it is utterly stupid to rely on a single server/service to remain running just so I can read something
"Hey Bob! My whole company network is down. I can't do anything. I was wondering if you could open up the document I sent you yesterday and give me the totals on the Freem account?
Scripting in a spreadsheet is cool. But when you stop to think about it, very few people actually do it. Most people use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to create documents, not programs (though of course a spreadsheet blurs that distinction somewhat).
Office does have a lot of features that OpenOffice doesn't, but 99% of the people out there have no use for them. That's not what's holding them back.
For people looking to play DVD's and other types of media under Linux, MPlayer is well worth downloading.
It also works flawlessly under FreeBSD. I finally figured out the problem with Quicktime playback, and now I have one less reason to boot into Windows. With kmplayer, it's also a native plugin to Konqueror.
The FreeBSD guys are going to be showing it off at TechTV today.
And just what is the legal and moral justification for banning reverse engineering? Do you have any philosophical foundation for this view, or is it just a jerk of the knee?
The malt in the reinheitsgebot was originally just barley malt. So a weiss did not meet the purity laws. For a long time a royal privilege was necessary to brew a wheat beer. But the law has been amended since then. For one thing, it needed to add yeast to the list of ingredients.
You have a great os, but not an acceptable license for my (probable) contributions.
And just what are your probable contributions? Copylefting a five line diff is a sign of chronic egotism. On the other hand, a worthwhile utility can still go into the contrib section along with gcc, tar and bc. And there's the whole realm of ports to think of. They're not the base system, so there's no licensing politics involved.
The GRUB people are looking for a FreeBSD developer. It's GPL and part of the GNU project. Get your butt in gear and go volunteer!
You can use FreeBSD all day long without having to turn in your GPL Fan Club membership card.
You're 90% spot on. But the remaining 10% is just your unswerving allegiance to Linux.
The problem is I don't really want companies getting rich off my code. I want them to contribute back with more code. The GPL enforces this.
First off, nothing's there to stop a company from getting rich off of GPLd code. Redhat, SuSE, etc. They're all getting rich off of GPL code. Some of this wealth is going back to Linus and friends, but most of this profit is coming from the unpaid work of thousands of volunteers.
Here's an example scenario: I write a real open source driver for Nvidia chipsets. It's just as fast as the proprietary Windows driver (which is still faster than the proprietary Linux driver), but 100% free. It causes tens of thousands of gamers to switch over to Linux. But Mandrake pays me zero dollars and zero cents for it.
Financially, the code they contribute back isn't going to put any food on the table. It may make the driver more attractive for other commercial companies, but those other companies aren't paying me either.
There is no monetary benefit to me in using the GPL, so it's utterly pointless to even mention "getting rich" anywhere in the BSD/GPL argument. Sure, you want them to contribute back, but that has absolutely nothing to do with money. So all you GPL advocates need to stop using the "people are getting rich off your hard work" argument. It's silly.
Sixth, despite popular myth, FreeBSD isn't a "better server platform" or "more mature"
FreeBSD and Linux were initially aimed at two different markets. FreeBSD was aimed at the server, while Linux was aimed at the client system. They are both broadening their focus today however, but that doesn't change the past. While Linux was busy with DRI, audio drivers and bluetooth, FreeBSD was busy doing to grunt work at major ISPs, internet portals and ftp sites.
I do need to take exception to your claim that FreeBSD is not more mature. As a name, "FreeBSD" is indeed newer than "Linux", but as a stable and robust code base, it predates Linux (and even GNU). For one example, it has been only recently that Linux distros finally dumped the shoddy ext2 filesystem. But FreeBSD has had the same robust FFS used by major commercial UNIXes since day one.
FreeBSD itself is actually 2 years younger than Linux
But still older than any of the popular Linux distros out today. FreeBSD is more than just a kernel. It's a complete system and not a hodgepodge of separate projects. And all of it is contained within a single project and code base. It has never had its libc go break everything else in the distribution just because a minor version number changed.
Today, Linux now has the most users and therefore the most MINDSHARE.
To put a positive spin on my rant, I absolutely agree. Due to the USl lawsuit and Jolitz being asleep at the wheel, Linux got itself a two year head start. FreeBSD has kept up the pace, but it's still two years behind in some areas. However, two years ago is not that long. FreeBSD routinely does stuff today that a Linux of 2001 would find difficult.
But frankly, you gives a rip about the most users? More people eat at Taco Bell than Tres Hermanos Taqueria, but guess which one has the best tacos and burritos? Heck, Taco Bell doesn't even have al pastor!
A old maxim says that the collective intelligence of a corporation is inversely proportional to its size. My company is one of the ten largest corporations in the world, so its collective intelligence is pretty low.
Our marketing designed and spec'ed product is failing miserably in the market. Our "legacy" engineering designed system is still doing gangbusters and keeping us afloat. The corporate solution to this problem? Sell our core intellectual property to our competitors for a flat sum, officially obsolete the legacy product, and make press releases that the failing product is actually the market leader.
Oh...and outsource our core engineering. All software development and most hardware development is to go to India. This isn't just some webpages or stuff. These are specialized medical embedded systems. The company laid off half of engineering, most of IT, but no one in human resources, finance or marketing. Those in engineering that remain have been told that they will either work in management, process, or other such roles.
A group of managers and directors just got back from a hiring trip to India. The news was not encouraging. Very few qualified people were found. Collectively, everyone who went on the trip said that this offloading plan will not work without at least two years of preparation and training. But the India group is scheduled to go live in December. They all say that the new hires can't handle the level of engineering that we requires. But the executives in charge aren't listening. The Indians will only work from 8:00am to 5:00pm, their time. No exceptions. So if we need to teleconference with them, it is us who need to come in five hours early to stay five hours late. We spent the last fifteen years building up an engineering department with intimate knowledge of our specialty, only to have anyone even close to collecting a pension layed off. We replaced them with Indian kids straight out of college. Our collective expertise in the field didn't get halved, it got decimated. We couldn't build a new product know if we tried.
In the short term I'm sure this will prop up the stock price for the board of directors, but in the long run it is the death of our company. And this isn't just us. All our major competitors are doing to same thing!
Hey! There's people in India who will take the job of CEO or vice president for a twentieth the salary! Why aren't they considering that option?
Quit your whining. This is a good thing people and it's an example of what makes capitalism great.
Well, if it were really free market capitalism, then we libertarians would have no cause to bitch. But it's really corporation capitalism. The difference between the two is that free market capitalism is based on the voluntary interactions of individuals, while corporate capitalism is based on government create special privileges for certain types of business organizations.
These special privileges and protections given by the government to government chartered organizations are anything BUT a level playing field. They shield corporations from many market forces that would otherwise act as checks and balances. If you take a look around you'll find very few private unincorporated businesses sending their core compentencies overseas. But among public corporations this is considered almost fashionable.
I'm not advocating that the government get involved to stop this. But that still doesn't think it's a wonderful thing for companies to be doing. In fact, I think it's self-destructive to the company in the long term. But there are things freedom loving individuals (of any political stripe) can encourage the government to do to improve the situation.
First stop futzing with the economy! Everytime you raise taxes, impose regulations, institute price controls, some little guy gets squeezed out. And since the economy is one huge interconnected mesh, everyone gets affected by it. So save the government interventions as a last resort. This isn't about whether taxes and regulations are good or bad, but whether the benefits of the tax/regulation is worth the price of jobs leaving the state or the nation.
Second, the government can stop treating corporations as legally privileged persons. This creates an artificial economy based on stock prices rather than actual products and value. I haven't heard of any private unincorporated companies sending their jobs overseas, but it's common and encouraged for publically traded corporations.
There is a bit of talk here about how portupgrade won't make it into the base system even if it were in C or C++. Maybe, maybe not. I do know that there's some work on revamping the whole package management system. If so, then portupgrade might very well be the candidate.
I have thought off and on about rewriting portupgrade in C++. The only benefit of this would be to get it into the base system, since I don't think with all the disk i/o going on, that C/C++ will be any faster than Ruby in this context. But if anyone is interested, contact me.
.NET applications under WindowsXP do not look like classic MFC applications under MFC. Many Java applications look like neither. I haven't used OSX, but I do keep hearing about this disparity between the Aquafresh and Brushed Aluminum styles.
I was talking about the toolkits, and you seem to talking about the applications. Mozilla uses the native Windows toolkit because it was programmed to. Java (if the programmer allows it) does the same thing.
You way would work, but it would still require mandating one single toolkit. Mozilla and newer Java uses GTK+ because they were designed to use GTK+. Opera uses Qt because it was designed to use Qt. In order to have one guaranteed consistant look you need to restrict the programmers to one toolkit.
wxWindows get's away with it because it is not a widget toolkit, but an API wrapper for various other toolkits. Should the desktop dictators ever decide that Qt is the mandatory toolkit, then wxWindows will have to be significantly modified to come into compliance.
Making GTK+ and Qt use the exact same API is impossible without rewriting one or the other completely from scratch. It cannot be done any other way. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "impossible". It certainly is possible. But it's completely pointless. When you look at themes like Bluecurve and Keramik/Geramik, you aren't looking at themes using the same API, you're looking at two themes attempting the same look through distinct APIs.
Well, since there isn't a Desktop Dictator, and unless SCO wins its improbable case, never will be one, then you're stuck with situation. I understand that you're upset with people choosing what you don't want them to choose, but that's life. Get over it.
How could anyone realistically expect one of the projects to be abandoned?
Reading the article in question, and many of the posts herein, I would say a lot of people certainly expect it. They may not be realistic, but they still fervently argue for it.
If you knew anything at all about programming GUI applications, you would know that what you're suggesting is impossible. The only way to do it WOULD be to mandate just one toolkit.
The Windows GUI does suck. And it sucks big time. The reason no one ever complains about it is because they are used to it. The very basics of manipulating on screen windows are simply missing. Poor control of z-order in windows, no snap-to screen edges or other windows. As a window manager only, even Blackbox blows Windows out of the water in terms of usability.
Then there's the new XP task-based interface. It only works if you're doing the certain tasks it expects you to do. Anything else and you're three menus deep looking for the task you really want to do.
And you totally blew by my point. You already have the freedom to use whatever desktop you want. Which means if you want GNOME to be the required standard, you can use it. Or if you want KDE to be the mandate, you can use it. No one is going to stop you.
You don't have to wait for someone else to tell you what desktop to use. You can choose for yourself right now. Today.
I want to run Quicktime to see the new ROTK trailer. I click on the start button. Up pops a menu with the choices for browsing the web, reading email, and logging out. There's some other task oriented stuff to the right. But Quicktime is nowhere in sight. I'm not expecting it to be a top level menu item, but damn if I can't find it. Then I notice a narrow item with a tiny icon why at the bottom of this huge glorious new menu: "other stuff which we feel is unimportant, but which you installed anyway, this way -->".
Slashdot Mirror
Who ever said it has to be a single processor?
it is utterly stupid to rely on a single server/service to remain running just so I can read something
"Hey Bob! My whole company network is down. I can't do anything. I was wondering if you could open up the document I sent you yesterday and give me the totals on the Freem account?
"What? You can't open it?"
Scripting in a spreadsheet is cool. But when you stop to think about it, very few people actually do it. Most people use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to create documents, not programs (though of course a spreadsheet blurs that distinction somewhat).
Office does have a lot of features that OpenOffice doesn't, but 99% of the people out there have no use for them. That's not what's holding them back.
For people looking to play DVD's and other types of media under Linux, MPlayer is well worth downloading.
It also works flawlessly under FreeBSD. I finally figured out the problem with Quicktime playback, and now I have one less reason to boot into Windows. With kmplayer, it's also a native plugin to Konqueror.
The FreeBSD guys are going to be showing it off at TechTV today.
Well, you could always use FreeBSD instead.
"What does BSD stand for?"
"Berkeley Software Distribution. It's the UNIX developed at UC Berkeley."
And just what is the legal and moral justification for banning reverse engineering? Do you have any philosophical foundation for this view, or is it just a jerk of the knee?
You missed my QBrew software. Where else you going to go to get a native GUI homebrew calculator for Linux and BSD?
The malt in the reinheitsgebot was originally just barley malt. So a weiss did not meet the purity laws. For a long time a royal privilege was necessary to brew a wheat beer. But the law has been amended since then. For one thing, it needed to add yeast to the list of ingredients.
Hmmm, I had a trappist monk write me about my brewing program, so there has to be at least a few left still brewing.
James Squire's is absolutely the worst beer from the southern hemisphere that's I've ever had the misfortune to taste. Damn that stuff was horrible.
Maybe they just ship the bad Squire's out of country, just like Lowenbrau and Carlsberg do...
You have a great os, but not an acceptable license for my (probable) contributions.
And just what are your probable contributions? Copylefting a five line diff is a sign of chronic egotism. On the other hand, a worthwhile utility can still go into the contrib section along with gcc, tar and bc. And there's the whole realm of ports to think of. They're not the base system, so there's no licensing politics involved.
The GRUB people are looking for a FreeBSD developer. It's GPL and part of the GNU project. Get your butt in gear and go volunteer!
You can use FreeBSD all day long without having to turn in your GPL Fan Club membership card.
You're 90% spot on. But the remaining 10% is just your unswerving allegiance to Linux.
The problem is I don't really want companies getting rich off my code. I want them to contribute back with more code. The GPL enforces this.
First off, nothing's there to stop a company from getting rich off of GPLd code. Redhat, SuSE, etc. They're all getting rich off of GPL code. Some of this wealth is going back to Linus and friends, but most of this profit is coming from the unpaid work of thousands of volunteers.
Here's an example scenario: I write a real open source driver for Nvidia chipsets. It's just as fast as the proprietary Windows driver (which is still faster than the proprietary Linux driver), but 100% free. It causes tens of thousands of gamers to switch over to Linux. But Mandrake pays me zero dollars and zero cents for it.
Financially, the code they contribute back isn't going to put any food on the table. It may make the driver more attractive for other commercial companies, but those other companies aren't paying me either.
There is no monetary benefit to me in using the GPL, so it's utterly pointless to even mention "getting rich" anywhere in the BSD/GPL argument. Sure, you want them to contribute back, but that has absolutely nothing to do with money. So all you GPL advocates need to stop using the "people are getting rich off your hard work" argument. It's silly.
Sixth, despite popular myth, FreeBSD isn't a "better server platform" or "more mature"
FreeBSD and Linux were initially aimed at two different markets. FreeBSD was aimed at the server, while Linux was aimed at the client system. They are both broadening their focus today however, but that doesn't change the past. While Linux was busy with DRI, audio drivers and bluetooth, FreeBSD was busy doing to grunt work at major ISPs, internet portals and ftp sites.
I do need to take exception to your claim that FreeBSD is not more mature. As a name, "FreeBSD" is indeed newer than "Linux", but as a stable and robust code base, it predates Linux (and even GNU). For one example, it has been only recently that Linux distros finally dumped the shoddy ext2 filesystem. But FreeBSD has had the same robust FFS used by major commercial UNIXes since day one.
FreeBSD itself is actually 2 years younger than Linux
But still older than any of the popular Linux distros out today. FreeBSD is more than just a kernel. It's a complete system and not a hodgepodge of separate projects. And all of it is contained within a single project and code base. It has never had its libc go break everything else in the distribution just because a minor version number changed.
Today, Linux now has the most users and therefore the most MINDSHARE.
To put a positive spin on my rant, I absolutely agree. Due to the USl lawsuit and Jolitz being asleep at the wheel, Linux got itself a two year head start. FreeBSD has kept up the pace, but it's still two years behind in some areas. However, two years ago is not that long. FreeBSD routinely does stuff today that a Linux of 2001 would find difficult.
But frankly, you gives a rip about the most users? More people eat at Taco Bell than Tres Hermanos Taqueria, but guess which one has the best tacos and burritos? Heck, Taco Bell doesn't even have al pastor!
Okay, let's talk. How do I reach you? (you can reach me through my website)
A old maxim says that the collective intelligence of a corporation is inversely proportional to its size. My company is one of the ten largest corporations in the world, so its collective intelligence is pretty low.
Our marketing designed and spec'ed product is failing miserably in the market. Our "legacy" engineering designed system is still doing gangbusters and keeping us afloat. The corporate solution to this problem? Sell our core intellectual property to our competitors for a flat sum, officially obsolete the legacy product, and make press releases that the failing product is actually the market leader.
Oh...and outsource our core engineering. All software development and most hardware development is to go to India. This isn't just some webpages or stuff. These are specialized medical embedded systems. The company laid off half of engineering, most of IT, but no one in human resources, finance or marketing. Those in engineering that remain have been told that they will either work in management, process, or other such roles.
A group of managers and directors just got back from a hiring trip to India. The news was not encouraging. Very few qualified people were found. Collectively, everyone who went on the trip said that this offloading plan will not work without at least two years of preparation and training. But the India group is scheduled to go live in December. They all say that the new hires can't handle the level of engineering that we requires. But the executives in charge aren't listening. The Indians will only work from 8:00am to 5:00pm, their time. No exceptions. So if we need to teleconference with them, it is us who need to come in five hours early to stay five hours late. We spent the last fifteen years building up an engineering department with intimate knowledge of our specialty, only to have anyone even close to collecting a pension layed off. We replaced them with Indian kids straight out of college. Our collective expertise in the field didn't get halved, it got decimated. We couldn't build a new product know if we tried.
In the short term I'm sure this will prop up the stock price for the board of directors, but in the long run it is the death of our company. And this isn't just us. All our major competitors are doing to same thing!
Hey! There's people in India who will take the job of CEO or vice president for a twentieth the salary! Why aren't they considering that option?
Quit your whining. This is a good thing people and it's an example of what makes capitalism great.
Well, if it were really free market capitalism, then we libertarians would have no cause to bitch. But it's really corporation capitalism. The difference between the two is that free market capitalism is based on the voluntary interactions of individuals, while corporate capitalism is based on government create special privileges for certain types of business organizations.
These special privileges and protections given by the government to government chartered organizations are anything BUT a level playing field. They shield corporations from many market forces that would otherwise act as checks and balances. If you take a look around you'll find very few private unincorporated businesses sending their core compentencies overseas. But among public corporations this is considered almost fashionable.
I'm not advocating that the government get involved to stop this. But that still doesn't think it's a wonderful thing for companies to be doing. In fact, I think it's self-destructive to the company in the long term. But there are things freedom loving individuals (of any political stripe) can encourage the government to do to improve the situation.
First stop futzing with the economy! Everytime you raise taxes, impose regulations, institute price controls, some little guy gets squeezed out. And since the economy is one huge interconnected mesh, everyone gets affected by it. So save the government interventions as a last resort. This isn't about whether taxes and regulations are good or bad, but whether the benefits of the tax/regulation is worth the price of jobs leaving the state or the nation.
Second, the government can stop treating corporations as legally privileged persons. This creates an artificial economy based on stock prices rather than actual products and value. I haven't heard of any private unincorporated companies sending their jobs overseas, but it's common and encouraged for publically traded corporations.
There is a bit of talk here about how portupgrade won't make it into the base system even if it were in C or C++. Maybe, maybe not. I do know that there's some work on revamping the whole package management system. If so, then portupgrade might very well be the candidate.
I have thought off and on about rewriting portupgrade in C++. The only benefit of this would be to get it into the base system, since I don't think with all the disk i/o going on, that C/C++ will be any faster than Ruby in this context. But if anyone is interested, contact me.
.NET applications under WindowsXP do not look like classic MFC applications under MFC. Many Java applications look like neither. I haven't used OSX, but I do keep hearing about this disparity between the Aquafresh and Brushed Aluminum styles.
I was talking about the toolkits, and you seem to talking about the applications. Mozilla uses the native Windows toolkit because it was programmed to. Java (if the programmer allows it) does the same thing.
You way would work, but it would still require mandating one single toolkit. Mozilla and newer Java uses GTK+ because they were designed to use GTK+. Opera uses Qt because it was designed to use Qt. In order to have one guaranteed consistant look you need to restrict the programmers to one toolkit.
wxWindows get's away with it because it is not a widget toolkit, but an API wrapper for various other toolkits. Should the desktop dictators ever decide that Qt is the mandatory toolkit, then wxWindows will have to be significantly modified to come into compliance.
Making GTK+ and Qt use the exact same API is impossible without rewriting one or the other completely from scratch. It cannot be done any other way. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word "impossible". It certainly is possible. But it's completely pointless. When you look at themes like Bluecurve and Keramik/Geramik, you aren't looking at themes using the same API, you're looking at two themes attempting the same look through distinct APIs.
Well, since there isn't a Desktop Dictator, and unless SCO wins its improbable case, never will be one, then you're stuck with situation. I understand that you're upset with people choosing what you don't want them to choose, but that's life. Get over it.
How could anyone realistically expect one of the projects to be abandoned?
Reading the article in question, and many of the posts herein, I would say a lot of people certainly expect it. They may not be realistic, but they still fervently argue for it.
If you knew anything at all about programming GUI applications, you would know that what you're suggesting is impossible. The only way to do it WOULD be to mandate just one toolkit.
The Windows GUI does suck. And it sucks big time. The reason no one ever complains about it is because they are used to it. The very basics of manipulating on screen windows are simply missing. Poor control of z-order in windows, no snap-to screen edges or other windows. As a window manager only, even Blackbox blows Windows out of the water in terms of usability.
Then there's the new XP task-based interface. It only works if you're doing the certain tasks it expects you to do. Anything else and you're three menus deep looking for the task you really want to do.
Do not confuse familiarity with usability.
Many companies actually choose GNOME for exactly that reason - it's NOT like Win32
Yeah! The panel is at the top of the screen instead of the bottom!
as well as easier to spell and pronounce names
Fsckin Aye Bubba! No one has a problem pronouncing "Gnumeric".
Or, at least that's what UI professionals tell me.
And the UI professionals are right! They're unnavigable unusable websites all say that they are right, so it must be so.
And you totally blew by my point. You already have the freedom to use whatever desktop you want. Which means if you want GNOME to be the required standard, you can use it. Or if you want KDE to be the mandate, you can use it. No one is going to stop you.
You don't have to wait for someone else to tell you what desktop to use. You can choose for yourself right now. Today.
I want to run Quicktime to see the new ROTK trailer. I click on the start button. Up pops a menu with the choices for browsing the web, reading email, and logging out. There's some other task oriented stuff to the right. But Quicktime is nowhere in sight. I'm not expecting it to be a top level menu item, but damn if I can't find it. Then I notice a narrow item with a tiny icon why at the bottom of this huge glorious new menu: "other stuff which we feel is unimportant, but which you installed anyway, this way -->".