Hear hear! I've been listening to the rants about what Linux needs to achieve "world domination". Then I installed Windows XP for the first time on a new dual-boot system a couple of weeks ago. Funny, the very things that "Linux needs" are the same things that Windows XP lacks.
"Linux needs a one-click GUI installer!" Windows XP doesn't have one. It starts up in that horrible newbie-frightening text mode, and you don't get out of it until after the first reboot.
"Linux needs a standard widget tookit!" Quicktime doesn't look like WinAmp doesn't look like Realplayer doesn't look like PowerDVD doesn't look like Media Player. NET doesn't look like "classic" MFC. I've even seen one case where a.NET component had a.NET look even though it was embedded in an MFC application. Huh?
"Linux needs to take usability lessons from Windows!" Oh man I don't even know where to start with this one. So let me pick on the whole "tasked based" stuff. Redmond guessed what tasks I would be doing, but they guessed horribly wrong. The most frequent menu entry I use is "more programs here -->". So why hasn't it move up to the top yet, instead of being this line at the bottom in smaller type with a smaller icon?
Of course, maybe their right. Maybe Linux isn't ready for the desktop. But if it's anything like FreeBSD, which I DO USE for my desktops at home and at work, then it is more than ready. The only thing it's missing is universal hardware manufacturer support.
I know for a fact the GNOME developers are very proud of their work and are convinced that GNOME is the desktop of the future, but I'm sure the KDE developers feel the same way.
So you're saying that this whole problem of coercing the poor newbie into making a dreadful choice is because of ego! I say send the GUI Police in to bust some skulls...
Let's not stop there! Besides mandating only one single GUI toolkit, let's mandate one single programming lanaguage! Make everyone use Ruby (my choice, since it's my turn to be dictator today). Ban Java. Forbid C. Persecute users of C++. Arrest Lisp and Haskell programmers. Tar and feather Perl and Python perverts.
The multitude of incompatible programming languages is holding Linux back from its rightful place as the New Monopoly Operating System!
And then you decide to use a different OS. FreeBSD, MorphOS, Plan 9, whatever. Suddenly you've stumbled into the same age old morass: the hardware vendors don't support you.
Our answer to the Redmond monopoly should NOT be another monopoly. It shouldn't be a game of king-of-the-hill. The "we can only support one OS" mentality needs to be eliminated, not encouraged.
Funny how you use the word "GNU". When I read this article the first thing I thought was, "I'm so glad I'm using FreeBSD because here we have NO ONE clamoring for a GUI Czar."
I think the point is that newbies don't always choose well
Amen! The last thing liberty needs is the ruthless imposition of choice. The newbie will never be free until their ability to make a decision is removed from them.
Several thousand years ago, the nation of Israel did not have a king. They were a free people. One description of their political system could have been "anarcho-theocracy". But all the nations around them had despotic kings. So the people went to their wisest member, Samuel, and asked him for a king. He warned them that a king would tax then, draft them, murder the best generals so he could sleep with their wives, bankrupt the economy by building guilded temples, instigate civil wars, and divert public funds for the promotion of foreign religions. But the people were adamant. So they got their king.
Skip forward to the modern day. The people of Linux look around them and see slavery, subjugation, domination and product activation everywhere but in their own OS. They started to grumble. "It's not fair that they live in squalor with MSDN subscriptions to tell them what to do. We need a king as well!" So they went to their wisest and said, "Place a king over us, to tell us what desktop we must use! The people of Windows mock us because we have choice. The people of Apple mock us because we are free. The people of Sun mock us because we don't meekly follow orders. Give us a king!"
And so the wisest relented and gave them a king. And the king sent his soldiers into the land to enforce his will. The new desktop would be Knome. Any who used KDE or GNOME would be banished. Any who used XFCE, Windowmaker or Blackbox would be arrested. Any who programmed for Qt, GTK+, Fox or FLTK would be pilloried. Distributions who offered their users a choice were stripped of the LSB certification.
Once a corporation reaches a certain size, it's collective intelligence exponentially drops with each new employee, until it reaches that of the flatworm. AOL is no exception.
I'm taking a class with a manager at AOL. He stated last weekend that a new AOL policy (at least in his department) was "anyone using Mozilla will be fired on the spot."
I'm not saying that BSD init (Slackware) is bad is just more primitive and less "clean".
You ought to take a look at the new RCng of NetBSD and FreeBSD. It's not exactly equivalent, because SysV and BSD have different goals with init, but much of it is similar. In fact, you can dump (and several ports do) most SysV scripts into/etc/rc.d (or better in/usr/local/etc/rc.d), and they just work. And without link farms from hell. Much cleaner than the typical SysV linkfarms I've seen.
And they I fell in love with sys V init scripts. That now I don't seem to like anything with out it.
From my experience, the time I save by dragging and dropping symlinks around the SysV init maze via a GUI is simply not worth it, since I only need to do that task *ONCE*. I only ever use reboot, halt and multiuser, so I don't need the other twenty nine run levels. So explain to me again the obvious advantages of SysV versus BSD inits again?
Correction, Mandrake ships with XFree86, which is what supports dual monitors. Other systems also shipping with XFree86 supporting dual monitors include among others Redhat, SuSE, Gentoo, FreeBSD, etc, etc, etc.
Re:Thats how you pay for "products"
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 2, Funny
but the Club Membership costs Mandrake basically nothing
But if SCO wins (hah!) there still is no justification for end users paying the license fees. They are not under contract to SCO. They have no business relationship with SCO. The companies that distributed Linux to them may be up the creek, but their users are not.
The BSA can engage in terrorist activities because the people they audit have implicitly agreed to various EULA's. But no such licenses exist for Linux. SCO cannot assert that their contracts and agreements are binding on third parties.
Re:Please join the mandrake club.
on
Mandrake 9.2 RC1
·
· Score: 1
It's not "stealing" as several others have said. By downloading this, people are using their free-as-in-speech rights to silently but definitively assert that the GPL means "free-as-in-beer".
Do what I did, and perform some actual test. Write a quick sample program requiring callbacks. Implement one version in Boost::Signals, and the other in Qt. Statically link both. Now check the size of the binaries. Now check the complexity of the actual syntax used. Chain signals to signals. Connect a single signal to multiple slots. Connect multiple signals to a single slot. Finally, send a single to an independent third party object with modifying it or writing a wrapper.
Qt is much more flexible than Boost, it results in smaller sizes, and is easier to use.
Take your fudding ass and get it out of here! And take that yapping gnome with you!
Canopy owns less than 6% of Trolltech. Trolltech employees own more than 60% of Trolltech. SCO (a minor precancerous growth on Canopy) has absolutely no control or influence over Trolltech. And even if they did, there's the Free Qt Foundation they would have to contend with.
First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code.
There is no ISO C++ mechanism that does the same thing that signals/slots do. None. None at all.
Now before you start talking about Boost::Signals, libsig++, gtkmm, etc., take a step back. Those things you're talking about are libraries, just the same as Qt. They are not standard mechanisms any more than gettext or libxml are standard mechanisms. Every bit of the code that is in Qt to implement signals/slots is standard ISO C++ code. No different than with Boost::Signals.
And as opposed to those other "standard" mechanisms, Qt signal/slots are extremely flexible.
The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate.
You have been smoking crack, haven't you? Despite it's unfamiliarity to those children raised on the Holy Bible of JavaDoc, the Qt documentation is a breath of fresh air when it comes to the dissemination of useful information. No other body of technical documentation anywhere in the Open Source world even comes close.
Because the GUI is slow. Slow, slow slow. That is, slow compared to everything else. Do you really expect that checkmark to be repainted before anything else in the system happens? Do you really expect you can even notice it not happening in the time it takes your find to raise up from the mouse button? With a GUI you have a few milliseconds to spare, an enormous amount of time in the CPU.
A GUI should never have top priority on a system. Your video decoding, maybe, but not the damn play button!
You're right, I keep forgetting that this is a PC we're talking about. If you're not upgrading in a six month cycle, Guido comes around to bust your kneecaps.
I understand the risk I face. It's the price I pay for really good uptime, service and price. At least I've got them researching ssh and sftp.
But the real point is, how many people have a hoster that actually offers a secure solution? Certainly the big three don't. Some smaller guys might, but good luck finding them at a reasonable price. These GUI publishing tools all use ftp, because that's all anyone ever provides in the consumer webhosting market.
FreeBSD support has been around about six months or so. I built a new system a couple of weeks ago, and chose a Nvidia card precisely because they supported FreeBSD. I've got a GeForce FX 5200 and there are no problems.
I used to bash Nvidia all day long for keeping their drivers closed, but it seems like ATI has been asleep at the wheel for a couple of years now with regards to specs, so what you gonna do? It's not like there are any other consumer grade video card manfuacturers anymore. Matrox still seems to be in business, but just try finding one of their cards.
So what do you do about hosters that won't let you update your site except via ftp? I have to use ftp for my site. Supposedly, rsync is available, but they haven't bothered setting it up for me.
One hose to your CPU cooler stiffens and cracks. Distilled water starts dripping onto your GPU fan. Your GPU fan is covered in dust. Dust plus distilled water makes mud. Well technically it's not mud, but the result is the same: conductivity. Your GPU fries while the fan evenly dispersed conductive sludge throughout your case. Sad.
But what if you don't have a GPU fan? Are you safe? Only if you have a completely sealed case. Dust happens. Even a layer of dust so fine you can't see it (from when you last opened your case) can make distilled water conduct electricity.
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Hear hear! I've been listening to the rants about what Linux needs to achieve "world domination". Then I installed Windows XP for the first time on a new dual-boot system a couple of weeks ago. Funny, the very things that "Linux needs" are the same things that Windows XP lacks.
.NET component had a .NET look even though it was embedded in an MFC application. Huh?
"Linux needs a one-click GUI installer!" Windows XP doesn't have one. It starts up in that horrible newbie-frightening text mode, and you don't get out of it until after the first reboot.
"Linux needs a standard widget tookit!" Quicktime doesn't look like WinAmp doesn't look like Realplayer doesn't look like PowerDVD doesn't look like Media Player. NET doesn't look like "classic" MFC. I've even seen one case where a
"Linux needs to take usability lessons from Windows!" Oh man I don't even know where to start with this one. So let me pick on the whole "tasked based" stuff. Redmond guessed what tasks I would be doing, but they guessed horribly wrong. The most frequent menu entry I use is "more programs here -->". So why hasn't it move up to the top yet, instead of being this line at the bottom in smaller type with a smaller icon?
Of course, maybe their right. Maybe Linux isn't ready for the desktop. But if it's anything like FreeBSD, which I DO USE for my desktops at home and at work, then it is more than ready. The only thing it's missing is universal hardware manufacturer support.
I know for a fact the GNOME developers are very proud of their work and are convinced that GNOME is the desktop of the future, but I'm sure the KDE developers feel the same way.
So you're saying that this whole problem of coercing the poor newbie into making a dreadful choice is because of ego! I say send the GUI Police in to bust some skulls...
Let's not stop there! Besides mandating only one single GUI toolkit, let's mandate one single programming lanaguage! Make everyone use Ruby (my choice, since it's my turn to be dictator today). Ban Java. Forbid C. Persecute users of C++. Arrest Lisp and Haskell programmers. Tar and feather Perl and Python perverts.
The multitude of incompatible programming languages is holding Linux back from its rightful place as the New Monopoly Operating System!
And then you decide to use a different OS. FreeBSD, MorphOS, Plan 9, whatever. Suddenly you've stumbled into the same age old morass: the hardware vendors don't support you.
Our answer to the Redmond monopoly should NOT be another monopoly. It shouldn't be a game of king-of-the-hill. The "we can only support one OS" mentality needs to be eliminated, not encouraged.
Funny how you use the word "GNU". When I read this article the first thing I thought was, "I'm so glad I'm using FreeBSD because here we have NO ONE clamoring for a GUI Czar."
I think the point is that newbies don't always choose well
Amen! The last thing liberty needs is the ruthless imposition of choice. The newbie will never be free until their ability to make a decision is removed from them.
Several thousand years ago, the nation of Israel did not have a king. They were a free people. One description of their political system could have been "anarcho-theocracy". But all the nations around them had despotic kings. So the people went to their wisest member, Samuel, and asked him for a king. He warned them that a king would tax then, draft them, murder the best generals so he could sleep with their wives, bankrupt the economy by building guilded temples, instigate civil wars, and divert public funds for the promotion of foreign religions. But the people were adamant. So they got their king.
Skip forward to the modern day. The people of Linux look around them and see slavery, subjugation, domination and product activation everywhere but in their own OS. They started to grumble. "It's not fair that they live in squalor with MSDN subscriptions to tell them what to do. We need a king as well!" So they went to their wisest and said, "Place a king over us, to tell us what desktop we must use! The people of Windows mock us because we have choice. The people of Apple mock us because we are free. The people of Sun mock us because we don't meekly follow orders. Give us a king!"
And so the wisest relented and gave them a king. And the king sent his soldiers into the land to enforce his will. The new desktop would be Knome. Any who used KDE or GNOME would be banished. Any who used XFCE, Windowmaker or Blackbox would be arrested. Any who programmed for Qt, GTK+, Fox or FLTK would be pilloried. Distributions who offered their users a choice were stripped of the LSB certification.
It is a shame AOL has sealed a deal with MS.
Once a corporation reaches a certain size, it's collective intelligence exponentially drops with each new employee, until it reaches that of the flatworm. AOL is no exception.
I'm taking a class with a manager at AOL. He stated last weekend that a new AOL policy (at least in his department) was "anyone using Mozilla will be fired on the spot."
we ought to only tax things we want less of
Then why the fsck is there an income tax? Shouldn't we be taxing poverty instead?
I'm not saying that BSD init (Slackware) is bad is just more primitive and less "clean".
/etc/rc.d (or better in /usr/local/etc/rc.d), and they just work. And without link farms from hell. Much cleaner than the typical SysV linkfarms I've seen.
You ought to take a look at the new RCng of NetBSD and FreeBSD. It's not exactly equivalent, because SysV and BSD have different goals with init, but much of it is similar. In fact, you can dump (and several ports do) most SysV scripts into
And they I fell in love with sys V init scripts. That now I don't seem to like anything with out it.
From my experience, the time I save by dragging and dropping symlinks around the SysV init maze via a GUI is simply not worth it, since I only need to do that task *ONCE*. I only ever use reboot, halt and multiuser, so I don't need the other twenty nine run levels. So explain to me again the obvious advantages of SysV versus BSD inits again?
Correction, Mandrake ships with XFree86, which is what supports dual monitors. Other systems also shipping with XFree86 supporting dual monitors include among others Redhat, SuSE, Gentoo, FreeBSD, etc, etc, etc.
but the Club Membership costs Mandrake basically nothing
Sounds like price gouging to me...
But if SCO wins (hah!) there still is no justification for end users paying the license fees. They are not under contract to SCO. They have no business relationship with SCO. The companies that distributed Linux to them may be up the creek, but their users are not.
The BSA can engage in terrorist activities because the people they audit have implicitly agreed to various EULA's. But no such licenses exist for Linux. SCO cannot assert that their contracts and agreements are binding on third parties.
It's not "stealing" as several others have said. By downloading this, people are using their free-as-in-speech rights to silently but definitively assert that the GPL means "free-as-in-beer".
Do what I did, and perform some actual test. Write a quick sample program requiring callbacks. Implement one version in Boost::Signals, and the other in Qt. Statically link both. Now check the size of the binaries. Now check the complexity of the actual syntax used. Chain signals to signals. Connect a single signal to multiple slots. Connect multiple signals to a single slot. Finally, send a single to an independent third party object with modifying it or writing a wrapper.
Qt is much more flexible than Boost, it results in smaller sizes, and is easier to use.
Take your fudding ass and get it out of here! And take that yapping gnome with you!
Canopy owns less than 6% of Trolltech. Trolltech employees own more than 60% of Trolltech. SCO (a minor precancerous growth on Canopy) has absolutely no control or influence over Trolltech. And even if they did, there's the Free Qt Foundation they would have to contend with.
First, the signal/slot mechanism really bugs me. I am annoyed with the need to use non-ANSI C++ techniques (e.g. public slots, moc) to achieve results that could easily be done with legal C++ code.
There is no ISO C++ mechanism that does the same thing that signals/slots do. None. None at all.
Now before you start talking about Boost::Signals, libsig++, gtkmm, etc., take a step back. Those things you're talking about are libraries, just the same as Qt. They are not standard mechanisms any more than gettext or libxml are standard mechanisms. Every bit of the code that is in Qt to implement signals/slots is standard ISO C++ code. No different than with Boost::Signals.
And as opposed to those other "standard" mechanisms, Qt signal/slots are extremely flexible.
The QT online documentation is not easy to navigate.
You have been smoking crack, haven't you? Despite it's unfamiliarity to those children raised on the Holy Bible of JavaDoc, the Qt documentation is a breath of fresh air when it comes to the dissemination of useful information. No other body of technical documentation anywhere in the Open Source world even comes close.
Because the GUI is slow. Slow, slow slow. That is, slow compared to everything else. Do you really expect that checkmark to be repainted before anything else in the system happens? Do you really expect you can even notice it not happening in the time it takes your find to raise up from the mouse button? With a GUI you have a few milliseconds to spare, an enormous amount of time in the CPU.
A GUI should never have top priority on a system. Your video decoding, maybe, but not the damn play button!
in timeframes that are applicable to PC's.
You're right, I keep forgetting that this is a PC we're talking about. If you're not upgrading in a six month cycle, Guido comes around to bust your kneecaps.
I understand the risk I face. It's the price I pay for really good uptime, service and price. At least I've got them researching ssh and sftp.
But the real point is, how many people have a hoster that actually offers a secure solution? Certainly the big three don't. Some smaller guys might, but good luck finding them at a reasonable price. These GUI publishing tools all use ftp, because that's all anyone ever provides in the consumer webhosting market.
FreeBSD support has been around about six months or so. I built a new system a couple of weeks ago, and chose a Nvidia card precisely because they supported FreeBSD. I've got a GeForce FX 5200 and there are no problems.
I used to bash Nvidia all day long for keeping their drivers closed, but it seems like ATI has been asleep at the wheel for a couple of years now with regards to specs, so what you gonna do? It's not like there are any other consumer grade video card manfuacturers anymore. Matrox still seems to be in business, but just try finding one of their cards.
So what do you do about hosters that won't let you update your site except via ftp? I have to use ftp for my site. Supposedly, rsync is available, but they haven't bothered setting it up for me.
One hose to your CPU cooler stiffens and cracks. Distilled water starts dripping onto your GPU fan. Your GPU fan is covered in dust. Dust plus distilled water makes mud. Well technically it's not mud, but the result is the same: conductivity. Your GPU fries while the fan evenly dispersed conductive sludge throughout your case. Sad.
But what if you don't have a GPU fan? Are you safe? Only if you have a completely sealed case. Dust happens. Even a layer of dust so fine you can't see it (from when you last opened your case) can make distilled water conduct electricity.
On the other hand, why would one heat "f***ing" water, either?
Because if it's cold it takes the mood right out of you, you dolt!