I've always agreed with Linus' "you write it you license it" idea. To me KDE is an app that runs on top of an OS like mySQL, Oracle, BRU or CDE.
I've never considered it a Linux component at all, especially since it will run quite nicely on BSD, Solaris or even HP-UX (according to the FAQ).
I guess this could lead to a rehash of "where does an OS begin/end" argument. Great fun to discuss but pretty irrelevant in the end. -------------------------------------------- -----------
My limited and probably error ridden recollection of 6th form physics tells me it's impossible to cool matter to absolute zero. But people try anyway.
As I understand it the GPL essentially prevents World Domination in the Linux world in the way MS have done it in the Windows world. It would be pretty much impossible to add undocumented API's or write some software that everyone else depended on to leverage your position in the Linux market.
So since it can't be done in theory, why not try anyway?
Red Hat are a public company. They have an obligation to their shareholders to earn a profit. Good on them for trying. ----------------------------------------- --------------
A quick google search gets back just over 1000 links on Dvorak keyboards, including this place which sells them. Lot's of people make alternative style keyboards and many more swear by them.
In The Design/Psychology of Everyday Things Don Norman does a comparison of various keyboard types including qwerty, Dvorak and Chorded keyboards. Most, if not all of the alternatives rate higher than qwerty in terms of typing speed and training.
Norman also points out that no matter how good a new kind of keyboard is, it will never replace the standard qwerty style. It would simply cost too much money. Retraining users, replacing hardware, rewriting software (in some cases), rewriting documentation etc. It all adds up. There are similar reasons why the metric systems hasn't been adopted world wide.
Also, how much more efficient does a keyboard have to be to justify a change in keys? IMHO, the qwerty keyboard is good enough. I look forward to the day when I don't have to tap away on this anymore. Bring on what-you-see-is-what-you-think! ----------------- --------------------------------------
There are a hell of a lot of Windows apps that proabably wouldn't have come about or been as useful without looking at the Windows source.
Citrix WinFrame comes to mind. IIRC Citrix did a deal with MS to get access to the source for Windows. This basically meant they could fix bugs more easily.
I've read various discussion groups where Sun developers are happy about Sun's decicision to open up Solaris because it will help them with their application developement. The same would go for Windows developers if MS, by some miracle, decided to let people see the source for Windows.
IMHO, the bulk of software developers, especially those who write for Windows, aren't really interested in helping maintain their OS of choice. They just want to make their software run better, with less bugs. Any access to OS source, no matter the license, will help them make this happen. ------------------------------------------------ -------
n a real test scenario you should have each application on each platform and compare the startup times then. Well, I do not have access to a MS Office on Linux version. But startup on Windows is NOT slower ( assuming of course you did switched the start 60% of MS Office with the OS box of for realistic comparement, of course). But startup of Star Office on Linux IS slower than startup on Windows and that while more than 90% is really the same source code.
I don't agree that this is a realistic comparison. A test of the default installation of both products is the realistic option. I fail to see how crippling one product makes the test fairer.
If Sun made it so that some of the libraries for Star Office loaded at boot time, then Star Office would load faster. At the moment they don't.
Most of the other Office Suites on Windows pull the same trick. Would you cripple MS, Lotus and Corel to make the test fair if those programs were included in the comparison?
What I'm about to say may be offtopic for the general discussion, but I am quite interested in this thread.
I like apps that use the web, rather than apps you access from the web.
Embedding browser controls in apps, wether they be written using MFC, GTK, Qt, Swing or even Borland's VCL mean that you can have the best of both worlds.
You need not give away any of the cool bells and whistles that come with your favourite lib and you can also tie your app to regularly and easily updated data on the web.
MS Money is a great example of this, especially when you run it on a dedicated net connection, without all the hassles of dialup etc.
I click a button which instructs some software to uses the LZW method to decompress and display a file.
Unisys have no problem with this because Netscape, the producers of the software have paid them money.
I scan an image, click a button and Corel Photopaint uses LZW to compress the image. Again, this is fine because Corel have paid up their license.
Apparently, if I put this file on a geocities page I may owe Unisys a license. If they deem me to be the operator of a Intranet Web site or an Internet Billboard Web site.
If I am such an operator eitherer Corel took care of the licensing issue (and passed part the cost on to me for me) or Unisys are ripping them off.
Either way, all I did was click a button. I didn't shift the bits around myself. I used a licensed algorithm. I don't know or care how it works.
Everyone is proposing new image formats, PNG in particular. Bugger that. I get hardly any people looking at my stuff anyway. The few I do probably don't run browsers that support these uncommon if technically superior formats. Not that I really use images much anyway.
I have sent an email to unisys asking if I need a license and also questioning if the license purchased by Corel covers my if they think I do. I've cc'd it to corel. If the/. effect is in force I bet I don't get an answer.
If Sun do buy StarOffice and market it there may very well be more copies of StarOffice sold than there are now. But I don't think it will be because of the cross-platform nature of the product.
Most people use a wp/spreadsheet/whatever because it's:
installed on their PC (witness the popularity of MS Works or Claris Works among school projects)
what they are given at work
produces file formats that their customers expect
Where I work I have a choice between Word/Excel and Lotus SmartSuite. 90% of the documents on the lan are created using MS products - so that's what I use. This is the only criteria by which I choose the tool. Whether or not the apps are cross-platform (they are) doesn't make a difference to me.
A very small percentage of use more than one OS in real life so a cross-platform office suite isn't a deal making must have feature, IMHO.
To me the Caldera lawsuit has been more interesting than the DOJ case.
MS caught red-handed breaking a competitors product. Not this whole "Bill sells too much software and he wants to rule the world" rubbish.
I wonder why Caldera really purchased DR DOS. Did they realise that DOS is a pretty good OS for PDA's with millions of developers world wide before or after they decided to sue MS and rifle through their mail?
I used OS/2 for about a year before app compatibility (i.e. games) forced me to move to Windows.
I used it because I got teh student version for free and it worked better than Win3.11 But damn if it wasn't ugly.
The WPS is confusing and unintuitive and annoying if you come to it from a Mac or Windows (I used both regularly at university at the time).
Examples
The right mouse button is used to drag and drop files
The difference b/w shadows and is only obvious to someone with a CompSci degree.
The difference between the Pick-up menu option and the Cut menu option isn't obvious.
The shredder prompts for confirmation twice when you drag a file on to it
The WPS is very powerful but too hard for most people.
Re:It's all about the money - no it's not
on
Unix in a Nutshell
·
· Score: 1
Normally, I'd just lurk around the book reviews but this kind of post annoys me and I think it's too important a topic to ignore.
So let's pick it apart piece by piece
I see no reason to review a book that's such a staple in the unix community such as this, and pass it off as being 'new' or 'unknown'..
On the/. front page the article is described as a review of 'one of the O'Reilly staples'. In the first paragraph the author states he "feels silly" reviewing a book that has already been approved and used by so many. I hardly think that is passing the book off as new or unknown. I'm surprosed it has taken so long for this review to appear on/. I suspect one of the reasons for the review was because it hadn't been done yet. Why climb a mountain that's already been climbed before? Because it's there.
I feel uneasy when commercials for books like this one start sneaking into the realm of 'actual interesting content'
The 30 other posters (at time of writing) would seem to disagree. The review has prompted discussion on various topics: UNIX documentation, man pages vs books, ORA books vs others. To me this is pretty interesting content.
There's a lot of money to be made by pointing at a very good book that a lot of nerds might be interested in, and convincing them to buy it through a money-making portal. At the same time, it's annoying to those of us who see it as a clear-cut way to make some money off of hard working geeks who may not know they're being led by the pied piper of geekyness - Slashdot.org.
You poor bugger, you've obviously been tricked by Evil Rob and his henchmen before - don't tell me you bought the book about the ducks and you're pissed off because everyone's favourite website (malevolent as it is) got 3c of your hard earned dosh.
Fortunately I have never been a victim of the dark Jedi incantation "Buy it at Amazon". Please give/. readers some credit - we aren't stupid. If we buy a book we buy it because we want it not because/. told us to.
Rob, Jeff and co put up this site because it is a cool thing to do. They want to make it as cool as possible - which costs money. So they sell banner ads and join a couple of affiliates programs. It doesn't cost me a single cent. Nor anyone other/. reader.
Posts that complain about the very necessary advertising and Amazon/CDNow links are ultimately a waste of time. Without the ads there would be no/. If you feel that strongly about them don't read/.
I love IDEs. Visual Age for Java has a fantastic visual building tool. Much better than the C++ version.
Am I right in thinking that Inprise/Borland are also porting JBuilder? It's basically the Delphi IDE but designed for Java instead.
I would love it if Inprise/Borland would write a VCL like library for Linux and then port Delphi.
Another question: is there an IDE or resource editor for the likes of GTK or similar. I use the MSC++ resource editor every day at work. I think it would make a great addition to the Linux world.
Good call. I've got no proof. None at all. No public technology exists at the moment that can do what these people claim Echelon does.
As for the matter of privacy: Given enough time and resources there is a pretty good chance a professional investigator can find out anything they like about you or your activities.
In this day and age privacy is a myth.
In NZ my name is on the Electoral Role. Anyone can look it up.
Whenever I get a presciption at a pharmacy, all my details are stored on the harddrive of their computer. All the details of every prescription are also sent, via mail or electronically to a central computer run by the government.
When I call for a Pizza, the teenager at the other end does't ask me where I live, but does ask me if I enjoyed the Chicken pizza I ordered last month.
When I get a book out from the public library the information is stored on a system readily accessible from the internet.
I buy something online - my credit card number, along with all my personal details are stored on the hard drive of the people who own the website
A spammer writes a script that generates email addresses, sends out thousands of mails and the one to my address doesn't bounce back. Now he's got my email address. He goes to deja.com and checks to see if I've posted anything - an instant list of my interests. He put's my address on a cd and sells it.
A newbie cracker logs on to their internet account. His dynamic ip address is associated with his account. The proxy server at the ISP keeps a log of the sites he visits. Telecom NZ's computer makes a record of the call (number called, duration, etc). Hour's later someone complains that their site has been messed with, their logs show the ip address of the idiot who did it. Due to NZ's new hacking laws the police are called in. Using records from Telecom and the ISP the cops chekc out what else he's been up to - credit card fraud and kiddie porn. The case is turned over to internal affairs who bust him. Turns out it his brother is the porn addict - he get's busted too.
We leave information about ourseleves everywhere. In the 80's the world was astounded when kids going by names like Phiber Optik could find out their intimate details.
10 to 15 years later, when the world has become much more connected, and when the President of the USA can be impeached because an internet journalist didn't need an editor to approve his story, when the company owned by the richest man in the world can be sued because of emails written 10 years ago, you cannot tell me real privacy exists. That our information is more secure from those who want to get at it.
Every day people are paid to find out things about others. Corporations, individuals, governments, marketing companies and crime syndicates all have reasons for collecting information on people. IMHO, it is wishful thinking to believe that anything disclosed to anyone else is safe from prying eyes.
Echelon may exist. It probably doesn't for very sound technical reasons. But if the technology did exist - do you think it wouldn't be used?
3) Secrecy: They've been doing for 50 years without a hitch? When they'd obviously need an army of techs/programmers/spooks? Not to mention all the accomplices necessary (phone companies, computer/software makers, etc)?
Number 3 has some additional points: If this conspiracy is so vast, evil and secret, how come Joe Blow from Australia was allowed to blow the whistle?
OK. I'm not claiming to know what is going on about anything. But I will say anything is a possibility.
Echelon was big news for a couple of days in NZ 2 or 3 years ago. The main beef wasn't so much that NZ was part of a spy ring, but that we didn't even use the info ourselves - we gave it all to the states! Shock horror!
I don't doubt that the technology exists to do this kind of spying, I also don't doubt that it's going on all the time. I do doubt whether most of the info collected is ever actually looked at by anything other than software or if anything is done with it.
Anyone who thinks they have any amount of real privacy should wake up.
I thought Civ2 was pretty well rounded except for the lack of multi-player. If they incorporate all the good stuff from the old Civs + Alpha Centauri (never played it but I hear it's great) the game should be awesome. But what other features could there be?
What more is there to total world or galactic domination?
I'd like to see a Civ world that lives on the net - we all get an island or a piece of land and get to develop it, trade with others etc. Sort of like a cross between CivNet and a MUD
Cassius is right. Surely most coders in the world are doing some sort of vertical market software.
The open source model means that the software is free - but the support isn't. Nor is customisation and maintenance.
Look at the recent article about the hotel chain installing Linux on all their servers. The only people who won't get paid because of this are Microsoft.
The hotel chain IT team will get paid to customise the system to be used in all their hotels.
The help desk will get paid because no matter how stable the OS is, users are still users
The sysadmins will have their hands full coding and downloading MP3's while they wait for the Win95 clients to crash.
I don't see too many losers here. I don't see anyone who won't be able to buy their tea.
I would imagine that 99% of mothers don't know what an OS is, nor do they want to know.
When I moved cities my mother decided to "learn how to use the computer" so she could keep in touch with me by email.
Mum still doesn't have a clue about how to use windows. Mum wouldn't know a spreadsheet from a paint program. She certainly couldn't tell the difference between RAM and ROM. And forget hooking up a printer or grabbing an image with the scanner.
But Mum does email me at least twice a week. She also hangs out in the gardening forum in Yahoo chat which is one of many bookmarks she visits every day. She has customised IE so that the CNN weather for Dunedin is the default website. And last month my mother installed the shockwave activex control by herself - answering two yes/no questions was pretty tough but she got through it!
My point is that Mum-friendly software doesn't depend on the OS it is running on. As long as the app that Mum uses is simple, easy and does what she expects then she will be happy.
In an ideal world, software could be radically customised depending on the type of user. Net based software could implement this with relative ease. Perhaps that's why Mum likes the net so much?
Linux's less-mature setup infrastructure increases the up- front work required to deploy an application
Sure Linux is a bit (only a little bit) more difficult to set up than NT or Win95. And installing apps can be a little obscure to say the least.
But once an app is installed, you don't really need to worry about it any more.
When I worked in tech support hell the biggest problems I faced were when users had installed something new:
Me: Good morning companyname, Joe speaking
User: Hi. I just installed the internet my mainframe. Now your program won't print.
Me: That sound odd. Will any other programs print?
User: I don't know. I can't start them. There's no mousey thingy on the screen.
Me: Can you tell me what is on the screen sir?
User: Just the normal screen. But it's blue and it's got all this white text on it
Me: (on mute) Bugger. (to customer) Have you got your NT rescuse disk handy?
User: I don't know. Where do I keep it? Can't you just dial in a fix this...
How often do you hear of Linux users reinstalling their OS for anything other than sheer enjoyment?
With Linux how often does upgrading a piece of shareware render a real app useless because of some obscure file being overwitten?
With Windows it has to be done just because you install/remove a simple (well it should be) browser.
For power users Linux can be a joy. We get our hands dirty setting it up, marvel at it's stability then break out fdisk and start again.
For people like my Mum this is insane behaviour. Unfortunatley for Mum she has been through the process twice in the last year. And geek or not, reinstalling Windows just isn't fun.
Excuse me, but isn't this the internet. The new, exciting medium which changes almost everything about the way the world works.
Where is the rule that says you can't make money from your homepage?
Slashdot is not a magazine or ezine like C|Net or ZDNet. It's basically the outgrowth of a homepage that became pretty popular over a period of time (remember Chips & Dips?)
Cmdr Taco, Hemos & co are only editors in the sense that it's their website and they can do what they want.
They let complete strangers submit stories that will feature on the front page read by more geeks than I can imagine.
The criteria? Taco thinks its pretty cool or Hemos knows some people who would be into it. Not because they can make 15 cents by pointing to a link at Amazon.
The slashdot effect tells us that it's a pretty good editorial policy
I check out/. several times a day. There is always something I am interested in on the front page (especially since the invention of the JenniCam slashbox:->) I have never paid a single cent to the people who run/. yet I am always amused or entertained in some way.
If you like/. but don't like Amazon, don't click the link.
But please don't complain about editorial policy or objectiveness or anything like that. Use your brain instead. Decide for yourself.
Living in NZ means I am normally quite a few hours ahead of the rest of the world ( don't wory, I won't tell you what happens). I've been getting this April Fools crap all day.
The best trick before this was a Compaq ad for a mouse that can recharge the batteries in your laptop - it included a special game to make recharging easy and fun!
I agree with soren. I've read the excerpts and the articles which follow. I don't think we should be bashing what it says just because it comes from a person that a lot of/.'ers don't like. I for one don't really care whether MS is a monopoly, or if Bill has more money than the GNP of my country. I also don't care if Bill is just repeating what he's read elsewhere. Bill want's a computer on every desk and in every home running MS software. Most of the/.'ers want Linux to achieve total world domination. The two goals are in opposition. But I bet Bill is paying attention to what the open source community is doing and saying We should pay attention to him as well
Space Quest ][ was the first game I played on the first PC my family owned.
My brother, sister and I spent hours in front of an XT with a Hercules Monochrome card, arguing about how to get Roger Wilco through the swamp without being eaten. We took turns typing...if Roger died it was the end of your turn. A few years later I had to institute the same rules in my flat when I bought my 486 and installed Doom 2.
Space Quest rocked. So did Kings Quest. And Police Quest. And Hoyle Card Games. And Codename: Iceman...
I am currently reading Tog on Software by the software design guru Bruce Tognazzini. As well as impressing me with his picture of how computers and information systems may be used in a few years time, Tog has made me really mad at much of the software I use every day.
Here are some examples:
Microsoft Outlook has lots of great features that I like to use - but it is veeerrry slow
Internet Explorer and Netscape do excellent jobs at rendering HTML but every so often they hang, locking up my computer completely
Windows 95 cannot keep track of shortcuts properly if you move the destination file, even though the OS has an adequate searching tool
Yeah Write, the editor I am currently typing this in doesn't let you turn off smart quotes completely, instead I have to do a replace all or type each quote twice to prevent squiggly quotation marks
These problems are caused by poor design. And the fixes/patches to the programs and the new releases don't fix this basic problem.
Let's take Outlook as an example. In the movie Hotshots part Deux, Charlie Sheen is a member of a commando team going into to: "get the boys who went in to get the boys". Outlook 98 is a program designed to fix the faults in a program designed to fix the faults in Inbox/Schedule+.
It has a Web-based UI on top of a buggy amalgam of components that would make more sense to be used as separate applets.
Tog suggests a document-centric approach with software applets as the tools that people use to create these documents. At the moment this kind of technology is in it's infancy - hands up who use OLE objects in the documents often?
The small applet approach is already used in the UNIX world every day. But tools such as grep, find, ispell, awk and sed are for geeks and the odd curious user. Not the likes of my mother, or even the Excel jockey in accounting. Once again, design is the key.
Tog is a proponent of assuring quality by involving all parties at all stages of the software development process. He makes several comparisons to the automobile industry, particularly the influence Japanese attention to quality had on American car manufacturers. He points out several lessons that can be learned from this industry.
IMHO, it will take a revolution in thinking to prevent PC software from becoming more and more buggy.
We need to pay more attention to the design of the software - right from the beginning.
We need to fix bugs when they are found and better still prevent them from happening in the first place with strict attention to quality. As Tog points out: Quality is free
If it helps, we need to start all over and design the thing again from the ground up - look at the latest version of MS Office for the Mac, it's bigger and slower than the previous version but people love it because it works the way they expect.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never considered it a Linux component at all, especially since it will run quite nicely on BSD, Solaris or even HP-UX (according to the FAQ).
I guess this could lead to a rehash of "where does an OS begin/end" argument. Great fun to discuss but pretty irrelevant in the end.- -----------
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As I understand it the GPL essentially prevents World Domination in the Linux world in the way MS have done it in the Windows world. It would be pretty much impossible to add undocumented API's or write some software that everyone else depended on to leverage your position in the Linux market.
So since it can't be done in theory, why not try anyway?
Red Hat are a public company. They have an obligation to their shareholders to earn a profit. Good on them for trying.- --------------
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In The Design/Psychology of Everyday Things Don Norman does a comparison of various keyboard types including qwerty, Dvorak and Chorded keyboards. Most, if not all of the alternatives rate higher than qwerty in terms of typing speed and training.
Norman also points out that no matter how good a new kind of keyboard is, it will never replace the standard qwerty style. It would simply cost too much money. Retraining users, replacing hardware, rewriting software (in some cases), rewriting documentation etc. It all adds up. There are similar reasons why the metric systems hasn't been adopted world wide.
Also, how much more efficient does a keyboard have to be to justify a change in keys? IMHO, the qwerty keyboard is good enough. I look forward to the day when I don't have to tap away on this anymore. Bring on what-you-see-is-what-you-think!- --------------------------------------
----------------
Citrix WinFrame comes to mind. IIRC Citrix did a deal with MS to get access to the source for Windows. This basically meant they could fix bugs more easily.
I've read various discussion groups where Sun developers are happy about Sun's decicision to open up Solaris because it will help them with their application developement. The same would go for Windows developers if MS, by some miracle, decided to let people see the source for Windows.
IMHO, the bulk of software developers, especially those who write for Windows, aren't really interested in helping maintain their OS of choice. They just want to make their software run better, with less bugs. Any access to OS source, no matter the license, will help them make this happen.- -------
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I don't agree that this is a realistic comparison. A test of the default installation of both products is the realistic option. I fail to see how crippling one product makes the test fairer.
If Sun made it so that some of the libraries for Star Office loaded at boot time, then Star Office would load faster. At the moment they don't.
Most of the other Office Suites on Windows pull the same trick. Would you cripple MS, Lotus and Corel to make the test fair if those programs were included in the comparison?
What I'm about to say may be offtopic for the general discussion, but I am quite interested in this thread.
- -----
I like apps that use the web, rather than apps you access from the web.
Embedding browser controls in apps, wether they be written using MFC, GTK, Qt, Swing or even Borland's VCL mean that you can have the best of both worlds.
You need not give away any of the cool bells and whistles that come with your favourite lib and you can also tie your app to regularly and easily updated data on the web.
MS Money is a great example of this, especially when you run it on a dedicated net connection, without all the hassles of dialup etc.
-------------------------------------------------
Unisys have no problem with this because Netscape, the producers of the software have paid them money.
I scan an image, click a button and Corel Photopaint uses LZW to compress the image. Again, this is fine because Corel have paid up their license.
Apparently, if I put this file on a geocities page I may owe Unisys a license. If they deem me to be the operator of a Intranet Web site or an Internet Billboard Web site.
If I am such an operator eitherer Corel took care of the licensing issue (and passed part the cost on to me for me) or Unisys are ripping them off.
Either way, all I did was click a button. I didn't shift the bits around myself. I used a licensed algorithm. I don't know or care how it works.
Everyone is proposing new image formats, PNG in particular. Bugger that. I get hardly any people looking at my stuff anyway. The few I do probably don't run browsers that support these uncommon if technically superior formats. Not that I really use images much anyway.
I have sent an email to unisys asking if I need a license and also questioning if the license purchased by Corel covers my if they think I do. I've cc'd it to corel. If the /. effect is in force I bet I don't get an answer.
If Sun do buy StarOffice and market it there may very well be more copies of StarOffice sold than there are now. But I don't think it will be because of the cross-platform nature of the product.
Most people use a wp/spreadsheet/whatever because it's:
- installed on their PC (witness the popularity of MS Works or Claris Works among school projects)
- what they are given at work
- produces file formats that their customers expect
Where I work I have a choice between Word/Excel and Lotus SmartSuite. 90% of the documents on the lan are created using MS products - so that's what I use. This is the only criteria by which I choose the tool. Whether or not the apps are cross-platform (they are) doesn't make a difference to me.A very small percentage of use more than one OS in real life so a cross-platform office suite isn't a deal making must have feature, IMHO.
MS caught red-handed breaking a competitors product. Not this whole "Bill sells too much software and he wants to rule the world" rubbish.
I wonder why Caldera really purchased DR DOS. Did they realise that DOS is a pretty good OS for PDA's with millions of developers world wide before or after they decided to sue MS and rifle through their mail?
I used it because I got teh student version for free and it worked better than Win3.11 But damn if it wasn't ugly.
The WPS is confusing and unintuitive and annoying if you come to it from a Mac or Windows (I used both regularly at university at the time).
Examples
The WPS is very powerful but too hard for most people.
So let's pick it apart piece by piece
I see no reason to review a book that's such a staple in the unix community such as this, and pass it off as being 'new' or 'unknown'..
On the /. front page the article is described as a review of 'one of the O'Reilly staples'. In the first paragraph the author states he "feels silly" reviewing a book that has already been approved and used by so many. I hardly think that is passing the book off as new or unknown. I'm surprosed it has taken so long for this review to appear on /. I suspect one of the reasons for the review was because it hadn't been done yet. Why climb a mountain that's already been climbed before? Because it's there.
I feel uneasy when commercials for books like this one start sneaking into the realm of 'actual interesting content'
The 30 other posters (at time of writing) would seem to disagree. The review has prompted discussion on various topics: UNIX documentation, man pages vs books, ORA books vs others. To me this is pretty interesting content.
There's a lot of money to be made by pointing at a very good book that a lot of nerds might be interested in, and convincing them to buy it through a money-making portal. At the same time, it's annoying to those of us who see it as a clear-cut way to make some money off of hard working geeks who may not know they're being led by the pied piper of geekyness - Slashdot.org.
You poor bugger, you've obviously been tricked by Evil Rob and his henchmen before - don't tell me you bought the book about the ducks and you're pissed off because everyone's favourite website (malevolent as it is) got 3c of your hard earned dosh.
Fortunately I have never been a victim of the dark Jedi incantation "Buy it at Amazon". Please give /. readers some credit - we aren't stupid. If we buy a book we buy it because we want it not because /. told us to.
Rob, Jeff and co put up this site because it is a cool thing to do. They want to make it as cool as possible - which costs money. So they sell banner ads and join a couple of affiliates programs. It doesn't cost me a single cent. Nor anyone other /. reader.
Posts that complain about the very necessary advertising and Amazon/CDNow links are ultimately a waste of time. Without the ads there would be no /. If you feel that strongly about them don't read /.
OK, I'm done now
Am I right in thinking that Inprise/Borland are also porting JBuilder? It's basically the Delphi IDE but designed for Java instead.
I would love it if Inprise/Borland would write a VCL like library for Linux and then port Delphi.
Another question: is there an IDE or resource editor for the likes of GTK or similar. I use the MSC++ resource editor every day at work. I think it would make a great addition to the Linux world.
As for the matter of privacy: Given enough time and resources there is a pretty good chance a professional investigator can find out anything they like about you or your activities.
In this day and age privacy is a myth.
We leave information about ourseleves everywhere. In the 80's the world was astounded when kids going by names like Phiber Optik could find out their intimate details.
10 to 15 years later, when the world has become much more connected, and when the President of the USA can be impeached because an internet journalist didn't need an editor to approve his story, when the company owned by the richest man in the world can be sued because of emails written 10 years ago, you cannot tell me real privacy exists. That our information is more secure from those who want to get at it.
Every day people are paid to find out things about others. Corporations, individuals, governments, marketing companies and crime syndicates all have reasons for collecting information on people. IMHO, it is wishful thinking to believe that anything disclosed to anyone else is safe from prying eyes.
Echelon may exist. It probably doesn't for very sound technical reasons. But if the technology did exist - do you think it wouldn't be used?
Number 3 has some additional points: If this conspiracy is so vast, evil and secret, how come Joe Blow from Australia was allowed to blow the whistle?
OK. I'm not claiming to know what is going on about anything. But I will say anything is a possibility.
Echelon was big news for a couple of days in NZ 2 or 3 years ago. The main beef wasn't so much that NZ was part of a spy ring, but that we didn't even use the info ourselves - we gave it all to the states! Shock horror!
I don't doubt that the technology exists to do this kind of spying, I also don't doubt that it's going on all the time. I do doubt whether most of the info collected is ever actually looked at by anything other than software or if anything is done with it.
Anyone who thinks they have any amount of real privacy should wake up.
What more is there to total world or galactic domination?
I'd like to see a Civ world that lives on the net - we all get an island or a piece of land and get to develop it, trade with others etc. Sort of like a cross between CivNet and a MUD
Just my 2 cents
The open source model means that the software is free - but the support isn't. Nor is customisation and maintenance.
Look at the recent article about the hotel chain installing Linux on all their servers. The only people who won't get paid because of this are Microsoft.
- The hotel chain IT team will get paid to customise the system to be used in all their hotels.
- The help desk will get paid because no matter how stable the OS is, users are still users
- The sysadmins will have their hands full coding and downloading MP3's while they wait for the Win95 clients to crash.
I don't see too many losers here. I don't see anyone who won't be able to buy their tea.When I moved cities my mother decided to "learn how to use the computer" so she could keep in touch with me by email.
Mum still doesn't have a clue about how to use windows. Mum wouldn't know a spreadsheet from a paint program. She certainly couldn't tell the difference between RAM and ROM. And forget hooking up a printer or grabbing an image with the scanner.
But Mum does email me at least twice a week. She also hangs out in the gardening forum in Yahoo chat which is one of many bookmarks she visits every day. She has customised IE so that the CNN weather for Dunedin is the default website. And last month my mother installed the shockwave activex control by herself - answering two yes/no questions was pretty tough but she got through it!
My point is that Mum-friendly software doesn't depend on the OS it is running on. As long as the app that Mum uses is simple, easy and does what she expects then she will be happy.
In an ideal world, software could be radically customised depending on the type of user. Net based software could implement this with relative ease. Perhaps that's why Mum likes the net so much?
But once an app is installed, you don't really need to worry about it any more.
When I worked in tech support hell the biggest problems I faced were when users had installed something new:
Me: Good morning companyname, Joe speaking
User: Hi. I just installed the internet my mainframe. Now your program won't print.
Me: That sound odd. Will any other programs print?
User: I don't know. I can't start them. There's no mousey thingy on the screen.
Me: Can you tell me what is on the screen sir?
User: Just the normal screen. But it's blue and it's got all this white text on it
Me: (on mute) Bugger. (to customer) Have you got your NT rescuse disk handy?
User: I don't know. Where do I keep it? Can't you just dial in a fix this...
How often do you hear of Linux users reinstalling their OS for anything other than sheer enjoyment?
With Linux how often does upgrading a piece of shareware render a real app useless because of some obscure file being overwitten?
With Windows it has to be done just because you install/remove a simple (well it should be) browser.
For power users Linux can be a joy. We get our hands dirty setting it up, marvel at it's stability then break out fdisk and start again.
For people like my Mum this is insane behaviour. Unfortunatley for Mum she has been through the process twice in the last year. And geek or not, reinstalling Windows just isn't fun.
Where is the rule that says you can't make money from your homepage?
Slashdot is not a magazine or ezine like C|Net or ZDNet. It's basically the outgrowth of a homepage that became pretty popular over a period of time (remember Chips & Dips?)
Cmdr Taco, Hemos & co are only editors in the sense that it's their website and they can do what they want.
They let complete strangers submit stories that will feature on the front page read by more geeks than I can imagine.
The criteria? Taco thinks its pretty cool or Hemos knows some people who would be into it. Not because they can make 15 cents by pointing to a link at Amazon.
The slashdot effect tells us that it's a pretty good editorial policy
I check out /. several times a day. There is always something I am interested in on the front page (especially since the invention of the JenniCam slashbox :->) I have never paid a single cent to the people who run /. yet I am always amused or entertained in some way.
If you like /. but don't like Amazon, don't click the link.
But please don't complain about editorial policy or objectiveness or anything like that. Use your brain instead. Decide for yourself.
The best trick before this was a Compaq ad for a mouse that can recharge the batteries in your laptop - it included a special game to make recharging easy and fun!
I use NT at work. I've adopted it. I'm sueing ms. It should be called Foaf/Windows NT. Or windows Foaf...
You'll find out a lot more
I agree with soren. I've read the excerpts and the articles which follow. I don't think we should be bashing what it says just because it comes from a person that a lot of /.'ers don't like. I for one don't really care whether MS is a monopoly, or if Bill has more money than the GNP of my country. I also don't care if Bill is just repeating what he's read elsewhere. Bill want's a computer on every desk and in every home running MS software. Most of the /.'ers want Linux to achieve total world domination. The two goals are in opposition. But I bet Bill is paying attention to what the open source community is doing and saying We should pay attention to him as well
Space Quest ][ was the first game I played on the first PC my family owned.
My brother, sister and I spent hours in front of an XT with a Hercules Monochrome card, arguing about how to get Roger Wilco through the swamp without being eaten. We took turns typing...if Roger died it was the end of your turn. A few years later I had to institute the same rules in my flat when I bought my 486 and installed Doom 2.
Space Quest rocked. So did Kings Quest. And Police Quest. And Hoyle Card Games. And Codename: Iceman...
Here are some examples:
These problems are caused by poor design. And the fixes/patches to the programs and the new releases don't fix this basic problem.
Let's take Outlook as an example. In the movie Hotshots part Deux, Charlie Sheen is a member of a commando team going into to: "get the boys who went in to get the boys". Outlook 98 is a program designed to fix the faults in a program designed to fix the faults in Inbox/Schedule+.
It has a Web-based UI on top of a buggy amalgam of components that would make more sense to be used as separate applets.
Tog suggests a document-centric approach with software applets as the tools that people use to create these documents. At the moment this kind of technology is in it's infancy - hands up who use OLE objects in the documents often?
The small applet approach is already used in the UNIX world every day. But tools such as grep, find, ispell, awk and sed are for geeks and the odd curious user. Not the likes of my mother, or even the Excel jockey in accounting. Once again, design is the key.
Tog is a proponent of assuring quality by involving all parties at all stages of the software development process. He makes several comparisons to the automobile industry, particularly the influence Japanese attention to quality had on American car manufacturers. He points out several lessons that can be learned from this industry.
IMHO, it will take a revolution in thinking to prevent PC software from becoming more and more buggy.