attacked them as if they were spoken to the Open Source community.
Raymond takes McNealy's comments out of context.
That is not correct. Simon Phipps doesn't accuse ESR of taking McNealy'c comments our of context. Phipps only implies that McNealy says different things depending on wether he is talking to one group or the other and ESR should only listen to the things he says to the group he belongs to.
In Hollywood movies the Native Americans accused those people of talking with two tongues, though I have never seen a person with two tongues and I doubt that McNealy has more than one.
Remember the scene from "Men in Black" (the movie) where Tommy Lee Jones tired to get the giant bug to eat him in order to get his gun back?
"Eat me!!!"
I have been reading warnings like this in other stories about the source code leak on Slashdot as well.
"Don't look at it, it will taint You and Microsoft will take over Linux!"
Some even suggested that this is a plot by Microsoft to taint oss developers and later claim in court that Linux is now property of Microsoft.
What has happened????
The Slashdot crowed used to consist of people proud to wear decss t-shirts. Now all cowardly put their heads down and bow to Microsoft and its powerful lawyers wielding the DMCA.
What happened to the country freedom of speech seemed so important?
Nvidia is the only large company that put out drivers for their chip themselves. They would maybe have to do some modifications, but wouldn't need to start all over again. Also they only support x86 with a crappy driver. There is an excellent open source nvidia driver.
The only reason I use the nvidia driver is that I happen to use x86 hardware and sometimes play games that need 3d acceleration. But there is a very limited number of games out there that nativly run on Linux and need 3d acceleration. The next card will be Ati anyways, because then I won't have to taint my kernel.
Yes, I am a happy Debian Sarge user (Debian still uses 4.2.1 for Sarge/testing so I am still licking my fingers for the good stuff in 4.3)
Did u check the list before posting it????
n 2k/private/inet/mshtml/src/f3/rsrc/unix/gnumake file
( what on earth could ppc mean? there is a line with x86 a couple lines below to give u a hint, windows on mac next or what?)
I don't know much about Windows, but this doesn't look like a Microsoft Windows source tree at all. At least not how I would imagine it. Lines from the file list:
win2k/private/inet/mshtml/src/f3/rsrc/unix/
wi
win2k/private/inet/mshtml/src/f3/crt/ppc/
win2k/private/inet/urlmon/compress/gzip/
And I didn't even went through a fourth of the list. Why don't we ask the guys from Wine or from ReactOS. They should be able to tell u how WinNT Source could probabely look like.
That is a very old method i developed with my friends. We would only open the door after a "secret" knock sequence. We had seen this on TV and thought this would be cool. We jeopardized the security regularly when we said "wrong knock" after someone else knocked. Usually parents. Then they would say "open up". And we had to comply.
I like xmms (www.xmms.org). Unfortunately there is no win32 version. Luckily I don't have Windows :-)
What is this winamp anyways?
So Your child will be a bully instead of a victim? Great choice. That will spare Your kid from the horrors it will bestow upon others during his/her school career.
No we have an unstable, resource hogging os to host a fairly good working, fairly stable os.
Why?
They have seen the success of Debian and decided that they will have to rely on somthing similar. Maybe the enterprise edition will rely on Fedora someday.
Anyways, I don't understand why they throw away the marketing effect of having a cool community desktop. Maybe they saw that the cool Debian name didn't work in the enterprise.