The best thing that freely available (MySQL) or OSS (PostgreSQL, older version of MySQL) databases can do is to fully support SQL. Then they can worry about going after the big boys. It's annoying when your database system doesn't support referential integrity (PostgreSQL) or subselects (MySQL), to give an example of two very useful SQL features that are missing from free databases.
The next best thing that would make these databases more popular is to have better admin tools. There are a lot of independent admin tool/interface builder projects out there (Pgaccess, Kmysql, etc...) that are showing a lot of promise so I'm hopeful that this shortcoming will be solved soon.
Actually, the help systems were not totally consistent. The original file formats used (before conversion to HTML) are Linuxdoc for KDE and DocBook for GNOME. Now, there is an effort underway to convert the KDE docs to DocBook which will make the formats consistent.
The thing that irritates me about Motif is not the color scheme, but the way it handles radio buttons and checkboxes. Instead of drawing a nice easy to see dot or check or x in the checkbox or radio button, Motif makes the button look depressed.
It is much harder to tell what option you have selected with the "depressed" look rather than with the checkmark or x look. Especially in monochrome.
-Macros and templates for tags that required a lot of other tags to use (such as RevHistories, SegmentedLists, Meta information)
-fill-in forms for complex tags with a lot of attributes with separation of optional and required attributes
-Integration with Jade so I can validate and generate files without having to go to a term window.
-Ability to hide all tags so that people that don't know docbook can still edit docbook files for the purpose of translation or proofreading without having to first convert the docs into another format (which can take a long time if the docs are long!)
-Allowing the user to easily switch/add/modify their DTD and stylesheets without having to fool with catalog files.
As one of the people on the kde-docbook team, I know first hand how difficult it is to properly assemble the docbook tools so that they work well with the latest DTD's and with the KDE stylesheets.
We're getting close to providing a good distribution of tools, and there has been a new release of the Cygnus rpms that includes DocBook 3.1 and the latest stylesheets so that should help too.
>Sure, more people saw films in the 30s than they >do now (cause of the depression) but in the 60s >and 70s and especially the 80s (cause of two >people - Lucas and Spielburg).
This is not true. In the 30's movies were much more popular because there was no television.
There are still some independent shareware companies that make high quality games. Spiderweb Software (Exile I, II, III, Realmz) and Ambrosia Software (Maelstrom, Apeiron, Escape Velocity) are two examples that I can think of off the top of my head.
Ambrosia, unless they have changed thier practices recently, is also a company that encourages independent developers to work for them. Several of their projects began with independent developers proposing projects and showing code to Ambrosia.
This is just a guess, but perhaps the reason why the games industry is less profitable than other software companies is that, like Hollywood, makes a huge portion of its revenue in the first month of a game release.
Software companies like Microsoft, have a steadier revenue stream since people upgrade their software at different times.
Also, game developers cannot continually make money off of upgrades to games. As Talin said, a game engine had a maximum lifespan of about two years.
I have three machines running on my account: a Pentium 200 running redhat 6, a PII 400 running win98, and a PII 266 with redhat 6.
The PII with rehat is the fastest, completing keys in about 8-11 hours (my estimates are bad because I am on dialup I don't have diald set up yet to automatically dialin)
The PII 400 is slower than the P200 running redhat by about 20 hours! I don't understand why. The graphics cannot be taking up that much processor time, and the 400 has 4x the memory of the p200!
My guess is that the unix clients are better written than the windows clients because the latest releases are available on Unix first. Plus, running it in text mode can't hurt. I haven't tried running the Linux client with any of the GUI front ends, though...that would make an interesting comparison.
How effective have the bombings been? Not very effective at helping out the Kosovars or keeping their homes from being destroyed or from creating thousands of refugees.
Kinda makes you wonder...how long will it be until you can buy "pre-made" characters directly from Origin? If people are buying other player's characters for hundreds of dollars, what is going to keep Origin from creating a group of "elite" player characters and selling "premium" accounts that include extras like magic items, higher levels, and castles?
Actually, the kernel would be the least of my worries for Y2K-type problems. Many utilities (such as "at") and various servers have the potential for Y2K problems not related to the system clock, but related to processing data files or log files with 2-digit dates in them, and not all of them have necessarily been examined for problems.
Of course, many major components have undergone some careful testing. Major applications and libraries like Apache, Ghostscript, Glibc and libc, Perl, CVS, RCS, etc. do have year 2000 statements detailing any issues and patches to fix those issues. But I do wonder sometimes if some command that I don't use very often might blow up in 2000.
I agree. We have porn filter software at work that not only blocks the bad stuff, but it also blocks access to legitimate pages -- I've even had it erroneously keep me from accessing a few network companies' pages!
On the other hand, filtering software is very useful for home use as long as it is used as a tool and not as a barrier to information. For example, a parent uses it to keep their pre-teenage son from filling their hard drive with porn. If it ever rejects a legitimate page such as a site discussing abortion that the boy needs to get to in order to finish a paper, all the parents have to do is turn off the software temporarily.
Perhaps it would be useful if teachers were in control of which sites the students accessed rather than some software company.
Congrats, Rob, you've really made Slashdot a one-stop site for nerd news! My favorite feature is the one that lets you filter out postings you don't like, followed by the customized Slashdot homepage.
While any FUD spread by Microsoft might discourage commercial office suite developers, it will only encourage the developers of Free Software office suites such as KOffice, Siag, GNOME, etc...
This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is no way that Microsoft office could compete on Linux with free software equivalents that have 80% of the functionality and 0% of the cost.
The real question is, will the Free software office suites be in a usable and stable form before Microsoft Office for Linux? I hope so.
Actually, the kfm in KDE1.1 still won't work correctly with Yahoo's cookies, and there are several other things that it's missing (like javascript) which are required for some sites.
That said, it's a great tool for reading documentation and looking through directories of HTML files since you can have the tree view on the left side showing all of your files.
Now, if it just had the command line at the bottom like Midnight Commander, it would be nearly perfect.
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The best thing that freely available (MySQL) or OSS (PostgreSQL, older version of MySQL) databases can do is to fully support SQL. Then they can worry about going after the big boys. It's annoying when your database system doesn't support referential integrity (PostgreSQL) or subselects (MySQL), to give an example of two very useful SQL features that are missing from free databases.
The next best thing that would make these databases more popular is to have better admin tools. There are a lot of independent admin tool/interface builder projects out there (Pgaccess, Kmysql, etc...) that are showing a lot of promise so I'm hopeful that this shortcoming will be solved soon.
Actually, the help systems were not totally consistent. The original file formats used (before conversion to HTML) are Linuxdoc for KDE and DocBook for GNOME. Now, there is an effort underway to convert the KDE docs to DocBook which will make the formats consistent.
The thing that irritates me about Motif is not the color scheme, but the way it handles radio buttons and checkboxes. Instead of drawing a nice easy to see dot or check or x in the checkbox or radio button, Motif makes the button look depressed.
It is much harder to tell what option you have selected with the "depressed" look rather than with the checkmark or x look. Especially in monochrome.
-Macros and templates for tags that required a lot of other tags to use (such as RevHistories, SegmentedLists, Meta information)
-fill-in forms for complex tags with a lot of attributes with separation of optional and required attributes
-Integration with Jade so I can validate and generate files without having to go to a term window.
-Ability to hide all tags so that people that don't know docbook can still edit docbook files for the purpose of translation or proofreading without having to first convert the docs into another format (which can take a long time if the docs are long!)
-Allowing the user to easily switch/add/modify their DTD and stylesheets without having to fool with catalog files.
As one of the people on the kde-docbook team, I know first hand how difficult it is to properly assemble the docbook tools so that they work well with the latest DTD's and with the KDE stylesheets.
We're getting close to providing a good distribution of tools, and there has been a new release of the Cygnus rpms that includes DocBook 3.1 and the latest stylesheets so that should help too.
>Sure, more people saw films in the 30s than they >do now (cause of the depression) but in the 60s >and 70s and especially the 80s (cause of two >people - Lucas and Spielburg).
This is not true. In the 30's movies were much more popular because there was no television.
There are still some independent shareware companies that make high quality games. Spiderweb Software (Exile I, II, III, Realmz) and Ambrosia Software (Maelstrom, Apeiron, Escape Velocity) are two examples that I can think of off the top of my head.
Ambrosia, unless they have changed thier practices recently, is also a company that encourages independent developers to work for them. Several of their projects began with independent developers proposing projects and showing code to Ambrosia.
This is just a guess, but perhaps the reason why the games industry is less profitable than other software companies is that, like Hollywood, makes a huge portion of its revenue in the first month of a game release.
Software companies like Microsoft, have a steadier revenue stream since people upgrade their software at different times.
Also, game developers cannot continually make money off of upgrades to games. As Talin said, a game engine had a maximum lifespan of about two years.
Well, last time I checked, there's a ton of Mac advocacy sites out there: Mackido, Mac Addict, Inside Mac Games to name a few.
There also used to be a mailing list called the EvangeList which pointed readers towards these sorts of polls, but I think it's gone now.
I have three machines running on my account: a Pentium 200 running redhat 6, a PII 400 running win98, and a PII 266 with redhat 6.
The PII with rehat is the fastest, completing keys in about 8-11 hours (my estimates are bad because I am on dialup I don't have diald set up yet to automatically dialin)
The PII 400 is slower than the P200 running redhat by about 20 hours! I don't understand why. The graphics cannot be taking up that much processor time, and the 400 has 4x the memory of the p200!
My guess is that the unix clients are better written than the windows clients because the latest releases are available on Unix first. Plus, running it in text mode can't hurt. I haven't tried running the Linux client with any of the GUI front ends, though...that would make an interesting comparison.
I think the key words here are "viable solution."
How effective have the bombings been? Not very effective at helping out the Kosovars or keeping their homes from being destroyed or from creating thousands of refugees.
Kinda makes you wonder...how long will it be until you can buy "pre-made" characters directly from Origin? If people are buying other player's characters for hundreds of dollars, what is going to keep Origin from creating a group of "elite" player characters and selling "premium" accounts that include extras like magic items, higher levels, and castles?
Unfortunately, it looks like Civ: CTP may not be that good of a game. It got really mixed reviews on Gamespot because of bugs and gameplay issues.
Too bad Alpha Centauri wasn't the Civ-type game selected to be ported to Linux. It's an excellent game -- definately a worthy successor to Civ 2.
Actually, the kernel would be the least of my worries for Y2K-type problems. Many utilities (such as "at") and various servers have the potential for Y2K problems not related to the system clock, but related to processing data files or log files with 2-digit dates in them, and not all of them have necessarily been examined for problems.
Of course, many major components have undergone some careful testing. Major applications and libraries like Apache, Ghostscript, Glibc and libc, Perl, CVS, RCS, etc. do have year 2000 statements detailing any issues and patches to fix those issues. But I do wonder sometimes if some command that I don't use very often might blow up in 2000.
I agree. We have porn filter software at work that not only blocks the bad stuff, but it also blocks access to legitimate pages -- I've even had it erroneously keep me from accessing a few network companies' pages!
On the other hand, filtering software is very useful for home use as long as it is used as a tool and not as a barrier to information. For example, a parent uses it to keep their pre-teenage son from filling their hard drive with porn. If it ever rejects a legitimate page such as a site discussing abortion that the boy needs to get to in order to finish a paper, all the parents have to do is turn off the software temporarily.
Perhaps it would be useful if teachers were in control of which sites the students accessed rather than some software company.
Congrats, Rob, you've really made Slashdot a one-stop site for nerd news! My favorite feature is the one that lets you filter out postings you don't like, followed by the customized Slashdot homepage.
While any FUD spread by Microsoft might discourage commercial office suite developers, it will only encourage the developers of Free Software office suites such as KOffice, Siag, GNOME, etc...
This is not necessarily a bad thing. There is no way that Microsoft office could compete on Linux with free software equivalents that have 80% of the functionality and 0% of the cost.
The real question is, will the Free software office suites be in a usable and stable form before Microsoft Office for Linux? I hope so.
Actually, the kfm in KDE1.1 still won't work correctly with Yahoo's cookies, and there are several other things that it's missing (like javascript) which are required for some sites.
That said, it's a great tool for reading documentation and looking through directories of HTML files since you can have the tree view on the left side showing all of your files.
Now, if it just had the command line at the bottom like Midnight Commander, it would be nearly perfect.