Go read Programming as if People Mattered by Nathaniel Borenstein. It talks about combining software engineering and UI design fruitfully. And about how not to fall into the "designed for dummies" trap, making programs easy for experts to use as well as novices. It's excellent, and Borenstein knows what he's talking about—he's no UNIX newbie!
Borenstein is the head of the LUIGUI project. So this is relevant.
It depends a lot on what you do, but possibly even more on who you work for. A lot of orgs have "pet languages".
If you work for DOD, you'll probably use Ada. If you don't, you probably won't. Some places do everything in Smalltalk, or LISP/Scheme, or Python.
I work at a consulting company now, and we use Java, C++, Perl, and VB for pretty much everything. I personally do Java almost exclusively for work, though I know plenty of other langugages.
But I have to say that it's useful to get a broad exposure to languages, even if you rarely use some of them. At school I learned a variety of AI-oriented languages (most dialects of LISP/Scheme) and I'm much better for it, even though I never use them in RL. For one thing, it helps me "think outside the box" (to use a cliche), but it also pads the resume...more important than you expect!:-)
I found that Debian has (IMHO) better defaults than Red Hat, and things tend to work better "out of the package". I mention this because Corel is basing their distribution on Debian, not Red Hat like everyone else (and cheers to them for it).
There also needs to be more concern for security, because there will now be a bunch of people with no knowledge or interest in security issues running systems with giant potential holes. Most distributions tend to install all of the daemons you could possibly need, and run them by default. My mom shouldn't have to dig around to disable rsh and FTPd, even if there's an easy tool to do it. Servers should be off by default, because it's pretty easy to tell when a server you need isn't running, but hard to tell when a server you don't need is running.
Furthermore, the name "Linux" is copyrighted to Linus. Thus, anybody can use Linux code within the provisions of the GPL, but only Linus can call it "Linux," thus giving us a way of telling which Linux is "real."
You're talking about a trademark here, not a copyright. It's totally different. Many people who oppose copyright do not oppose trademarks, though apparently Alsop does.
Furthermore, the name "Linux" is copyrighted to Linus. Thus, anybody can use Linux code within the provisions of the GPL, but only Linus can call it "Linux," thus giving us a way of telling which Linux is "real."
You're talking about a trademark here, not a copyright. It's totally different. Many people who oppose copyright do not oppose trademarks, though apparently Alsop does.
I had missed all of this because I stopped reading Usenet a couple of years ago.
Recently, I started again, and noticed that all of the big eight (or however many) hierarchies had "meow" groups (i.e., comp.meow, news.meow, talk.meow, etc.). I presume that relates, but how?
People do read the code and find GPL or BSD code in there, as has been suspected all along (e.g. in their DNS code). Although I suspect they would only release the source code for the kernel, not the services.
It pretty definitely uses BSD code, but that's allowed by the BSD license. It's not a copyleft. That's why there are commercial BSDs like BSDI and SunOS.
Adding to Altus's comments, not only are general-purpose things usually much more complicated than single-purpose things, but they tend not to do the job as well.
Why are knife and screwdriver makers still in business when there are Swiss army knives? How does Cisco stay alive when PCs running Linux or BSD can function as routers?
The 'Joe User' argument only works with the 'Joe User' computer.
There are plenty of users with atypical needs who aren't willing to spend a lot of time mucking around with their computers to get stuff working (especially when it works quite easily in Windows). Musicians and artists are a good example. You simply can't do serious music work on Linux, not because of any intrinsic flaws, but because there's a lot of work to be done.
If you took a room full of Windows 98 machines, each with the user's own theme, appearance etc, and a room full of Linux users, each with their preffered window manager and theme and layout, who would win the consistency challenge? Windows.
I as a computer user don't care if my desktop is consistent with others desktops. They can do what they like. I do care if mine moves around on me. Consistency is not the same as homogeneity.
But I don't care about consistency nearly as much as I do usability. I'm willing to learn a new thing if it offers an obvious, significant advantage (e.g., Windows 95 compared to 3.1). Most people would agree.
Which is not to say that Linux is superior in either regard.
Just typing the command name should work (like in DOS) unless "/usr/games" isn't in your PATH environment variable (also like in DOS). Unlike in DOS, the path entries are separated by colons, and the current directory is generally not included (for security reasons). I suspect that this latter part is what tripped you up, since it seems counter-intuitive, but it's really a good idea.
These examples don't have so much to do with Linux as with the hardware vendors. Linux is not intrinsically harder than Windows to install on any hardware. It certainly has nothing to do with Linux giving you greater control. It's just that hardware vendors tend to help Microsoft make it easy to install Windows, and get in the way of making it easy to install Linux.
Which is not to trivialize the issue. There's certainly effort that can be taken by Linux developers to increase hardware support. But this effort is a) hard (and more so than for people like Microsoft who get the specs and/or drivers from the manufacturers), and b) relatively expensive. I think for the time being, it's much better to be able to auto-detect hardware and have the installer say "I know what that is, let me configure it for you" or "I don't know what that is, but if it's one of the following, you can configure it yourself..." or especially "I know what that is, but Linux doesn't support it."
On the other hand, we're obviously likely to see more and more hardware vendors offer explicit Linux support as the market demands it.
Consistancy is also an important part of the GUI experience. Microsoft has tried to maintain control over the consistancy of it's desktop for a very good reason. A user should be able to use any windows machine without having to relearn the interface.
I have to take issue with this one. Microsoft certainly tries to maintain control, but not consistency. I have MSIE4 and MS Office 97 installed on top of NT 4 here, and each of those has subtle differences in their widgets, layout, and behavior. They're not as different as Motif vs. OpenLook, and people seem to have little problem coping, but it's probably no more different than Qt, Motif, and GTK+ (using the default theme).
And for that matter, people moving from Win 3.1 to 95 had to relearn basically all of the interface. People did it, probably because the new interface was so much better.
Not to knock consistency, but I think that sometimes it's emphasized at the expense of quality.
And do you call it/g'nu/ or/nu/? And/lin-uks/ or/lIn-uks/?
It's definitely/g'nu/. Most people I've met (all American) pronounce Linux as rhyming with "cynics". I believe that is supposed to be pronounced lee-nukes (as Linus is pronounced lee-noose).
The hypocrisy in Stallman's position is that he chose to use closed source OSes to achieve his goal -- publicizing his idea of Free Software by making tools people would want to use; now he thinks it's immoral for the rest of us to work with closed source stuff to achieve our own goals.
Stallman has said that he decided early on that the FSF would use proprietary software only for the purposes of developing a free replacement (see the "Donated Computers" section). He doesn't feel good about it, he just realizes that it's a necessary evil.
BTW: Saying that he thinks it's immoral to work with closed source stuff is a bit of a misrepresentation. I expect he realizes that some people will need to use closed source software to live their life, and that not everyone can work on free replacements. At the risk of putting words in his mouth, I would say that he would consider using proprietary software to be a bad idea, but only because you're hurting yourself. Creating proprietary software is another story.
These questions are pretty easy to ask, but quite difficult to answer. None of the developers are claiming to be revolutionizing human-computer interaction. They're just trying to bring Linux up to the state of the art.
Contrary to your claims, people have been suggesting for years that the desktop metaphor isn't the only or best UI model. It's just that nobody has suggested a replacement which is clearly better. People are working on desktop environments because we basically know how to build a desktop environment. Nobody knows how to build the environment of the future, or even what it is.
Not CDF, RDF. RDF is making its way through the W3C now, and is the technology behind the new My Netscape channel format. Mozilla definitely has some sort of RDF support, though I doubt that it has flythroughs or hyperbolic trees or anything. As a historical note, the work that eventually became MCF/Hotsauce and RDF began in the CYC AI project.
Evolution suggests that winners will emerge, and the poor ones will fail.
True, but the license differences ensure that different programs can't "interbreed". Which is a shame. Mozilla and KDE or GNOME could have beautiful offspring.
Misinformation propagation
on
GNOME-steaders
·
· Score: 1
It doesn't say the only fully open source desktop, just the first. The GNOME project started before the QPL, and the GNOME project has made a 1.0 release whereas the Qt 2.0 based KDE is still in development, AFAIK.
Slashdot Mirror
Go read Programming as if People Mattered by Nathaniel Borenstein. It talks about combining software engineering and UI design fruitfully. And about how not to fall into the "designed for dummies" trap, making programs easy for experts to use as well as novices. It's excellent, and Borenstein knows what he's talking about—he's no UNIX newbie!
Borenstein is the head of the LUIGUI project. So this is relevant.
It depends a lot on what you do, but possibly even more on who you work for. A lot of orgs have "pet languages".
If you work for DOD, you'll probably use Ada. If you don't, you probably won't. Some places do everything in Smalltalk, or LISP/Scheme, or Python.
I work at a consulting company now, and we use Java, C++, Perl, and VB for pretty much everything. I personally do Java almost exclusively for work, though I know plenty of other langugages.
But I have to say that it's useful to get a broad exposure to languages, even if you rarely use some of them. At school I learned a variety of AI-oriented languages (most dialects of LISP/Scheme) and I'm much better for it, even though I never use them in RL. For one thing, it helps me "think outside the box" (to use a cliche), but it also pads the resume...more important than you expect! :-)
All well said. I just have a few things to add.
I found that Debian has (IMHO) better defaults than Red Hat, and things tend to work better "out of the package". I mention this because Corel is basing their distribution on Debian, not Red Hat like everyone else (and cheers to them for it).
There also needs to be more concern for security, because there will now be a bunch of people with no knowledge or interest in security issues running systems with giant potential holes. Most distributions tend to install all of the daemons you could possibly need, and run them by default. My mom shouldn't have to dig around to disable rsh and FTPd, even if there's an easy tool to do it. Servers should be off by default, because it's pretty easy to tell when a server you need isn't running, but hard to tell when a server you don't need is running.
You're talking about a trademark here, not a copyright. It's totally different. Many people who oppose copyright do not oppose trademarks, though apparently Alsop does.
You're talking about a trademark here, not a copyright. It's totally different. Many people who oppose copyright do not oppose trademarks, though apparently Alsop does.
I had missed all of this because I stopped reading Usenet a couple of years ago.
Recently, I started again, and noticed that all of the big eight (or however many) hierarchies had "meow" groups (i.e., comp.meow, news.meow, talk.meow, etc.). I presume that relates, but how?
GLIB takes a good approach here:
#define FALSE 0 #define TRUE !FALSEIt's still a good idea to not compare to TRUE and FALSE, though, and it's never necessary.
It pretty definitely uses BSD code, but that's allowed by the BSD license. It's not a copyleft. That's why there are commercial BSDs like BSDI and SunOS.
The article suggested that the only part that they're thinking about opening is the NT kernel.
Which probably wouldn't be useful to may people. It's not even clear that you'd be able to rebuild Windows with the modifications you make.
That's actually the current logo that they're trying to replace!
I always kinda liked it, too, but they're trying to not be Linux-specific. And there's no liberal-use logo for it.
Adding to Altus's comments, not only are general-purpose things usually much more complicated than single-purpose things, but they tend not to do the job as well.
Why are knife and screwdriver makers still in business when there are Swiss army knives? How does Cisco stay alive when PCs running Linux or BSD can function as routers?
There are plenty of users with atypical needs who aren't willing to spend a lot of time mucking around with their computers to get stuff working (especially when it works quite easily in Windows). Musicians and artists are a good example. You simply can't do serious music work on Linux, not because of any intrinsic flaws, but because there's a lot of work to be done.
I as a computer user don't care if my desktop is consistent with others desktops. They can do what they like. I do care if mine moves around on me. Consistency is not the same as homogeneity.
But I don't care about consistency nearly as much as I do usability. I'm willing to learn a new thing if it offers an obvious, significant advantage (e.g., Windows 95 compared to 3.1). Most people would agree.
Which is not to say that Linux is superior in either regard.
Salon is typically Linux-friendly, so I doubt it.
Just typing the command name should work (like in DOS) unless "/usr/games" isn't in your PATH environment variable (also like in DOS). Unlike in DOS, the path entries are separated by colons, and the current directory is generally not included (for security reasons). I suspect that this latter part is what tripped you up, since it seems counter-intuitive, but it's really a good idea.
These examples don't have so much to do with Linux as with the hardware vendors. Linux is not intrinsically harder than Windows to install on any hardware. It certainly has nothing to do with Linux giving you greater control. It's just that hardware vendors tend to help Microsoft make it easy to install Windows, and get in the way of making it easy to install Linux.
Which is not to trivialize the issue. There's certainly effort that can be taken by Linux developers to increase hardware support. But this effort is a) hard (and more so than for people like Microsoft who get the specs and/or drivers from the manufacturers), and b) relatively expensive. I think for the time being, it's much better to be able to auto-detect hardware and have the installer say "I know what that is, let me configure it for you" or "I don't know what that is, but if it's one of the following, you can configure it yourself..." or especially "I know what that is, but Linux doesn't support it."
On the other hand, we're obviously likely to see more and more hardware vendors offer explicit Linux support as the market demands it.
I have to take issue with this one. Microsoft certainly tries to maintain control, but not consistency. I have MSIE4 and MS Office 97 installed on top of NT 4 here, and each of those has subtle differences in their widgets, layout, and behavior. They're not as different as Motif vs. OpenLook, and people seem to have little problem coping, but it's probably no more different than Qt, Motif, and GTK+ (using the default theme).
And for that matter, people moving from Win 3.1 to 95 had to relearn basically all of the interface. People did it, probably because the new interface was so much better.
Not to knock consistency, but I think that sometimes it's emphasized at the expense of quality.
It's definitely /g'nu/. Most people I've met (all American) pronounce Linux as rhyming with "cynics". I believe that is supposed to be pronounced lee-nukes (as Linus is pronounced lee-noose).
Stallman has said that he decided early on that the FSF would use proprietary software only for the purposes of developing a free replacement (see the "Donated Computers" section). He doesn't feel good about it, he just realizes that it's a necessary evil.
BTW: Saying that he thinks it's immoral to work with closed source stuff is a bit of a misrepresentation. I expect he realizes that some people will need to use closed source software to live their life, and that not everyone can work on free replacements. At the risk of putting words in his mouth, I would say that he would consider using proprietary software to be a bad idea, but only because you're hurting yourself. Creating proprietary software is another story.
Of course. But KDE and GNOME don't interoperate. They share a display, but not a clipboard, visual appearance, etc.
These questions are pretty easy to ask, but quite difficult to answer. None of the developers are claiming to be revolutionizing human-computer interaction. They're just trying to bring Linux up to the state of the art.
Contrary to your claims, people have been suggesting for years that the desktop metaphor isn't the only or best UI model. It's just that nobody has suggested a replacement which is clearly better. People are working on desktop environments because we basically know how to build a desktop environment. Nobody knows how to build the environment of the future, or even what it is.
Not CDF, RDF. RDF is making its way through the W3C now, and is the technology behind the new My Netscape channel format. Mozilla definitely has some sort of RDF support, though I doubt that it has flythroughs or hyperbolic trees or anything. As a historical note, the work that eventually became MCF/Hotsauce and RDF began in the CYC AI project.
It refers to source code and binaries. The DFSG requires both to be distributable. Remember that Debian is a binary distribution.
True, but the license differences ensure that different programs can't "interbreed". Which is a shame. Mozilla and KDE or GNOME could have beautiful offspring.
It doesn't say the only fully open source desktop, just the first. The GNOME project started before the QPL, and the GNOME project has made a 1.0 release whereas the Qt 2.0 based KDE is still in development, AFAIK.