There are code control systems available for Windows as well - PVCS (nasty), SourceSafe (even nastier) and WinCVS, which is just a GUI wrapper around CVS. I wouldn't say that Windows suffers in this department.
Ugh, if there's ever been an application "framework" nastier than MFC I've yet to see it. The sheer complexity involved in acheiving some of the simplest tasks is truly amazing - who wants to deal with a huge mess of DDX/DDV commands just to get the value of an edit box into a variable?
Personally I'm using Borland's VCL at the moment, and whilst it, like any other framework, does constrain the things you can do, it certainly feels a hell of a lot more "natural" than MFC ever did - things work the way you expect. As for chaning an SDI app into an MDI app? Well, it'd be some work, but I can see myself doing that without starting over.
No, using MFC as an example of why Windows is a poor environment for coding is wrong. Plain and simple, MFC sucks, and there are a lot better alternatives out there for coding apps in. And since Borland are porting Delphi and C++ Builder to Linux, I'd highly recommend them there as well.
How wrong you are. The philosophy behind RMS's glorious vision of a world where nothing is hidden and we can all share in the glories of source code is one that shall life the human condition and provide us with a spiritual feast the likes of which have never been seen before. Indeed, it can be argued that RMS is the reincarnated spirit of Jesus, and I for one can see the similarities - the beard for one.
When the people of the world unite under the banner of GNU/Linux then all wars shall end, all suffering shall be alleiviated, and we will all dance happily through fields of flowers. Except for the lawyers that is...
What was Bill Gates doing at Global Linux 2000? Maybe he wanted to speak with RMS about how he can GPL all of Microsoft's products? Naah, not likely is it?
On a more serious note, it's good to see that Linux's popularity is being taken seriously across the globe - this event was sponsered by the "Ministry of Information and Communication" in Korea, not just by a few Linux hackers. And whilst events like this aren't necessary for Linux, they sure go a long way in ensuring that people see it as a serious product, something that counts for a lot in the clueless world of the PHB.
Wow, this almost makes MP3 obsolete for storing music portably:) Admittedly you could use that for 100 hours of "CD-quality" MP3s, but no true audiophile is going to accept that. Erm, well, no true audiophile is going to accept CDs either, but anyway...
But seriously, this is an amazing capacity for a hard drive this small, and it seems pretty robust as well - they say it can withstand up to 1500G. However, surely the physical limits of magnetic hard drive technology must be approaching - this has a density of 15 billion bits/square inch - what is the theoretical limit?
Despite the fact that I can and have programmed a lot of C++ stuff at home and at work, for some reason it just doesn't seem to stick, and I find myself constantly annoyed by minor language niggles and an obscure syntax that sometimes just tries too hard to be concise.
Now, I've been programming for years and I find C++ difficult to get into sometimes, so if this book can really make it accessible for the user then that's half a miracle by itself. Of course, if the lady in question being taught C++ became his wife soon after, it does raise the question of how much "private tutoring" she was getting...:)
--- Jon E. Erikson
Not likely to appeal to many iMac users
on
Power Up That iMac
·
· Score: 2
Whilst the iMac was at the time a decently specced machine, that wasn't the reason people went and bought it, and it certainly wasn't what Apple were pushing in their advertising campaigns. After all, it was meant to appeal to the family rather than the geek, and in that respect it certainly succeeded.
But surely this kind of owner isn't really going to care one way or the other about upgrading their iMac so that it runs faster? After all, $500 is a fair bit of money to spend on something that intangible to most people, and there isn't quite the same situation on the Mac as on the PC where if you don't have the latest CPU/graphics card/whatever you can't run anything released within the last six months.
No, it's a good service, but I can't see there being that much demand for it.
There must be an easier way to get each component to comunicate with each other, and create a lightweight office suite that doesn't take over your entire system. It just seems noone wants to try at this time.:(
No, unfortunately not, and it's because these sort of packages are aimed at institutions rather than people, and people who buy software for these kinds of places are all to fond of all in one "solutions" since they mean less licensing issues (supposedly) and other buzzwords like interoperability and so on. Stability and bloat aren't features that matter to them, just convenience.
As long as these kinds of products are aimed at this market, and I can't see it changing, then bloat and "features" will be the order of the day.
... or are all of these "integrated" (and I use that term very loosely) office suites getting way out of hand? There is definitely such a thing as trying to do too much, and MS Office, StarOffice et al. are heading this way at a full gallop rather than concentrating on refining what's already there.
At the rate it's going these suites will contain even more added extras than Emacs, and that program will look positively trim compared to the full suite, coming on 4 DVDs as it will. And the more "value added" features that get incorporated, the worse they get to use - trying to format long documents is always a complete nightmare, and to be honest, I'd rather do it in HTML by hand than in Word or Writer.
Anyway, my point is that if I really must have an office suite, all I want is a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database, tops. Anything else is something I can get separately to suit me. The size of a program really shouldn't be proportional to the year it's released in.
Nice idea, great standard and all that, but does anyone know of a decent ORB that handles all of the 13 CORBA services well? The main ORB I've used is Orbix, and that only supports 4 out of the 13 standards as of version 2.3, which quite frankly sucks and makes using it a real pain in the arse (along with a lovely bug where two servers end up with the same ID, causing them to crash).
As for performace, sure you take a hit, but I'd say that the benefits using a unified model for local and remote connectivity outweighs the penalties - after all having different standards in different parts of the system introduces bloat elsewhere anyway. And writing code for such a model is a lot easier...
Why was London always so deserted in the Dangermouse cartoons? It was like someone had let off an air strike above it, wiping out all of the population except for Dangermouse's HQ under the post box (is that right?). And it was Baron Greenback, Nero and Stiletto right?
Yeah, sure you can upload patches onto the Dreamcast's VMU using this, but that hardly makes it a tool for coding anything more than quick hacks and patches. Nobody in their right mind would attempt to write anything more than a simple demo on one of these, and I don't think that was ever the intention.
No, this is just a crack box really, like the Game Genie or its relatives.
LOL! A good, if sarcastic, review of a movie which deserved it. I'm getting sick of the standard Hollywood line of "science fiction" movies which are becoming more and more stomach churning with every release.
Independence Day was alright, if only for some of the special effects, but it wasn't ever meant to be a "serious" film. Unfortunately later writers and directors have seemed to fall into the trap of believing their own hype - that they are writing a serious film when all they're really writing is more Hollywood pap.
Science fiction so rarely makes it to the cinema from books, and invariably fails when it does, far more so than any other genre of film. This is a real shame, since there are so many decent books out there for the taking. OTOH, I'd rather not have one of my favourite books turned into a Hollywood "blockbuster" thank you very much:)
"Xbox is the first non-sucky architecture for a console"
Well, they would say that now, wouldn't they... But seriously, Microsoft hasn't got the rights to Myth, Take2 software get to keep that along with Oni, so it doesn't look like the doom and gloom predicted by the nay-sayers here.
Well, at least it looks like the X-Box will have some games for it when it finally arrives. That's always the main sticking point for consoles - the initial games generally suck, going more for flashy graphics and effects rather than solid gameplay. Maybe Microsoft are trying to buck that trend by getting hold of someone to produce some playable games, something Bungie seem to do very well.
Errm, have you read this article at Ars Technica on the architecture of the K7? Does it look anything like the 8086? Of course not, there's a world of difference in the underlying architecture, it's just the ISA that has remained backwardsly compatible.
And even in real terms, chips are getting faster over time. The growth may not be quite as explosive as the clock speed would indicate, but it's there. And Athlon's Sledgehammer will be a fully 64-bit processor as well...
Ugh, very true. The Wintel combination has meant that each of them has held back to keep in line with the other, and because of this neither has been able to break away from the past.
Case in point - real mode. In real terms it has been obsolete since the 286 introduced protected mode and the 386 enhanced it. But it's only now with Windows Millenium and 2000 that real mode is no longer used by MS operating systems. This means that the chips require extra transistors for real mode and virtual 8086 mode making them more expensive and hotter, and Windows has reuqired extra code to handle legacy apps which use them.
No, you might have got a speed increase by changing the core from CISC to RISC, but you could also get one by just removing all the extraneous crap that's still there. Hopefully Intel or AMD will abandon their wish for every new chip to be able to pretend it is an 8086...
The technical expertise that lies behind the Athlon is amazing and shouldn't be knocked - considering all of the legacy limitations they have to work with, it's a real accomplishment that they've produced such a good chip. It's not the technology that's obsolete, it's what the technology is supposed to run that needs completely revamping.
Hardly. Whilst I don't know of anyone that likes the x86, saying that it's obsolete is extremely premature - look at the increases in processing power that have gone on over the last few years and are still continuing with things like Athlon's forthcoming Sledgehammer.
The fact is that despite its poor design chip makers have done some amazing things to push it to greater speeds - the Athlon CPU looks and works nothing like the 8086, they just happen to run the same instruction set. And in this year we'll be seeing the GHz barrier broken - hardly the sign of an "obsolete" chip is it?
As long as the chips are still getting faster and people are still buying them I think calling the x86 platform obsolete is incorrect. A pain in the ass? Sure, we'd all like a brand new chip design, even Intel, but it works, and it's still growing.
Wow, didn't he do well? I don't think he managed to contribute anything at all to the case, just a lot of negatives about things he (didn't) know. It's hardly going to look good for the MPAA when their Chairman seems to know zero knowledge of anything to do with the case, not even the defendent's names.
It was a classic game, very eerie at times with a great game system and some evil puzzles. I still remember being suprised by that first mummy on the second level... Damn, why aren't more games like that around today?
Hmm, I'm not too sure about this. Whilst real-time adventure games can be great, part of the whole "look and feel" of Myst was the fact that you couldn't just go anywhere or do anything. As ewhac says, sometimes that makes the game what it was - does anyone remember a game called Dungeon Master for the Atari ST/Amiga? Classic dungeon bash with some evil puzzles, but those puzzles wouldn't have been possible without the constraints on movement inherent in the game.
Sometimes real-time and flexibility work for a game - I don't think anyone is going to argue that Quake had a better engine than Wolfeinstein, but when it comes to adventure and strategy games these features aren't necessary, or even warrented in some cases. Civilisation wouldn't have been what it was if it was real time as was originally planned.
I'll certainly have a look at it when it comes out, but until then, I'm remaining dubious about the whole thing. Still, hopefully this won't kill a great game.
You see there's one big problem with having a.god TLD - it's really only of use to Christians, and isn't really fair on the multitude of faiths out there. So if ICANN decide that we can have the.god TLD, then my suggestion is that we also require the following TLDs to complete the set and make sure nobody feels left out:
.nogod
.satan
.odin,.loki,.thor etc.
.ganesh,.shiva etc.
.mars,.venus,.uranus (heh heh)
.zeus,.eros,.ares,.etc.
.fence (for agnostics)
I'm sure there are many more fine examples, but having.god does tend to imply that all of these are also required. It would be far easier to have none at all...
Given that the uptake of the IA-64 is likely to be slow enough anyway, the idea of making people pay a hefty amount for this tool is one that's just too stupid for words. Intel and HP need to have software available for the chip, since otherwise nobody will touch it with a bargepole despite all of Intel's marketing might.
No, the two companies are taking a huge risk by starting with a fresh, non-compatible arhcitecture, and they're going to want as much support for it as quickly as possible. This way they can get the Linux developer crowd, always eager for a new platform, to start work on an IA-64 version as quickly as possible, so that the server market will be open to the chip.
No, it's not suprising really. Not doing this would have put Intel/HP at the mercy of closed source development houses, many of whom are going to be very unwilling to risk the jump to a new platform.
Okay, it looks nice and has a lot of interesting effects, but I'm really wondering what the whole point of being able to do linear transforms on windows is, other than for purely cosmetic reasons. Who here would ever really need windows tilted at some neck-wrenching angle whilst actually trying to get something done?
Apart from that though it looks like it'll be promising if it ever gets to a fully working state and people start supporting it. The idea of having its API exposed through a CORBA interface is interesting, though I do wonder at a possible performace hit there.
Anyway, it's about time something took over from X, a system which is becoming increasingly aged and complex. I certainly hope this takes off in the next few years.
Yeah, as much as I hate to say this and all, but it was fairly inevitable that a lot of the Linux bandwagon sites will close. After all, even in the growing open source market there's only room for so many sites - people can only read X sites per day, and they tend to stick with what they know.
A lot of the sites that have started up recently will probably die over the next year or so as their authors either lose interest or no longer have the time to update them.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing - once the chaff has gone then the only sites remaining will be the popular ones that people actually visit. It certainly makes finding things out easier when there are only a few central repositories where you need to look.
Slashdot Mirror
There are code control systems available for Windows as well - PVCS (nasty), SourceSafe (even nastier) and WinCVS, which is just a GUI wrapper around CVS. I wouldn't say that Windows suffers in this department.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Ugh, if there's ever been an application "framework" nastier than MFC I've yet to see it. The sheer complexity involved in acheiving some of the simplest tasks is truly amazing - who wants to deal with a huge mess of DDX/DDV commands just to get the value of an edit box into a variable?
Personally I'm using Borland's VCL at the moment, and whilst it, like any other framework, does constrain the things you can do, it certainly feels a hell of a lot more "natural" than MFC ever did - things work the way you expect. As for chaning an SDI app into an MDI app? Well, it'd be some work, but I can see myself doing that without starting over.
No, using MFC as an example of why Windows is a poor environment for coding is wrong. Plain and simple, MFC sucks, and there are a lot better alternatives out there for coding apps in. And since Borland are porting Delphi and C++ Builder to Linux, I'd highly recommend them there as well.
---
Jon E. Erikson
How wrong you are. The philosophy behind RMS's glorious vision of a world where nothing is hidden and we can all share in the glories of source code is one that shall life the human condition and provide us with a spiritual feast the likes of which have never been seen before. Indeed, it can be argued that RMS is the reincarnated spirit of Jesus, and I for one can see the similarities - the beard for one.
When the people of the world unite under the banner of GNU/Linux then all wars shall end, all suffering shall be alleiviated, and we will all dance happily through fields of flowers. Except for the lawyers that is...
Oh yeah, good troll...
---
Jon E. Erikson
What was Bill Gates doing at Global Linux 2000? Maybe he wanted to speak with RMS about how he can GPL all of Microsoft's products? Naah, not likely is it?
On a more serious note, it's good to see that Linux's popularity is being taken seriously across the globe - this event was sponsered by the "Ministry of Information and Communication" in Korea, not just by a few Linux hackers. And whilst events like this aren't necessary for Linux, they sure go a long way in ensuring that people see it as a serious product, something that counts for a lot in the clueless world of the PHB.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Wow, this almost makes MP3 obsolete for storing music portably :) Admittedly you could use that for 100 hours of "CD-quality" MP3s, but no true audiophile is going to accept that. Erm, well, no true audiophile is going to accept CDs either, but anyway...
But seriously, this is an amazing capacity for a hard drive this small, and it seems pretty robust as well - they say it can withstand up to 1500G. However, surely the physical limits of magnetic hard drive technology must be approaching - this has a density of 15 billion bits/square inch - what is the theoretical limit?
---
Jon E. Erikson
Despite the fact that I can and have programmed a lot of C++ stuff at home and at work, for some reason it just doesn't seem to stick, and I find myself constantly annoyed by minor language niggles and an obscure syntax that sometimes just tries too hard to be concise.
Now, I've been programming for years and I find C++ difficult to get into sometimes, so if this book can really make it accessible for the user then that's half a miracle by itself. Of course, if the lady in question being taught C++ became his wife soon after, it does raise the question of how much "private tutoring" she was getting... :)
---
Jon E. Erikson
Whilst the iMac was at the time a decently specced machine, that wasn't the reason people went and bought it, and it certainly wasn't what Apple were pushing in their advertising campaigns. After all, it was meant to appeal to the family rather than the geek, and in that respect it certainly succeeded.
But surely this kind of owner isn't really going to care one way or the other about upgrading their iMac so that it runs faster? After all, $500 is a fair bit of money to spend on something that intangible to most people, and there isn't quite the same situation on the Mac as on the PC where if you don't have the latest CPU/graphics card/whatever you can't run anything released within the last six months.
No, it's a good service, but I can't see there being that much demand for it.
---
Jon E. Erikson
There must be an easier way to get each component to comunicate with each other, and create a lightweight office suite that doesn't take over your entire system. It just seems noone wants to try at this time. :(
No, unfortunately not, and it's because these sort of packages are aimed at institutions rather than people, and people who buy software for these kinds of places are all to fond of all in one "solutions" since they mean less licensing issues (supposedly) and other buzzwords like interoperability and so on. Stability and bloat aren't features that matter to them, just convenience.
As long as these kinds of products are aimed at this market, and I can't see it changing, then bloat and "features" will be the order of the day.
---
Jon E. Erikson
... or are all of these "integrated" (and I use that term very loosely) office suites getting way out of hand? There is definitely such a thing as trying to do too much, and MS Office, StarOffice et al. are heading this way at a full gallop rather than concentrating on refining what's already there.
At the rate it's going these suites will contain even more added extras than Emacs, and that program will look positively trim compared to the full suite, coming on 4 DVDs as it will. And the more "value added" features that get incorporated, the worse they get to use - trying to format long documents is always a complete nightmare, and to be honest, I'd rather do it in HTML by hand than in Word or Writer.
Anyway, my point is that if I really must have an office suite, all I want is a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database, tops. Anything else is something I can get separately to suit me. The size of a program really shouldn't be proportional to the year it's released in.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Nice idea, great standard and all that, but does anyone know of a decent ORB that handles all of the 13 CORBA services well? The main ORB I've used is Orbix, and that only supports 4 out of the 13 standards as of version 2.3, which quite frankly sucks and makes using it a real pain in the arse (along with a lovely bug where two servers end up with the same ID, causing them to crash).
As for performace, sure you take a hit, but I'd say that the benefits using a unified model for local and remote connectivity outweighs the penalties - after all having different standards in different parts of the system introduces bloat elsewhere anyway. And writing code for such a model is a lot easier...
---
Jon E. Erikson
Why was London always so deserted in the Dangermouse cartoons? It was like someone had let off an air strike above it, wiping out all of the population except for Dangermouse's HQ under the post box (is that right?). And it was Baron Greenback, Nero and Stiletto right?
---
Jon E. Erikson
Yeah, sure you can upload patches onto the Dreamcast's VMU using this, but that hardly makes it a tool for coding anything more than quick hacks and patches. Nobody in their right mind would attempt to write anything more than a simple demo on one of these, and I don't think that was ever the intention.
No, this is just a crack box really, like the Game Genie or its relatives.
---
Jon E. Erikson
LOL! A good, if sarcastic, review of a movie which deserved it. I'm getting sick of the standard Hollywood line of "science fiction" movies which are becoming more and more stomach churning with every release.
Independence Day was alright, if only for some of the special effects, but it wasn't ever meant to be a "serious" film. Unfortunately later writers and directors have seemed to fall into the trap of believing their own hype - that they are writing a serious film when all they're really writing is more Hollywood pap.
Science fiction so rarely makes it to the cinema from books, and invariably fails when it does, far more so than any other genre of film. This is a real shame, since there are so many decent books out there for the taking. OTOH, I'd rather not have one of my favourite books turned into a Hollywood "blockbuster" thank you very much :)
---
Jon E. Erikson
"Xbox is the first non-sucky architecture for a console"
Well, they would say that now, wouldn't they... But seriously, Microsoft hasn't got the rights to Myth, Take2 software get to keep that along with Oni, so it doesn't look like the doom and gloom predicted by the nay-sayers here.
Well, at least it looks like the X-Box will have some games for it when it finally arrives. That's always the main sticking point for consoles - the initial games generally suck, going more for flashy graphics and effects rather than solid gameplay. Maybe Microsoft are trying to buck that trend by getting hold of someone to produce some playable games, something Bungie seem to do very well.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Errm, have you read this article at Ars Technica on the architecture of the K7? Does it look anything like the 8086? Of course not, there's a world of difference in the underlying architecture, it's just the ISA that has remained backwardsly compatible.
And even in real terms, chips are getting faster over time. The growth may not be quite as explosive as the clock speed would indicate, but it's there. And Athlon's Sledgehammer will be a fully 64-bit processor as well...
---
Jon E. Erikson
Ugh, very true. The Wintel combination has meant that each of them has held back to keep in line with the other, and because of this neither has been able to break away from the past.
Case in point - real mode. In real terms it has been obsolete since the 286 introduced protected mode and the 386 enhanced it. But it's only now with Windows Millenium and 2000 that real mode is no longer used by MS operating systems. This means that the chips require extra transistors for real mode and virtual 8086 mode making them more expensive and hotter, and Windows has reuqired extra code to handle legacy apps which use them.
No, you might have got a speed increase by changing the core from CISC to RISC, but you could also get one by just removing all the extraneous crap that's still there. Hopefully Intel or AMD will abandon their wish for every new chip to be able to pretend it is an 8086...
---
Jon E. Erikson
The technical expertise that lies behind the Athlon is amazing and shouldn't be knocked - considering all of the legacy limitations they have to work with, it's a real accomplishment that they've produced such a good chip. It's not the technology that's obsolete, it's what the technology is supposed to run that needs completely revamping.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Hardly. Whilst I don't know of anyone that likes the x86, saying that it's obsolete is extremely premature - look at the increases in processing power that have gone on over the last few years and are still continuing with things like Athlon's forthcoming Sledgehammer.
The fact is that despite its poor design chip makers have done some amazing things to push it to greater speeds - the Athlon CPU looks and works nothing like the 8086, they just happen to run the same instruction set. And in this year we'll be seeing the GHz barrier broken - hardly the sign of an "obsolete" chip is it?
As long as the chips are still getting faster and people are still buying them I think calling the x86 platform obsolete is incorrect. A pain in the ass? Sure, we'd all like a brand new chip design, even Intel, but it works, and it's still growing.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Wow, didn't he do well? I don't think he managed to contribute anything at all to the case, just a lot of negatives about things he (didn't) know. It's hardly going to look good for the MPAA when their Chairman seems to know zero knowledge of anything to do with the case, not even the defendent's names.
---
Jon E. Erikson
It was a classic game, very eerie at times with a great game system and some evil puzzles. I still remember being suprised by that first mummy on the second level... Damn, why aren't more games like that around today?
---
Jon E. Erikson
Hmm, I'm not too sure about this. Whilst real-time adventure games can be great, part of the whole "look and feel" of Myst was the fact that you couldn't just go anywhere or do anything. As ewhac says, sometimes that makes the game what it was - does anyone remember a game called Dungeon Master for the Atari ST/Amiga? Classic dungeon bash with some evil puzzles, but those puzzles wouldn't have been possible without the constraints on movement inherent in the game.
Sometimes real-time and flexibility work for a game - I don't think anyone is going to argue that Quake had a better engine than Wolfeinstein, but when it comes to adventure and strategy games these features aren't necessary, or even warrented in some cases. Civilisation wouldn't have been what it was if it was real time as was originally planned.
I'll certainly have a look at it when it comes out, but until then, I'm remaining dubious about the whole thing. Still, hopefully this won't kill a great game.
---
Jon E. Erikson
You see there's one big problem with having a .god TLD - it's really only of use to Christians, and isn't really fair on the multitude of faiths out there. So if ICANN decide that we can have the .god TLD, then my suggestion is that we also require the following TLDs to complete the set and make sure nobody feels left out:
I'm sure there are many more fine examples, but having .god does tend to imply that all of these are also required. It would be far easier to have none at all...
---
Jon E. Erikson
Given that the uptake of the IA-64 is likely to be slow enough anyway, the idea of making people pay a hefty amount for this tool is one that's just too stupid for words. Intel and HP need to have software available for the chip, since otherwise nobody will touch it with a bargepole despite all of Intel's marketing might.
No, the two companies are taking a huge risk by starting with a fresh, non-compatible arhcitecture, and they're going to want as much support for it as quickly as possible. This way they can get the Linux developer crowd, always eager for a new platform, to start work on an IA-64 version as quickly as possible, so that the server market will be open to the chip.
No, it's not suprising really. Not doing this would have put Intel/HP at the mercy of closed source development houses, many of whom are going to be very unwilling to risk the jump to a new platform.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Okay, it looks nice and has a lot of interesting effects, but I'm really wondering what the whole point of being able to do linear transforms on windows is, other than for purely cosmetic reasons. Who here would ever really need windows tilted at some neck-wrenching angle whilst actually trying to get something done?
Apart from that though it looks like it'll be promising if it ever gets to a fully working state and people start supporting it. The idea of having its API exposed through a CORBA interface is interesting, though I do wonder at a possible performace hit there.
Anyway, it's about time something took over from X, a system which is becoming increasingly aged and complex. I certainly hope this takes off in the next few years.
---
Jon E. Erikson
Yeah, as much as I hate to say this and all, but it was fairly inevitable that a lot of the Linux bandwagon sites will close. After all, even in the growing open source market there's only room for so many sites - people can only read X sites per day, and they tend to stick with what they know.
A lot of the sites that have started up recently will probably die over the next year or so as their authors either lose interest or no longer have the time to update them.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing - once the chaff has gone then the only sites remaining will be the popular ones that people actually visit. It certainly makes finding things out easier when there are only a few central repositories where you need to look.
---
Jon E. Erikson