for some reason QT sucks ass, sucks donkey balls, sucks great big rocks through a hose on windows 95,98,ME. Kivio hardley runs for a few seconds before it crashes.
Hopefully Trolltech have fixed the problem by now...
i serious question how good the usability can be if they failed to do a compartive study. maybe it will be usable for newbies, but if your target market is former outlook users (which they certainly are in Ximians case) then is a really bad idea not to have even looked at it.
From my very limited use i hated the inteface to Outlook but it might have done a few clever things and if you study it carefully at least you can learn from their mistakes.
But what do i know, i am not PIM user and am not likely to change my ways anytime soon.
I wonder why Ximian does not do any cross platform software. I guess they are more of a consultancey than a retail business and they seem to be doing well enough at it. Maybe with the move to gtk2 they and other linux only projects will start to do both Gnome2 and GTK2 builds and offer applications for more platforms. (more likely is that people will just get Gnome to run on more platforms).
Part of the problem with usability in open source is most developers dont know enough about usability.
some developers know nothing about usability. these are the developers that design a whole new and different user interface just for its the sake of it.
some developers do know a little about usability but not much and they at least have the sense to play it safe and make their applications reasonabley similar to the existing applications. At least this way they end up making the same old mistake that people are used to rather than making whole new bunch of horribly mistakes that even people who have used commputers before can barely figure out.
The next stage which is beginning to happen at the core level of KDE and Gnome (but not with the individual applications just as that there are people working on usability and the developers are listing to them. Studies are being done, the existing approaches are looked at and rather than just simpley copying them designers are figuring out what is good about them and mostly importantly why it is good. When you understand why things are done a certain way you can at least make well balanced trade offs or optimise for certain use cases. When you understand why things in computer intefaces are done a certain way and why people want to do things that way you can really start to improve things and dare I say innovate.
It is getting much better and I expect it will continue to do so especially with the recent release of the Gnome HIG (Human Inteface Guide) v1.0 http://usability.gnome.org/hig/1.0/announcem ent.ht ml
Democracy is really not the important word in that sentence the important part is "a goverment that represents the best interests of the majority of its people" which i realise now could describe any sort of benevolent dictatorship.
Currently Democracy just seems to be the best way to keep a benevolent dictatorship or any other government from becoming hostile.
We could discuss the old arguement that American is a Republic not a democracy, but i dont wanna go there.
The notion that the "Free market will solve everything" is based on some very flawed assumptions.
The first is the assumption of the perfectly informed consumer. There is no such thing as the perfectly informed consumer, a customer who is aware of which companies own which, which company behave ethically or distrubite products that do not conform the consumers ethical standards. There is just too much information and it is just too complicated for even the concerned consumers to know it all. Most consumers dont even care if a company kills babies* so long as they get cheap gasoline (*i know of know such company).
the second flawed assumption is that the market can ever actually be free. Governments can and do interfere. Governments usually* set minimum ethical standards and try to stop companies defrauding the investors or cheating their customers (* need i even say Enron, WorldCom etc?). Governments are also one of the largest spenders in the market. The economies of many small towns are totally dependent on Goverment military spending, governmetn prison bugdets. So government legislation and spending have a huge effect on the market place. big businness calls for 'laissez faire' so they can make as much profit with the minimum obligation to show and morality or provide quality products.
Capitalism is not supposed to solve problems like this. Democracy, and a goverment that represents the best interests of the majority of its people is supposed to sovle this.
Not that I would ever be insane enough to put apt in a cron job like the typical Debian user
A typical Debian user would not do this. Good god, that's a recipe for disaster!
Not that i believe there is actually such a thing as a typical debian user but one might do this not for the sake of upgrading but rather for apt-get security updates.
obviously for any large scale installation you would want not want to do automated installation except on a test machine and only later update the rest of your network.
I know what you meant but to be pedantic* a VB application could still be open source and in fact could be Gnome Basic compatible. The language of program has very little to do with its openess or the ability to run on an open source platform.
I'll just mentally replace the word VB with 'proprietary'.
As for the government using only opensource software, i might argue about the openness of file formats but that could reasonably be covered open standard not necessarily open source.
I might also argue that users are not just users and that conrtibutary effect of the government being able to control its own systems and that any necessary maintainance or developement work in house could benifit the community at large rather than consultants of the proprietary vendor.
Forcing greater openness should in fact result in less red tape not more as other posters have suggested. If there is an open repository, small government agencies could more simply find and reuse software from other agencies and if it was all avialble under a consistant set of open licenses you would not have to waste time answering licesnse questions.
Tim O'Reilly has some good points, but i dont want them to be try so I'll just have to keep thinking up counter arguements.
*im bored and this is slashdot so what do you expect.
dont discount the face that most people are working of hotmail/yahoo/webmail/company accounts with restricted quotas. It would not take very long to fill 50 megs with just email (not including attachments).
If you are on various mailing lists you really will need to delete some mail occassionaly.
If you are on an open mailing list is especially annoying when your spam fileter lets mail through because the list is not a spammer but the real sender is.
It was also pretty cool when GIDE and Anjuta merged.
It was not like you suggested something really implausable like OpenOffice porting to Gnome.
KDE Gnome merger is never going to happen, the advantage for commercial interests of using gkt remains even and is an option worth keeping even for those who prefer the KDE desktop. The language difference between KDE and Gnome is also a big deal.
But that is no reason for use to not to want interoperability and a better unified more coherent vision of open source.
It is tragic that no distribution was willing to pick up the X Setup tools, too much vested interest in their own custom tools. http://primates.ximian.com/~chema/xst Maybe some one will port them to Gtk2 and debian. There seem to be gradually more and more people who get that usuability and accesibility are important even if they dont necessarily know anything about it. the potential for having nice graphical admin tools with standardised config files and being able to remote update the rest of the network based on the configuration of your test machine is just awesome.
while we are being unfairly branded as trolls i definately think some of the video media player programs need to be culled. my money is on gstreamer surviving and maybe something based on xinelib too, dont know which KDE apps are best though.
Kudos to the author of BladeEnc, be cool to see what he does next.
It is based on RedCarpet and used with permission. > Eid, hopes to merge that slightly forked version of Red Carpet back into the main development tree before long.
The advice to use a sacrificial testing machine is very wise.
Slashdot just would not be as much fun if people actually read the articles:P
Nice, finally an open source linux based media player that does not use MDI (Gimp is a great program but man i cannot get used to that interface). makes sense to have an interface that is not a radical departure from Quicktime/Realplayer/Microsoft media player interfaces.
I wonder what is based on? Gstreamer, i would gess.
Oeone seems to be full of nice litte pieces that would be a welcome addition to the standard desktop.
It is not an OS, it is a custom distribution based on Redhat, using an alternative desktop to Gnome/KDE or anything else.
If you are going to have mozilla open all day anyway why not have it integrated into your whole desktop! These would make for pretty cool web terminals.
Another post asks if this is like Active Desktop, and would say it is (even though in windows the browser is already embedded in Explorer and the whole rest of the desktop so you have already take the performance hit)
this kde usability report http://dot.kde.org/1027587840/ http://www .viralata.net/kde_usability/001_02.html discusses how users were quite confused by the web style single click interface used by KDE3 and how users familiar with double click sometimes even click hyperlinks twice. Seems like it might work well for newbies though.
I was pretty confused personally when trying to use KDE3, i can relate to making lots of accidental clicks. an interesting concept but i am not convinced it is a huge enough improvement to make it worth unlearning my old habits.
Not another Office app, its Abbiword
on
OEone HomeBase Desktop
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As for speed i would expect this would be no slower than running both mozilla than Abiword at the same time, so if you already have mozilla open all day everyday the speed difference is probably not noticable
If Nethack is a little to retro for you then checkout Nethack Falcons Eye http://falconseye.sf.net/
All the gameplay of Nethack and a fancy 3D interface. It is real pretty. I have not played it much, once you have played for a bit it is hard to beat the interface and controls of the standard Nethack interface on an old monochrome screen.
According to Disney LILO is pronounced "Lee Low". I thought the bootloader was pronounced "Lie Low" but I recently heard some respectable hackers call it "Lee Low"
Strangley this page about LILO explains how to pronounce Linux but not LILO. http://home.att.net/~lilo-boot/lilohome.htm
very interesting/weird theory, can you provide any reasonably authorative links i would like to know more?
i would like to read more about this, what sort of timescale would this happen on? I cannot imagine it would be very could for the ecosystem. would we be more likely to be engulfed by the sun, hit by an asteroid or some other armegeddon before this happened?
I did subscribe:P but i expected transgaming to release more code than they did so i did not continue, all they really needed to do was to be a several months ahead of Wine and perhaps for legal reasons keep some of the access control software prioprietary.
true WineX led WineHQ to beleive that they would eventually be getting some code back a claim which was later quitely dropped. this lead winehq to concentrate on other areas of development rather than end up doing redundant work.
hopefully some arrangement can be made to get some of the WineX code into the main WineHQ but from what i have read winex strike a hard bargain and i would not hold my breath.
so WineHQ are actually worse off than they would have been. this is not so much a problem of the previous choice of license so much as the misleading claims made by wineX.
a mailinglist thread about the "negotiations" http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/wi ne-license/2002/ 05/0132.html
The misleading statement made by Transgaming:
Once we have reached our subscription goals, we plan to release all of the WineX source code under the Wine license, which will allow it to be directly integrated with the core Wine project code hosted at www.winehq.com. Until then, we will periodically submit selected portions of our code for integration with the Wine project."
Slashdot Mirror
hopefully it is better than Kivio for windows
...
for some reason QT sucks ass, sucks donkey balls, sucks great big rocks through a hose on windows 95,98,ME.
Kivio hardley runs for a few seconds before it crashes.
Hopefully Trolltech have fixed the problem by now
i serious question how good the usability can be if they failed to do a compartive study.
maybe it will be usable for newbies, but if your target market is former outlook users (which they certainly are in Ximians case) then is a really bad idea not to have even looked at it.
From my very limited use i hated the inteface to Outlook but it might have done a few clever things and if you study it carefully at least you can learn from their mistakes.
But what do i know, i am not PIM user and am not likely to change my ways anytime soon.
I was gonna say that.
mod the Coward up.
I wonder why Ximian does not do any cross platform software. I guess they are more of a consultancey than a retail business and they seem to be doing well enough at it.
Maybe with the move to gtk2 they and other linux only projects will start to do both Gnome2 and GTK2 builds and offer applications for more platforms. (more likely is that people will just get Gnome to run on more platforms).
Part of the problem with usability in open source is most developers dont know enough about usability.
m ent.ht ml
some developers know nothing about usability. these are the developers that design a whole new and different user interface just for its the sake of it.
some developers do know a little about usability but not much and they at least have the sense to play it safe and make their applications reasonabley similar to the existing applications. At least this way they end up making the same old mistake that people are used to rather than making whole new bunch of horribly mistakes that even people who have used commputers before can barely figure out.
The next stage which is beginning to happen at the core level of KDE and Gnome (but not with the individual applications just as that there are people working on usability and the developers are listing to them. Studies are being done, the existing approaches are looked at and rather than just simpley copying them designers are figuring out what is good about them and mostly importantly why it is good. When you understand why things are done a certain way you can at least make well balanced trade offs or optimise for certain use cases. When you understand why things in computer intefaces are done a certain way and why people want to do things that way you can really start to improve things and dare I say innovate.
It is getting much better and I expect it will continue to do so especially with the recent release of the Gnome HIG (Human Inteface Guide) v1.0
http://usability.gnome.org/hig/1.0/announce
Democracy is really not the important word in that sentence the important part is
"a goverment that represents the best interests of the majority of its people"
which i realise now could describe any sort of benevolent dictatorship.
Currently Democracy just seems to be the best way to keep a benevolent dictatorship or any other government from becoming hostile.
We could discuss the old arguement that American is a Republic not a democracy, but i dont wanna go there.
The notion that the "Free market will solve everything" is based on some very flawed assumptions.
The first is the assumption of the perfectly informed consumer. There is no such thing as the perfectly informed consumer, a customer who is aware of which companies own which, which company behave ethically or distrubite products that do not conform the consumers ethical standards.
There is just too much information and it is just too complicated for even the concerned consumers to know it all. Most consumers dont even care if a company kills babies* so long as they get cheap gasoline (*i know of know such company).
the second flawed assumption is that the market can ever actually be free.
Governments can and do interfere. Governments usually* set minimum ethical standards and try to stop companies defrauding the investors or cheating their customers (* need i even say Enron, WorldCom etc?).
Governments are also one of the largest spenders in the market. The economies of many small towns are totally dependent on Goverment military spending, governmetn prison bugdets.
So government legislation and spending have a huge effect on the market place.
big businness calls for 'laissez faire' so they can make as much profit with the minimum obligation to show and morality or provide quality products.
Capitalism is not supposed to solve problems like this.
Democracy, and a goverment that represents the best interests of the majority of its people is supposed to sovle this.
Just as art and music and software will be developed even if people did not have IP laws to protect them so will drugs.
There are always charitable organisations who will develop cures for diseases even if it is more profitable to just develop treatments.
Viagra, now a recreational drug was developed to help thin the blood of patients with heart problems and look how that turned out.
If the company that invented a drug offers it at a reasonable price many people will buy the original and the big brand the than the cheap generic.
You can go into any drugstore and buy geniric paracetamol and yet people still buy the more expensive branded stuff.
> Something to checkout for people wanting free fonts: Linux Font Project
Note they are working on bitmap fonts, not truetype fonts.
Not that i believe there is actually such a thing as a typical debian user but one might do this not for the sake of upgrading but rather for apt-get security updates.
obviously for any large scale installation you would want not want to do automated installation except on a test machine and only later update the rest of your network.
I know what you meant but to be pedantic* a VB application could still be open source and in fact could be Gnome Basic compatible. The language of program has very little to do with its openess or the ability to run on an open source platform.
I'll just mentally replace the word VB with 'proprietary'.
As for the government using only opensource software, i might argue about the openness of file formats but that could reasonably be covered open standard not necessarily open source.
I might also argue that users are not just users and that conrtibutary effect of the government being able to control its own systems and that any necessary maintainance or developement work in house could benifit the community at large rather than consultants of the proprietary vendor.
Forcing greater openness should in fact result in less red tape not more as other posters have suggested. If there is an open repository, small government agencies could more simply find and reuse software from other agencies and if it was all avialble under a consistant set of open licenses you would not have to waste time answering licesnse questions.
Tim O'Reilly has some good points, but i dont want them to be try so I'll just have to keep thinking up counter arguements.
*im bored and this is slashdot so what do you expect.
Space is cheap
dont discount the face that most people are working of hotmail/yahoo/webmail/company accounts with restricted quotas.
It would not take very long to fill 50 megs with just email (not including attachments).
If you are on various mailing lists you really will need to delete some mail occassionaly.
If you are on an open mailing list is especially annoying when your spam fileter lets mail through because the list is not a spammer but the real sender is.
Being moderated as troll was a bit harsh.
It was also pretty cool when GIDE and Anjuta merged.
It was not like you suggested something really implausable like OpenOffice porting to Gnome.
KDE Gnome merger is never going to happen, the advantage for commercial interests of using gkt remains even and is an option worth keeping even for those who prefer the KDE desktop.
The language difference between KDE and Gnome is also a big deal.
But that is no reason for use to not to want interoperability and a better unified more coherent vision of open source.
It is tragic that no distribution was willing to pick up the X Setup tools, too much vested interest in their own custom tools.
http://primates.ximian.com/~chema/xst
Maybe some one will port them to Gtk2 and debian. There seem to be gradually more and more people who get that usuability and accesibility are important even if they dont necessarily know anything about it. the potential for having nice graphical admin tools with standardised config files and being able to remote update the rest of the network based on the configuration of your test machine is just awesome.
while we are being unfairly branded as trolls i definately think some of the video media player programs need to be culled. my money is on gstreamer surviving and maybe something based on xinelib too, dont know which KDE apps are best though.
Kudos to the author of BladeEnc, be cool to see what he does next.
appears to be based on Red Carpet?
:P
It is based on RedCarpet and used with permission.
> Eid, hopes to merge that slightly forked version of Red Carpet back into the main development tree before long.
The advice to use a sacrificial testing machine is very wise.
Slashdot just would not be as much fun if people actually read the articles
http://www.oeone.com/images/screenshots/sm_wordpro cessor.gif
Nice, finally an open source linux based media player that does not use MDI (Gimp is a great program but man i cannot get used to that interface).
makes sense to have an interface that is not a radical departure from Quicktime/Realplayer/Microsoft media player interfaces.
I wonder what is based on? Gstreamer, i would gess.
Oeone seems to be full of nice litte pieces that would be a welcome addition to the standard desktop.
It is not an OS, it is a custom distribution based on Redhat, using an alternative desktop to Gnome/KDE or anything else.
If you are going to have mozilla open all day anyway why not have it integrated into your whole desktop! These would make for pretty cool web terminals.
Another post asks if this is like Active Desktop, and would say it is (even though in windows the browser is already embedded in Explorer and the whole rest of the desktop so you have already take the performance hit)
i find browser based interfaces quite interesting
this kde usability report
http://dot.kde.org/1027587840/
http://ww
discusse
Seems like it might work well for newbies though.
I was pretty confused personally when trying to use KDE3, i can relate to making lots of accidental clicks. an interesting concept but i am not convinced it is a huge enough improvement to make it worth unlearning my old habits.
Checkout the screenshot at mozdev.org small screenshot of Abiword mozilla plugin
big screeshot of Abiword mozilla plugin .
As for speed i would expect this would be no slower than running both mozilla than Abiword at the same time, so if you already have mozilla open all day everyday the speed difference is probably not noticable
checkout the abiword plugin for mozilla at
http://abimoz.mozdev.org
pretty cool
if citetations are the same as footnotes/endnotes (which are entirely differnt from headers/footers) then the version of Abiword in CVS has them.
This will become Abiword 2.0. It will take a few months of testing and checking before it stabalises to become our stable supported gold
verion 2.0
If you are the kind of person unafraid of building from source then please do help out.
The OS X port is coming along nicely too.
Mortal pongbat was my personal favorite for quite a while, especially in two player mode.
Like pong except you get to shoot chunks out of your opponents bat.
i would love to play it again on Linux or Wine.
If Nethack is a little to retro for you then checkout Nethack Falcons Eye
http://falconseye.sf.net/
All the gameplay of Nethack and a fancy 3D interface. It is real pretty.
I have not played it much, once you have played for a bit it is hard to beat the interface and controls of the standard Nethack interface on an old monochrome screen.
According to Disney LILO is pronounced "Lee Low". I thought the bootloader was pronounced "Lie Low" but I recently heard some respectable hackers call it "Lee Low"
Strangley this page about LILO explains how to pronounce Linux but not LILO.
http://home.att.net/~lilo-boot/lilohome.htm
And yes - Windows update - meddling bastards.
very interesting/weird theory, can you provide any reasonably authorative links i would like to know more?
i would like to read more about this, what sort of timescale would this happen on? I cannot imagine it would be very could for the ecosystem.
would we be more likely to be engulfed by the sun, hit by an asteroid or some other armegeddon before this happened?
> Since you havent subscribed, shut up.
:P but i expected transgaming to release more code than they did so i did not continue, all they really needed to do was to be a several months ahead of Wine and perhaps for legal reasons keep some of the access control software prioprietary.
I did subscribe
the current split is just wasteful and divisive
true
i ne-license/2002/ 05/0132.html
WineX led WineHQ to beleive that they would eventually be getting some code back a claim which was later quitely dropped. this lead winehq to concentrate on other areas of development rather than end up doing redundant work.
hopefully some arrangement can be made to get some of the WineX code into the main WineHQ but from what i have read winex strike a hard bargain and i would not hold my breath.
so WineHQ are actually worse off than they would have been. this is not so much a problem of the previous choice of license so much as the misleading claims made by wineX.
a mailinglist thread about the "negotiations"
http://www.winehq.com/hypermail/w
The misleading statement made by Transgaming:
Once we have reached our subscription goals, we plan to release all of the WineX source code under the Wine license, which will allow it to be directly integrated with the core Wine project code hosted at www.winehq.com. Until then, we will periodically submit selected portions of our code for integration with the Wine project."