I recently discovered Opera Mini, and now routinely browse the web not on my notebook, but on my cell phone, a Sony Ericsson K750i.
(For those of you who haven't yet tried Opera Mini, it's a Java-based web browser for cell phones, using Opera's Small Screen Rendering. The pages themselves are rendered on Opera's server, and are then transmitted to the cell phone in a highly efficient, binary format.)
Opera Mini is obviously revolutionary, in that it allows cell phone users to have a full web experience, without having to resort to specially designed sites. It's further proof that a "mobile web" is clearly redundant, and that cell phones (and other "small devices") can be first-class citizens on the Internet.
You claim that Opera Mini will remain free. Yet I would be surprised if you didn't intend to make money off Opera Mini somehow. To the extent that you are at liberty to disclose such details, are you negotiating with handset makers, to have this technology included in cell phones? Are you planning on supplying the web browser for most cell phones in the future, replacing the abysmal software that is currently bundled?
The GIMP seems to be the project that Slashdot users love to hate. People go on and on about the horrendous user interface, yet fail to back this up with anything substantial. Why all the hostility toward the GIMP? If you hate the interface, what is it about it that you don't like?
I, for one, can't really see what people dislike so much about the project. The application was perfectly usable before 2.x, yet got a huge boost when 2.0 was released. The GIMP has done the most of any project when it comes to building new widgets on top of the GTK toolkit.
The GIMP is no Photoshop. It doesn't have adjustment layers, color management, the healing brush, all the cool plug-ins for digital photographers that Photoshop CS introduced, and lots of other features. Photoshop is a remarkable application, there's no question about it, but the GIMP is eminently usable -- it's a remarkable project, and it is making great strides.
So the next time, if you feel the need to complain, please try to be a little bit more specific and use less inflammatory language.
Guess why I have written that subject line, its not that I was being hostile against Gimp back then when I started using it, it mainly where the mailing list, IRC discussions and the lack of progress that made me feel that way.
I have been lurking on the developer's mailing list for a few months now, and must say that I have been extremely impressed with the GIMP developers. Sven Neumann in particular is active in most threads, and even welcomes bug reports that are already covered in Bugzilla. A lot of the developers are also active on the list for users.
While it took a few years for The GIMP to reach version 2, progress has been swift ever since (and comparing v1.2 with v2.0, I don't think that I could find anyone who wouldn't think that it was worth all the time spent perfecting the dockable user interface). v2.2 has many new useful features, and with the addition of color management in the next version, the future looks bright indeed.
Mod parent up. After having used the versions leading up to GIMP 2.0, I must say that it's disheartening to read comments from user who have obviously never used the new version, who base their opinions on screenshots or, worse, the experience they had with GIMP 1.2 many years ago. Please stop wasting our time.
I find the new interface wonderful, and an immense improvement over the old version. All in all, I have so far been extremely impressed with the new GIMP. Kudos to the developers!
Please mod parent down. The poster simply copied Daniel Glazman's comments on mozillaZine's forum. Also, the poster quite clearly states that he has no qualms about posting other peoples' material in his journal.
Quoting:
"And so another glorious trolling session begins. My last account became well-known far too quickly, and the slashdot janitors killed all my karma. Kinda hard to troll at -1. So...fresh account!"
I have very little to add to the parent poster; let me just congratulate him or her for summing up my feelings on determinism versus free will so succintly.
This age-old philosophical question is indeed very interesting. My view has always been that determinism is really the only logical position to take, but that we need to believe in free will in order to live.
Personally, I would hate to reduce myself to a player in a movie, unfolding before my very eyes. Thus, in a sense, I believe that I have free will, despite my intellect telling me that this is likely false.
Ironically, this means that it has always been determined, that I would believe in my free will. Sad, isn't it?
According to http://www.connected.com/company/executive_team.as p, Bob Brennan is the CEO of Connected. What reasons do you have to believe that cfreeze (the poster) is indeed Mr. Bob Brennan?'
vnc (or other RFB) server support, so I can view my desktop -- the one shown on the monitor -- from another computer.
I don't quite understand this last point - a friend of mine routinely logs into his Linux system from our department's Sun Ray terminals. He's not simply forwarding X11 through SSH, he interacts with his desktop the same way as he would had he been sitting at the computer. I believe that this is achieved using XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol). This seems to work well for my friend.
We've been using Sun Rays at my Computer Science department for a couple of years now, and I must say that I'm impressed; I definitely believe that thin clients are the future now. Performance is more than adequate. As some poster mentioned, if we wish to do something computationally expensive, we can just log into a standard workstation and start our jobs there. Not that I've ever felt a need to do that.
I'm part of a student group maintaining programs that aren't critical to the department (like Mozilla and, uh, xsnow), and I've gotta tell you, it's a relief to install a program once on the server, and see it just work on every terminal.
We have a Mac room as well (recently upgraded to G4 computers running Mac OS X), and they're all littered with student files and programs (or at least the old Mac OS 9 machines were). A couple of years back, when I was in high school, we used Windows machines. There were always heaps of viruses and programs not approved by the school on these computers.
I'm sure that our system administrators can recall episodes where things didn't work so smoothly with our Sun Rays, but as a partially outside observer, I have to say that Sun's solution works exceptionally well.
There's an interesting interview at NEWS.COM with Jim Bell, director of standards and industry initiatives at Hewlett-Packard, titled "Why the W3C needs to be royalty free".
> Whether or not their stuff runs on Microsoft software, or Netscape software [...] they don't care...
I believe that you are incorrect. While AOL and its users couldn't care less about the technology itself, AOL doesn't want to be dependant on Microsoft and Microsoft's operating systems. AOL wants AOL software to be everywhere (it's part of their AOL Anywhere strategy), including set-top boxes. Who wants to be dependant on technology created by your main competitor?
What if you could get AOL on your Playstation 2 or your GameCube? Or on the yet-to-be-announced AOLBox, complete with word processing software and everything else a home user could ever want? This box could run Linux, and, as luck would have it, there's a rapidly maturing cross-platform toolkit and browser that runs on most platforms, including Linux and Windows. It's Mozilla, and AOL has been spending a lot of money on Mozilla for years now. Why? To release free Netscape browsers, which would pay for the development costs by including links to Netscape's advert-funded site? Not likely.
So why does Netscape's branded version of Mozilla matter? The web is full of markup that has only been tested properly with IE for Windows - as that is the only browser that people think matters. It's getting harder and harder to browse using Netscape 4, my preferred browser. Before the release of Netscape 6, the situation with Mozilla was similar - the release of Netscape 6 prompted many sites to spend time on making them compatible with Mozilla/Netscape 6. So Netscape is really paving the way for AOL to change the browser engine to Gecko - as they couldn't change rendering engine overnight, had the support for it not been there in the form of standards-compliant HTML and JavaScript.
To AOL, it's important that users, no matter from where they access AOL, get the same "experience". They can't get that with IE - they can't have the Windows client use IE, and then use Gecko on set-top boxes. Thus, I predict that AOL will switch to Gecko eventually, as they most definitely will want to move beyond the personal computer.
> I was still scared by all the 'rules' etc they forced on us.
We weren't too happy about it either, at first. But once you take the time to study the license agreement, most things they ask for are quite reasonable; after all, they operate the servers and provide you with free support. All you have to do is add a menu item or two. They also want you to integrate their "music browser" (and they'll then share the ad revenue with you), but you don't have to do that if you don't want to.
> If there were an easy free way to do a CDDB app, I'd implement it straight away.
Contact CDDB to get permission to download the SDK. When you've received the SDK, check out the Visual Basic demo project. We don't use Visual Basic, so I don't know how good the demo project is, but the C++ project was great; we used it to build our Delphi CDDB2 wrapper.
Basically, if you know how to work with COM interfaces using VB, you know how to use the CDDB2 SDK. Compare this to CDDB1, where you had to implement the (albeit simple) protocol yourself.
We're using Gracenote's CDDB2 service in one of our commercial applications and we don't pay Gracenote a dime. You only have to pay Gracenote if you charge for your software and have a very large number of users (more than 250,000 or something like that). There is a "free" license that states that if you don't make money off your product in any way (including but not limited to banner advertising), you don't have to pay, no matter how many users you have.
I suppose that the software the story mentions makes use of the original CDDB1 service; Gracenote has said that they will someday terminate this service and move all of its users to CDDB2. I'm not sure that this is what happened, though.
Also, I'm not certain that Gracenote has released the CDDB2 UNIX SDK yet. The Win32 SDK has been available for quite some time now and consists of a well-defined set of COM interfaces. The Win32 SDK is well-documented and supported by Gracenote. We've been very happy with the level of support we've received (again, for free).
Provided that the UNIX/Linux SDK has been released and there are no license issues, any free software (as in beer at least) could make use of CDDB2 and Gracenote's servers free of charge.
Note that I don't touch on whether it was right of them to use the community-entered data in the first place; most discussions on Slashdot seem to center on this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently discovered Opera Mini, and now routinely browse the web not on my notebook, but on my cell phone, a Sony Ericsson K750i.
(For those of you who haven't yet tried Opera Mini, it's a Java-based web browser for cell phones, using Opera's Small Screen Rendering. The pages themselves are rendered on Opera's server, and are then transmitted to the cell phone in a highly efficient, binary format.)
Opera Mini is obviously revolutionary, in that it allows cell phone users to have a full web experience, without having to resort to specially designed sites. It's further proof that a "mobile web" is clearly redundant, and that cell phones (and other "small devices") can be first-class citizens on the Internet.
You claim that Opera Mini will remain free. Yet I would be surprised if you didn't intend to make money off Opera Mini somehow. To the extent that you are at liberty to disclose such details, are you negotiating with handset makers, to have this technology included in cell phones? Are you planning on supplying the web browser for most cell phones in the future, replacing the abysmal software that is currently bundled?
The GIMP seems to be the project that Slashdot users love to hate. People go on and on about the horrendous user interface, yet fail to back this up with anything substantial. Why all the hostility toward the GIMP? If you hate the interface, what is it about it that you don't like?
I, for one, can't really see what people dislike so much about the project. The application was perfectly usable before 2.x, yet got a huge boost when 2.0 was released. The GIMP has done the most of any project when it comes to building new widgets on top of the GTK toolkit.
The GIMP is no Photoshop. It doesn't have adjustment layers, color management, the healing brush, all the cool plug-ins for digital photographers that Photoshop CS introduced, and lots of other features. Photoshop is a remarkable application, there's no question about it, but the GIMP is eminently usable -- it's a remarkable project, and it is making great strides.
So the next time, if you feel the need to complain, please try to be a little bit more specific and use less inflammatory language.
This comment really deserves to be read by everyone reading this thread.
I have been lurking on the developer's mailing list for a few months now, and must say that I have been extremely impressed with the GIMP developers. Sven Neumann in particular is active in most threads, and even welcomes bug reports that are already covered in Bugzilla. A lot of the developers are also active on the list for users.
While it took a few years for The GIMP to reach version 2, progress has been swift ever since (and comparing v1.2 with v2.0, I don't think that I could find anyone who wouldn't think that it was worth all the time spent perfecting the dockable user interface). v2.2 has many new useful features, and with the addition of color management in the next version, the future looks bright indeed.
Mod parent up. After having used the versions leading up to GIMP 2.0, I must say that it's disheartening to read comments from user who have obviously never used the new version, who base their opinions on screenshots or, worse, the experience they had with GIMP 1.2 many years ago. Please stop wasting our time.
I find the new interface wonderful, and an immense improvement over the old version. All in all, I have so far been extremely impressed with the new GIMP. Kudos to the developers!
Please mod parent down. The poster simply copied Daniel Glazman's comments on mozillaZine's forum. Also, the poster quite clearly states that he has no qualms about posting other peoples' material in his journal.
Quoting:
I have very little to add to the parent poster; let me just congratulate him or her for summing up my feelings on determinism versus free will so succintly.
This age-old philosophical question is indeed very interesting. My view has always been that determinism is really the only logical position to take, but that we need to believe in free will in order to live.
Personally, I would hate to reduce myself to a player in a movie, unfolding before my very eyes. Thus, in a sense, I believe that I have free will, despite my intellect telling me that this is likely false.
Ironically, this means that it has always been determined, that I would believe in my free will. Sad, isn't it?
Moderate parent up, please!
According to http://www.connected.com/company/executive_team.as p, Bob Brennan is the CEO of Connected. What reasons do you have to believe that cfreeze (the poster) is indeed Mr. Bob Brennan?'
:-)
Or did I just miss out on a joke?
The really sad thing about this Simpsons joke is... that I actually get it! I need to get out more...
vnc (or other RFB) server support, so I can view my desktop -- the one shown on the monitor -- from another computer.
I don't quite understand this last point - a friend of mine routinely logs into his Linux system from our department's Sun Ray terminals. He's not simply forwarding X11 through SSH, he interacts with his desktop the same way as he would had he been sitting at the computer. I believe that this is achieved using XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol). This seems to work well for my friend.
We've been using Sun Rays at my Computer Science department for a couple of years now, and I must say that I'm impressed; I definitely believe that thin clients are the future now. Performance is more than adequate. As some poster mentioned, if we wish to do something computationally expensive, we can just log into a standard workstation and start our jobs there. Not that I've ever felt a need to do that.
I'm part of a student group maintaining programs that aren't critical to the department (like Mozilla and, uh, xsnow), and I've gotta tell you, it's a relief to install a program once on the server, and see it just work on every terminal.
We have a Mac room as well (recently upgraded to G4 computers running Mac OS X), and they're all littered with student files and programs (or at least the old Mac OS 9 machines were). A couple of years back, when I was in high school, we used Windows machines. There were always heaps of viruses and programs not approved by the school on these computers.
I'm sure that our system administrators can recall episodes where things didn't work so smoothly with our Sun Rays, but as a partially outside observer, I have to say that Sun's solution works exceptionally well.
There's an interesting interview at NEWS.COM with Jim Bell, director of standards and industry initiatives at Hewlett-Packard, titled "Why the W3C needs to be royalty free".
> Whether or not their stuff runs on Microsoft software, or Netscape software [...] they don't care...
I believe that you are incorrect. While AOL and its users couldn't care less about the technology itself, AOL doesn't want to be dependant on Microsoft and Microsoft's operating systems. AOL wants AOL software to be everywhere (it's part of their AOL Anywhere strategy), including set-top boxes. Who wants to be dependant on technology created by your main competitor?
What if you could get AOL on your Playstation 2 or your GameCube? Or on the yet-to-be-announced AOLBox, complete with word processing software and everything else a home user could ever want? This box could run Linux, and, as luck would have it, there's a rapidly maturing cross-platform toolkit and browser that runs on most platforms, including Linux and Windows. It's Mozilla, and AOL has been spending a lot of money on Mozilla for years now. Why? To release free Netscape browsers, which would pay for the development costs by including links to Netscape's advert-funded site? Not likely.
So why does Netscape's branded version of Mozilla matter? The web is full of markup that has only been tested properly with IE for Windows - as that is the only browser that people think matters. It's getting harder and harder to browse using Netscape 4, my preferred browser. Before the release of Netscape 6, the situation with Mozilla was similar - the release of Netscape 6 prompted many sites to spend time on making them compatible with Mozilla/Netscape 6. So Netscape is really paving the way for AOL to change the browser engine to Gecko - as they couldn't change rendering engine overnight, had the support for it not been there in the form of standards-compliant HTML and JavaScript.
To AOL, it's important that users, no matter from where they access AOL, get the same "experience". They can't get that with IE - they can't have the Windows client use IE, and then use Gecko on set-top boxes. Thus, I predict that AOL will switch to Gecko eventually, as they most definitely will want to move beyond the personal computer.
David Polberger
> I was still scared by all the 'rules' etc they forced on us.
We weren't too happy about it either, at first. But once you take the time to study the license agreement, most things they ask for are quite reasonable; after all, they operate the servers and provide you with free support. All you have to do is add a menu item or two. They also want you to integrate their "music browser" (and they'll then share the ad revenue with you), but you don't have to do that if you don't want to.
> If there were an easy free way to do a CDDB app, I'd implement it straight away.
Contact CDDB to get permission to download the SDK. When you've received the SDK, check out the Visual Basic demo project. We don't use Visual Basic, so I don't know how good the demo project is, but the C++ project was great; we used it to build our Delphi CDDB2 wrapper.
Basically, if you know how to work with COM interfaces using VB, you know how to use the CDDB2 SDK. Compare this to CDDB1, where you had to implement the (albeit simple) protocol yourself.
We're using Gracenote's CDDB2 service in one of our commercial applications and we don't pay Gracenote a dime. You only have to pay Gracenote if you charge for your software and have a very large number of users (more than 250,000 or something like that). There is a "free" license that states that if you don't make money off your product in any way (including but not limited to banner advertising), you don't have to pay, no matter how many users you have.
I suppose that the software the story mentions makes use of the original CDDB1 service; Gracenote has said that they will someday terminate this service and move all of its users to CDDB2. I'm not sure that this is what happened, though.
Also, I'm not certain that Gracenote has released the CDDB2 UNIX SDK yet. The Win32 SDK has been available for quite some time now and consists of a well-defined set of COM interfaces. The Win32 SDK is well-documented and supported by Gracenote. We've been very happy with the level of support we've received (again, for free).
Provided that the UNIX/Linux SDK has been released and there are no license issues, any free software (as in beer at least) could make use of CDDB2 and Gracenote's servers free of charge.
Note that I don't touch on whether it was right of them to use the community-entered data in the first place; most discussions on Slashdot seem to center on this issue.