Well, if you looked close enough and compared the prices of a latitude with Linux installed or Windows installed - you would have seen that with Linux it would costs you MORE...
So if I was in that situation - I would order it with windows, resize the Windows partition to the minimum (you never know when you need it), and install manually Linux - it's not that hard with the Dell notebooks..
Don't forget that most people do use windows - so you can just connect it to the built-in Ethernet port it got, and use smbmount command - and presto - share files between your Linux and this device..
As for "scandisk" - I belive they mean fsck, but go tell a windows user what is fsck..
One thing that I don't see anyone giving a solution to it - are the eyes - you play around the eyes, adding wrinkles, try to make the image look happy, sad, angry - but the eyes themselves looks like a dead person's eyes...
Anyway, Sun report has been read by the KDE people also and some of the points are being discussed on the mailing list - feel free to look at it at lists.kde.org
Imagine that you have a company which makes a product call ABC. Now, a company which is not a direct competitor of your product decided to buy this ABC word in Google, so if I search for ABC in Google - I see their Ad, and suppose that I'm clicking on it. Your competitor of course doesn't have any product that competes with ABC, but they got an exposure ON MY ACCOUNT. In business terms it called "potentional sales loss" just because of this childhood from your competitors (in this case - Ximian).
Now lets look at Ximian and what do they do. They are making the Gnome desktop with other companies and volunteers, which is very good for the Linux community, and no one argues about that.
But lets look at their business plan (or should I say - guess it, because they don't publish zilch about it)..
They claim they give services... To whom?
*) To Sun Microsystems: Nop, Sun got their own engineering working on Gnome and they issue their own packages. Sun, if they really want to, can sponsor the entire Gnome project within few days if they want to - but they just take a roll by assisting building Gnome on their Solaris OS, and by giving advices on the mailing lists.
*) HP - same as Sun, they issue their own packages (as well as packages of KDE) and participating in the Gnome foundation and on the mailing lists.
Both companies really don't need any Ximian services. They could ask Ximian to do a contract job for a very small amount of money (few thousand dollars, nothing more), but I can hardly call this a revenue stream..
Who else Ximian can offer services to? Redhat? they got their own programmers. SuSE? same. Caldera? they don't give a damn about Gnome at all. Mandrake? same boat as Redhat. *BSD? their Gnome maintainer has Quit the Gnome foundation and ceased doing any Gnome work (thats according to what I heard anyway).
What else.. Mono perhaps as a future services revenue? nice idea. Good luck competing with Microsoft on implementing the.NET thingy. Rest assure that upon the first beta release that MS people will download and if the're will be a single patent infrigment - then Ximian will have a lawsuit waiting for them.
Red-Carpet? now here is an excellent tool for updating. I have played with it and I must say - I'm very impressed. Real good work Ximian. Now there is the big question - Will users will be happy to pay the $10-$30 a month for a subscription service for using it? with my experience with the Linux community - I doubt that many will jump on it.
If I were in Ximian management then I would recommend 2 things:
1. Offer KDE packages. KDE is not a cancer, people want it and people use it, along with other Gnome packages. Give it to the people (not just the distribution security updates).
2. Call theKompany - Shawn has told with his answers that although they do packaging, it's troublesome to keep up with all the distribution. Ximian got professional tools for dealing with it and with dependencies problems, as well as they need Debain packages, which Ximian already do - a business deal could be made here and I live it to both sides to fill the details if they are willing to..
If they find that a product doesn't sell well, or doesn't sell at all for a PERIOD of time (that can take a long time you know - it takes people time to find software they need - they don't find or see every software release) - then they'll release it as GPL..
Lets take Frame Maker as an exmaple - it's not being sold any more for quite a long time. Do you see Adobe releases the source? I'm sure there are thousands of software packages which won't see the light of day even if the product is discontued or deprecated...
So they actually are doing a good thing with this..
KDE is available to all the machine you specified and more. Heck - it's even available to 68k machines! (Atari TT, Amiga, etc), as well as others. I don't have the link here - could someone post it please?
The problem with Linux (and BSD's on this case) is simple - and I see it all the times..
People wants everything to be free AND open source.
Thats a legit request - on some occasions, but try to tell that to a commercial vendor when he's trying to make living and once their competitors will see his code will simply copy the features (who can tell that the code is the same if they sell it under closed source license?) and will sell it under half the price (heh, no R&D investment is needed)..
We heard all before from people like RMS, ESR and others that the way to make money is by support. Go ahead - Call MS and see why they refuse to support the user directly - it's NOT PROFITABLE. Ask 100 more companies - the amount of money to make is very small - so they don't write applications that are needed for Linux/BSD. It's that simple..
As for hardware vendors - some of them simply cannot release the specs because they are licensed from 3rd party (example: nVidia - licensed some parts from SGI and from others), and part of this agreement is not to release specs to the public. nVidia in this case ARE releasing some parts of their specs for the 2D/Video parts of their card to the XFree team under a very strict agreement..
If you really want your hardware to be supported, then you have 3 choices:
1. Arrange a petition to give to the hardware OEM, so they can see there is a demand.
2. Start debugging the driver or reverse engineering the windows drivers (on coutries that it is legal) and create a driver. If I'm not mistaken - that was the way the Linux ZIP driver was created..
3. If the hardware is cheap, then post a request on the specific mailing list, and ask for someone (who did some work already - not someone that came out of the blue) to do the driver and if he agrees, buy him the hardware and ship it. You'll be amazed how much this helps..
Bitching/Flaming/Coursing on forums simply doesn't help - and trust me, I'm following dozens of forums and mailing lists. Want example? go read the HP OpenMail forums.
Umm, actually you are wrong (and I had Amiga 1000, and Amiga 500)
The people who killed Amiga was... Commodore themselves, they never listened to their customers, always were arrogant (I know, I talked to them few times)
Commodore should be a classic example how NOT to treat a customer.
but we're talking 5GB Microdrive which goes into your PCMCIA type II slot - you can have 3-4 hours of "movies" (call it what you want - but you have 320x240 resolution without anti aliasing etc...) - so they can be compressed quite easily with any codec... and that includes stereo sound..
Of course - the power required to operate those kind of driver continuosly will "milk" you battery right away - but thats another point..
from the article...: "There's already some evidence that others anticipate this; Richard Thwaite, director of IT for Ford Europe, stated in 2001 that an open source desktop is their goal, and that they expect the industry to eventually go there (he controls 33,000 desktops, so this would not be a trivial move)."
Excuse me, but have you heard about sales tactics? this is just a tactic to move some negotiations between MS and Ford. Do you really think that Ford will switch to Linux on a snap of a finger? what about all their software they're using? servers? clients? what about all their internal applications? you're talking here about dozens of software packages that each department uses their own packages (with the expection of MS Office and stuff like that)
So what this article that you point to is just pointed to MS to say "guys, if you won't lower your ACL copy and Windows XP copy for each machine, then we can invest in alternatives" - but moving to Linux right now (as much as I love Linux and use it daily) will be a totally irresponsible thing to do - specially that you don't have the applications neede, support contracts, or anyone that will walk company size of ford to switch from Windows to Linux, both clients/workstations and servers.
Re:One goes down - another goes up
on
Death of a Rebel
·
· Score: 2
You probably thinking about Code Weavers who announced their way to run Windows plugins...
Let's see what Code Weavers did - they emulated the part to run Windows version Netscape plugins. Meaning - if you install a player/plugin which supports Netscape (like all of them *currently* do) - then you'll be able to use it under Netscape, Mozilla and Konqueror (with Konqueror's Netscape plugin support). The whole thing will be just a Linux Netscape plugin.
Now - 2 things: A. they released it for embedded devices, and it costs the developer money. B. It only supports those players who supports Netscape plugins. They will release a Desktop version later this year if I understood correctly.
Now - let's see what Malte and Niko (the reaktivate guys) did:
The reaktivate idea is quite simple - a small layer added in higher priority to nsplugins layer in Konqueror. Now - when an app wants to install ActiveX, wine will run and the application will things this is Windows and MSIE, so it's kosher to install ActiveX. Then Reaktivate will download the ActiveX, asks the user premission to install and installs it on the wine [you don't need any windows DLL's - one of the authors doesn't have any windows installation at all - so he's making it sure the Reaktivate development can be run without any windows stuff needed - so fake Windows directory which wine can create is enough).
Now - regarding the security - I understood that they'll add layer of protection, and probably the signature check for any ActiveX before installation. Add to that the your actives will run CHRoot, and as a user (not root), then you got a pretty good protection.
The Reaktivate way will let you install new plugins in case the software house decides that Netscape plugin is not necessary because of a very small browser market [for example]
You confuse between Flash and Shockwave - many people do - specially since Macromedia called it Shockwave flash, but they are 2 creates with some similarities - but they target different world each..
Example - Shockwave can do 3D (using hardware renderer or software one - depends on your DirectX [on Reactivate it will be probably running with OpenGL thanks to the WineX team]). Flash - not
There are 2 different players - Flash 5 (which is available to all popular OS's and then there is Shockwave 8.5 - which is only available under Windows and Mac (and now soon - anything that can run Wine)..
Sure, give me also 16 years to reach where they have reached, to work at their terms (exclusive licensing deals which are legally questionable), money, and good sales people - and I'll get there..
People always seems to forget how much Linux has been progressed.
Go ahead - search on your CD archive or get Redhat 4.2, SuSE 4.0, Slackware 2.0 - and install it, see what applications you got (without upgrading to today's libs) and you can see how much Linux has been progressed..
So sure, Linux won't get the desktop market tommorow - KDE and Gnome will get much more mature, and at the end, one of them will be dominant wether you like it or not, companies will get into one standard (as crappy as the standard will be), and there will be apps and Linux will get a bigger desktop market share.
I hardly think it will take MS share, but I belive it will get a good hold within 2-3 years, which is a long time to make Linux more mature and friendly to newbies...
KDE is great IMHO, but does that means I won't use any software just because it's written with GTK or uses GNOME libraries? why? I belive both Gnome and KDE got advantages and disadvantages - and I think most people here agree with me on this point..
So, for example - I preffer XChat over KSIRC, why? because I think it's great! I use Jpilot instead of Kpilot. Why? because it got more features and it's more mature and enhanced, compared to what Kpilot gives me today...
As for your second point - I kind of agree, but I still prefer sometimes the way to direct an email to the project maintainer then the mailing lists..
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you looked close enough and compared the prices of a latitude with Linux installed or Windows installed - you would have seen that with Linux it would costs you MORE...
So if I was in that situation - I would order it with windows, resize the Windows partition to the minimum (you never know when you need it), and install manually Linux - it's not that hard with the Dell notebooks..
Don't forget that most people do use windows - so you can just connect it to the built-in Ethernet port it got, and use smbmount command - and presto - share files between your Linux and this device..
As for "scandisk" - I belive they mean fsck, but go tell a windows user what is fsck..
One thing that I don't see anyone giving a solution to it - are the eyes - you play around the eyes, adding wrinkles, try to make the image look happy, sad, angry - but the eyes themselves looks like a dead person's eyes...
Someone is making one..
Anyway, Sun report has been read by the KDE people also and some of the points are being discussed on the mailing list - feel free to look at it at lists.kde.org
hmm - on AMD 800 Mhz, 320MB RAM, KDE CVS from last night...
$time kmail
real 0m1.439s
user 0m0.650s
sys 0m0.000s
So KMAIL will be slow if you try to run it when you're loading it from another, non KDE enviroment, it has to load all services.
The upcoming version of KDE 2.2 should give you at least 30-50% speed boost when starting KDE applications.
As much as I heard from a Japanese programmer who bought this kit - yes, it's inside the Linux DVD..
You do not, however, get all the sources. Some of the things are under closed source license (like the Emotion driver, etc..)
Duh...
nForce is a nice chipset, but I really donno who can assist you there if you want Linux support..
On the other hand - SiS have a full chipset solution, open source drivers, and they know Linux pretty well..
It was fixed few minutes later, and I saw the error on Konqueror..
Ok, then let me answer this:
.NET thingy. Rest assure that upon the first beta release that MS people will download and if the're will be a single patent infrigment - then Ximian will have a lawsuit waiting for them.
Imagine that you have a company which makes a product call ABC. Now, a company which is not a direct competitor of your product decided to buy this ABC word in Google, so if I search for ABC in Google - I see their Ad, and suppose that I'm clicking on it. Your competitor of course doesn't have any product that competes with ABC, but they got an exposure ON MY ACCOUNT. In business terms it called "potentional sales loss" just because of this childhood from your competitors (in this case - Ximian).
Now lets look at Ximian and what do they do. They are making the Gnome desktop with other companies and volunteers, which is very good for the Linux community, and no one argues about that.
But lets look at their business plan (or should I say - guess it, because they don't publish zilch about it)..
They claim they give services... To whom?
*) To Sun Microsystems: Nop, Sun got their own engineering working on Gnome and they issue their own packages. Sun, if they really want to, can sponsor the entire Gnome project within few days if they want to - but they just take a roll by assisting building Gnome on their Solaris OS, and by giving advices on the mailing lists.
*) HP - same as Sun, they issue their own packages (as well as packages of KDE) and participating in the Gnome foundation and on the mailing lists.
Both companies really don't need any Ximian services. They could ask Ximian to do a contract job for a very small amount of money (few thousand dollars, nothing more), but I can hardly call this a revenue stream..
Who else Ximian can offer services to? Redhat? they got their own programmers. SuSE? same. Caldera? they don't give a damn about Gnome at all. Mandrake? same boat as Redhat. *BSD? their Gnome maintainer has Quit the Gnome foundation and ceased doing any Gnome work (thats according to what I heard anyway).
What else.. Mono perhaps as a future services revenue? nice idea. Good luck competing with Microsoft on implementing the
Red-Carpet? now here is an excellent tool for updating. I have played with it and I must say - I'm very impressed. Real good work Ximian. Now there is the big question - Will users will be happy to pay the $10-$30 a month for a subscription service for using it? with my experience with the Linux community - I doubt that many will jump on it.
If I were in Ximian management then I would recommend 2 things:
1. Offer KDE packages. KDE is not a cancer, people want it and people use it, along with other Gnome packages. Give it to the people (not just the distribution security updates).
2. Call theKompany - Shawn has told with his answers that although they do packaging, it's troublesome to keep up with all the distribution. Ximian got professional tools for dealing with it and with dependencies problems, as well as they need Debain packages, which Ximian already do - a business deal could be made here and I live it to both sides to fill the details if they are willing to..
I wish both companies Good Luck.
So how much time you wanted - a month?
If they find that a product doesn't sell well, or doesn't sell at all for a PERIOD of time (that can take a long time you know - it takes people time to find software they need - they don't find or see every software release) - then they'll release it as GPL..
Lets take Frame Maker as an exmaple - it's not being sold any more for quite a long time. Do you see Adobe releases the source? I'm sure there are thousands of software packages which won't see the light of day even if the product is discontued or deprecated...
So they actually are doing a good thing with this..
KDE is available to all the machine you specified and more. Heck - it's even available to 68k machines! (Atari TT, Amiga, etc), as well as others. I don't have the link here - could someone post it please?
The problem with Linux (and BSD's on this case) is simple - and I see it all the times..
People wants everything to be free AND open source.
Thats a legit request - on some occasions, but try to tell that to a commercial vendor when he's trying to make living and once their competitors will see his code will simply copy the features (who can tell that the code is the same if they sell it under closed source license?) and will sell it under half the price (heh, no R&D investment is needed)..
We heard all before from people like RMS, ESR and others that the way to make money is by support. Go ahead - Call MS and see why they refuse to support the user directly - it's NOT PROFITABLE. Ask 100 more companies - the amount of money to make is very small - so they don't write applications that are needed for Linux/BSD. It's that simple..
As for hardware vendors - some of them simply cannot release the specs because they are licensed from 3rd party (example: nVidia - licensed some parts from SGI and from others), and part of this agreement is not to release specs to the public. nVidia in this case ARE releasing some parts of their specs for the 2D/Video parts of their card to the XFree team under a very strict agreement..
If you really want your hardware to be supported, then you have 3 choices:
1. Arrange a petition to give to the hardware OEM, so they can see there is a demand.
2. Start debugging the driver or reverse engineering the windows drivers (on coutries that it is legal) and create a driver. If I'm not mistaken - that was the way the Linux ZIP driver was created..
3. If the hardware is cheap, then post a request on the specific mailing list, and ask for someone (who did some work already - not someone that came out of the blue) to do the driver and if he agrees, buy him the hardware and ship it. You'll be amazed how much this helps..
Bitching/Flaming/Coursing on forums simply doesn't help - and trust me, I'm following dozens of forums and mailing lists. Want example? go read the HP OpenMail forums.
Umm, actually you are wrong (and I had Amiga 1000, and Amiga 500)
... Commodore themselves, they never listened to their customers, always were arrogant (I know, I talked to them few times)
The people who killed Amiga was
Commodore should be a classic example how NOT to treat a customer.
excuse me,
but we're talking 5GB Microdrive which goes into your PCMCIA type II slot - you can have 3-4 hours of "movies" (call it what you want - but you have 320x240 resolution without anti aliasing etc...) - so they can be compressed quite easily with any codec... and that includes stereo sound..
Of course - the power required to operate those kind of driver continuosly will "milk" you battery right away - but thats another point..
Excuse me, but have you heard about sales tactics? this is just a tactic to move some negotiations between MS and Ford. Do you really think that Ford will switch to Linux on a snap of a finger? what about all their software they're using? servers? clients? what about all their internal applications? you're talking here about dozens of software packages that each department uses their own packages (with the expection of MS Office and stuff like that)
So what this article that you point to is just pointed to MS to say "guys, if you won't lower your ACL copy and Windows XP copy for each machine, then we can invest in alternatives" - but moving to Linux right now (as much as I love Linux and use it daily) will be a totally irresponsible thing to do - specially that you don't have the applications neede, support contracts, or anyone that will walk company size of ford to switch from Windows to Linux, both clients/workstations and servers.
grr... Correct Link
The hardware (at least from outside) looks very cool
Let's see what Code Weavers did - they emulated the part to run Windows version Netscape plugins. Meaning - if you install a player/plugin which supports Netscape (like all of them *currently* do) - then you'll be able to use it under Netscape, Mozilla and Konqueror (with Konqueror's Netscape plugin support). The whole thing will be just a Linux Netscape plugin. Now - 2 things: A. they released it for embedded devices, and it costs the developer money. B. It only supports those players who supports Netscape plugins. They will release a Desktop version later this year if I understood correctly. Now - let's see what Malte and Niko (the reaktivate guys) did:
The reaktivate idea is quite simple - a small layer added in higher priority to nsplugins layer in Konqueror. Now - when an app wants to install ActiveX, wine will run and the application will things this is Windows and MSIE, so it's kosher to install ActiveX. Then Reaktivate will download the ActiveX, asks the user premission to install and installs it on the wine [you don't need any windows DLL's - one of the authors doesn't have any windows installation at all - so he's making it sure the Reaktivate development can be run without any windows stuff needed - so fake Windows directory which wine can create is enough). Now - regarding the security - I understood that they'll add layer of protection, and probably the signature check for any ActiveX before installation. Add to that the your actives will run CHRoot, and as a user (not root), then you got a pretty good protection. The Reaktivate way will let you install new plugins in case the software house decides that Netscape plugin is not necessary because of a very small browser market [for example]
Actually - the problem is pretty simple:
Run your VMWare (if you have it on your machine) with Windows - or reboot to Windows.
Now install the Quicktime player - it doesn't matter which components (minimal is ok)
After it'll finish - watch the new widgets on the Quicktime windows - they are totally different - and thats what today Wine is not supporting...
If there was a way to run the Quicktime player without those widgets (with standard widgets) - then you could run QuickTime under Wine...
You confuse between Flash and Shockwave - many people do - specially since Macromedia called it Shockwave flash, but they are 2 creates with some similarities - but they target different world each..
Example - Shockwave can do 3D (using hardware renderer or software one - depends on your DirectX [on Reactivate it will be probably running with OpenGL thanks to the WineX team]). Flash - not
There are 2 different players - Flash 5 (which is available to all popular OS's and then there is Shockwave 8.5 - which is only available under Windows and Mac (and now soon - anything that can run Wine)..
Hi,
;)
I made the screenshot, and yes, a bit of Irony won't hurt anyone
Sure, give me also 16 years to reach where they have reached, to work at their terms (exclusive licensing deals which are legally questionable), money, and good sales people - and I'll get there..
People always seems to forget how much Linux has been progressed.
Go ahead - search on your CD archive or get Redhat 4.2, SuSE 4.0, Slackware 2.0 - and install it, see what applications you got (without upgrading to today's libs) and you can see how much Linux has been progressed..
So sure, Linux won't get the desktop market tommorow - KDE and Gnome will get much more mature, and at the end, one of them will be dominant wether you like it or not, companies will get into one standard (as crappy as the standard will be), and there will be apps and Linux will get a bigger desktop market share.
I hardly think it will take MS share, but I belive it will get a good hold within 2-3 years, which is a long time to make Linux more mature and friendly to newbies...
Oh man, puh-lease!
KDE is great IMHO, but does that means I won't use any software just because it's written with GTK or uses GNOME libraries? why? I belive both Gnome and KDE got advantages and disadvantages - and I think most people here agree with me on this point..
So, for example - I preffer XChat over KSIRC, why? because I think it's great! I use Jpilot instead of Kpilot. Why? because it got more features and it's more mature and enhanced, compared to what Kpilot gives me today...
As for your second point - I kind of agree, but I still prefer sometimes the way to direct an email to the project maintainer then the mailing lists..
Clicking Submit instead of Preview can be dangerous sometimes... (continuing the YoGy stuff)
YoGy got few points here - but I wish both products will succseed..