The posts so for have missed the main point. That is, sound in Linux sucks. It just needs to be fixed.
- arts must die, and it will w/ KDE4
- esd must die
- every program should start using gstreamer
- ALSA must learn to do proper software mixing out of the box.
Imagine my "pleasure" when I inadvertly caused a "beep" to emerge from my terminal window, and as a result had to wait a while (20 seconds? can't remember) before I could start playing a video with sound. Or how I had to do "killall -9 artsd" to start playing video in totem after listening to music on Amarok (which is superior to rhythmbox in most ways).
There are about a zillion more packages available for Debian than there are for Ubuntu.
No, there aren't. The list of packages that are not in the Ubuntu "universe" repo (essentially a snapshot of stuff in Debian Unstable) and that are in Debian is extremely short. I don't have real first hand knowledge but I would expect it to be less than 100 packages. Anyone know the exact figure? Or is it zero?
In fact, there's still lame justifications going around about other warts about the language.
Still, there are sites like this that list flaws in the language, and the community tends to whine about the warts all the time. The warts are also going to be fixed. The whitespace issue is not considered a wart.
I do suggest he tweak his attention span. To tune unhelpful people like yourself out.
It's generally considered a good thing to try to avoid giving up immediately. It's an extremely important virtue for a programmer...
I've started to learn python twice. Each time I run into the concept of "Syntactically significant white-space" I run away screaming. Give me braces, damnit.
Most people find that they like the whitespace after half an hour or so of trying it. I don't see why you'd be different. Perhaps a minor tweak of attention span would be in order...
If you're such a bad developer that you can't possibly write good, clean and maintainable code in Perl, then Python won't help you much.
Believe me, it does. In Python the good, clean, maintainable code practically writes itself. In Perl, the good, clean, maintainable code won't even *run*;-).
Even if the code was semantically "correct" and good, it would still be ugly and painful to write because of all the $@->.
Furthermore, Perl has a bigger chance than Python of being installed on Linux distributions by default. This alone is a good reason to choose Perl over Python. Don't get me started about Ruby.
What linux distribution installs perl, and not python, by default?
The benefits of Python over Perl are large enough to make the install of python a requirement, and a criterion of choosing a service provider. At least if your programs are going to be larger than 200 lines or so.
Is the difference in configuration due to a better front end in Immunix, or some more fundamental flaw in SELinux? What's wrong with SELinux, and why can't it be fixed instead?
So these people are out of work and can possibly implement OSS as a benefit to their community and therefore collect unemployment? Are you kidding me?
Perhaps if they were employees of a gov program that got cut that would make sense, but why would we start paying those that jumped on the high risk bandwagon 80% of their salary. I know a lot of slashdotters are going to be upset at that, but give me a break! Be compoetetive.
IT work means a lot of different things to diff people. I'm interested to see how it goes. If I can influence further changes I will.
You know, you clearly talk english but I don't have an idea what the hell you are talking about. There has to be some meaning, some logic but I just can't find it. Was the text created by ELIZA or other kind of bot? Is this a Turing test?
I've helped people write python code that generates more python code, and that is truly painful (the indentation-based grouping of Python makes this much more difficult than it needs to be).
eval-ing code is also considered ugly and nonpythonic in python circles. And it is. There is almost always an alternative.
Also, if the whitespace block structure becomes an issue, it's trivial to preprocess something like
def f(x,y) { while 1 { print x,y } }
into equivalent indented syntax.
My point being: this is not a big issue, and it can be easily circumvented.
I prefer something that only does one thing well, like the ipod (arguably) or whatever, than something that does a ton of stuff ok.
Playing mp3's "well enough" is trivial (as opposed to e.g. camera functionality), so I don't see a problem bundling the capability w/ a device that is with you all the time. I don't want to carry two devices with me, esp. since the phone is with me always anyway.
Will this be anything like or as successful as their Gameboy killer?
The difference is that ipod is very easy to kill. It's an mp3 player, there is nothing special about it.
A gaming platform is a different thing altogether, because it represents a different level of "commitment", and is influenced by such things as availability of games.
Re:oh no! New and better optimization!
on
GCC 4.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
I guess us gentoo users will just have to recompile our systems yet again. Oh well. Does anyone have a loaded gun handy?
Don't you think this is going to be the situation when a source based distro has an *actual* edge over other distros? Typically the performance optimizations are a myth, but this baby might really make the distro fly...
Those shopping for a shell, and with a taste for Python, would do well to check out ipython.
In the 'pysh' mode, it acts as a fully functional system shell, even on Windows. Bash and friends suck on windows, but IPython truly shines there. It really makes the command prompt use of Windows feasible, with bash like filename completion etc. Being able to extend it with python functions (as opposed to separate scripts) is a killer feature as well.
I've actually replaced the command prompt launchers on my KDE desktop with 'ipython -p pysh' launchers.
Well, we were pragmatic, and the folks who thought they were the pragmatic ones weren't thinking through consequences all of the way to the end-game.
Still, it must be said that I can hardly think any more convincing example of the superiority of OSS than what just happened.
The question is where to go now? My preference would be GNU Arch, as it's more decentralized. But it may not be ready for this heavy a use, and I am hardly an expert in revision control.
Arch is probably the only one that will do. Or something that follows the arch protocol like 'bazaar'. Too bad bazaar-ng won't be ready in time... But with arch-like repositories, there is a minimal amount of lock-in.
Understatement of the week. Ubuntu is the top distro in distrowatch "page hit ranking" (with a big margin), if you look at the results in 3 month range.
The more Debian ignores the problems, and repeats that "everything is ok" (which Debian people often do), the more people will see that things are not going to change, get disillusioned, and switch away. The "only developers matter, Debian does not need users" attitude doesn't help either, even if it was true.
It's wise not to put all your eggs in one basket, but a lot of your arguments feels non the less as FUD and "chicken little" argumentation, since I can't see why they would want to put themselves out of business.
I guess it's the same instinct that makes me prefer open source software.
Ok, let me clarify: LGPL is more free than GPL in the sense MIT and BSD licenses are more free than GPL. Where I come, how much you are allowed to do determines how free something is. LGPL allows you to do more than GPL.
Companies don't care about being dependant on TrollTech, because Qt is an extremely nice toolkit that saves them money on account of its great design, great documentation, great tutorial, great examples, etc.
Probably not - however, that should be the choice of the company, not something that would in practice be mandated for them by making Qt the default toolkit.
If you really think these euros is too much, all it tells is that either you have no idea what it costs to have people employed, or that you are a cheap bastard that want first class tool for nothing.
Or, I'm a company with 5000+ developers and if I suddenly decided to put them all into Linux application development, I would go bankrupt.
A large part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you are not dependent on single vendor. Suddenly jumping on to become completely dependent on the mercy of Trolltech is not good business sense, even if it is a fact on life in Windows world.
What if Trolltech suddenly decided to go evil and put on a price tag of, say, $10000? Would your boss enjoy the fact that you either pay through the nose or GPL your application? The idea of open source is that if you don't like something, you can fork the product. You can fork Qt only in it's GPL incarnation.
I'm not at all saying that the current licensing of Qt is bad - it's a good business model for Trolltech that allows them to profit enough to put out a first-class toolkit, which allows me to run a slick and snappy KDE. It's a win-win.
On the other hand, it would be a complete disaster if Qt suddenly became the "default" toolkit for Linux. The situation would be worse than in Windows, where you can use native GUI toolkits without royalties.
It's a shame that KDE and Gnome do not both use Qt. It would eliminate almost all of the compatibility issues, save memory on hybrid desktops, and allow them to compete on things that really matter like UI design."
It would also eliminate the option of creating closed source applications without paying thousands of euros for Qt licenses (or at least apps that fit the general UI look and feel).
Not in million years. Companies don't want to be that dependent on Trolltech.
This comes from a KDE user (KDE 3.4 is a gem). But I'm also a developer, and I don't see Qt as *strategically* viable route to bring Linux desktop forward.
(For those that don't know, Gtk is LGPL which is more free than GPL, which is the license Qt uses).
To me it seems like anything that makes it easy for users to install random software off the internet to be a REALLY BAD THING
I think they can create a "special edition" of the software, that requires you to type "all hail the emperor TUX, of which much software floweth" every time you are trying to install something. Then it's just doable, but not excessively convenient.
Slashdot Mirror
The posts so for have missed the main point. That is, sound in Linux sucks. It just needs to be fixed.
- arts must die, and it will w/ KDE4
- esd must die
- every program should start using gstreamer
- ALSA must learn to do proper software mixing out of the box.
Imagine my "pleasure" when I inadvertly caused a "beep" to emerge from my terminal window, and as a result had to wait a while (20 seconds? can't remember) before I could start playing a video with sound. Or how I had to do "killall -9 artsd" to start playing video in totem after listening to music on Amarok (which is superior to rhythmbox in most ways).
There are about a zillion more packages available for Debian than there are for Ubuntu.
No, there aren't. The list of packages that are not in the Ubuntu "universe" repo (essentially a snapshot of stuff in Debian Unstable) and that are in Debian is extremely short. I don't have real first hand knowledge but I would expect it to be less than 100 packages. Anyone know the exact figure? Or is it zero?
... are we going to pretend that rexx isn't dead?
I mean, perhaps this romantic nostalgia should just be gotten over with at some point.
There are better alternatives around these days, with significant developer communities.
In fact, there's still lame justifications going around about other warts about the language.
Still, there are sites like this that list flaws in the language, and the community tends to whine about the warts all the time. The warts are also going to be fixed. The whitespace issue is not considered a wart.
I do suggest he tweak his attention span. To tune unhelpful people like yourself out.
It's generally considered a good thing to try to avoid giving up immediately. It's an extremely important virtue for a programmer...
I've started to learn python twice. Each time I run into the concept of "Syntactically significant white-space" I run away screaming. Give me braces, damnit.
Most people find that they like the whitespace after half an hour or so of trying it. I don't see why you'd be different. Perhaps a minor tweak of attention span would be in order...
If you're such a bad developer that you can't possibly write good, clean and maintainable code in Perl, then Python won't help you much.
;-).
Believe me, it does. In Python the good, clean, maintainable code practically writes itself. In Perl, the good, clean, maintainable code won't even *run*
Even if the code was semantically "correct" and good, it would still be ugly and painful to write because of all the $@->.
Furthermore, Perl has a bigger chance than Python of being installed on Linux distributions by default. This alone is a good reason to choose Perl over Python. Don't get me started about Ruby.
What linux distribution installs perl, and not python, by default?
The benefits of Python over Perl are large enough to make the install of python a requirement, and a criterion of choosing a service provider. At least if your programs are going to be larger than 200 lines or so.
Heck I sure as hell wouldn't want to waste my youth as a workaholic just to end up as one of those rich bachelors at 35.
Only on slashdot, part 17: someone thinks being a rich bachelor at 35 is a bad thing.
Come on, this is not even funny anymore.
Kinda like iFolder?
Is the difference in configuration due to a better front end in Immunix, or some more fundamental flaw in SELinux? What's wrong with SELinux, and why can't it be fixed instead?
Hah, it happens to everyone of us every now and then :-).
So these people are out of work and can possibly implement OSS as a benefit to their community and therefore collect unemployment? Are you kidding me?
Perhaps if they were employees of a gov program that got cut that would make sense, but why would we start paying those that jumped on the high risk bandwagon 80% of their salary. I know a lot of slashdotters are going to be upset at that, but give me a break! Be compoetetive.
IT work means a lot of different things to diff people. I'm interested to see how it goes. If I can influence further changes I will.
You know, you clearly talk english but I don't have an idea what the hell you are talking about. There has to be some meaning, some logic but I just can't find it. Was the text created by ELIZA or other kind of bot? Is this a Turing test?
and if they all decide that the best way to spend their time is to develop and perfect a tcl front end to cdrecord, that's their choice.
It probably wouldn't count - I would assume they would expect a project to be "established" or large enough (e.g. more than 2 developers).
I've helped people write python code that generates more python code, and that is truly painful (the indentation-based grouping of Python makes this much more difficult than it needs to be).
eval-ing code is also considered ugly and nonpythonic in python circles. And it is. There is almost always an alternative.
Also, if the whitespace block structure becomes an issue, it's trivial to preprocess something like
def f(x,y) { while 1 { print x,y } }
into equivalent indented syntax.
My point being: this is not a big issue, and it can be easily circumvented.
I prefer something that only does one thing well, like the ipod (arguably) or whatever, than something that does a ton of stuff ok.
Playing mp3's "well enough" is trivial (as opposed to e.g. camera functionality), so I don't see a problem bundling the capability w/ a device that is with you all the time. I don't want to carry two devices with me, esp. since the phone is with me always anyway.
Will this be anything like or as successful as their Gameboy killer?
The difference is that ipod is very easy to kill. It's an mp3 player, there is nothing special about it.
A gaming platform is a different thing altogether, because it represents a different level of "commitment", and is influenced by such things as availability of games.
I guess us gentoo users will just have to recompile our systems yet again. Oh well.
Does anyone have a loaded gun handy?
Don't you think this is going to be the situation when a source based distro has an *actual* edge over other distros? Typically the performance optimizations are a myth, but this baby might really make the distro fly...
Those shopping for a shell, and with a taste for Python, would do well to check out ipython.
In the 'pysh' mode, it acts as a fully functional system shell, even on Windows. Bash and friends suck on windows, but IPython truly shines there. It really makes the command prompt use of Windows feasible, with bash like filename completion etc. Being able to extend it with python functions (as opposed to separate scripts) is a killer feature as well.
I've actually replaced the command prompt launchers on my KDE desktop with 'ipython -p pysh' launchers.
Well, we were pragmatic, and the folks who thought they were the pragmatic ones weren't thinking through consequences all of the way to the end-game.
Still, it must be said that I can hardly think any more convincing example of the superiority of OSS than what just happened.
The question is where to go now? My preference would be GNU Arch, as it's more decentralized. But it may not be ready for this heavy a use, and I am hardly an expert in revision control.
Arch is probably the only one that will do. Or something that follows the arch protocol like 'bazaar'. Too bad bazaar-ng won't be ready in time... But with arch-like repositories, there is a minimal amount of lock-in.
Knoppix and Ubuntu are popular also.
Understatement of the week. Ubuntu is the top distro in distrowatch "page hit ranking" (with a big margin), if you look at the results in 3 month range.
The more Debian ignores the problems, and repeats that "everything is ok" (which Debian people often do), the more people will see that things are not going to change, get disillusioned, and switch away. The "only developers matter, Debian does not need users" attitude doesn't help either, even if it was true.
It's wise not to put all your eggs in one basket, but a lot of your arguments feels non the less as FUD and "chicken little" argumentation, since I can't see why they would want to put themselves out of business.
I guess it's the same instinct that makes me prefer open source software.
Also read this piece about sharecropping.
Gtk is LGPL which is more free than GPL
That's a matter of opinion.
Ok, let me clarify: LGPL is more free than GPL in the sense MIT and BSD licenses are more free than GPL. Where I come, how much you are allowed to do determines how free something is. LGPL allows you to do more than GPL.
Companies don't care about being dependant on TrollTech, because Qt is an extremely nice toolkit that saves them money on account of its great design, great documentation, great tutorial, great examples, etc.
Probably not - however, that should be the choice of the company, not something that would in practice be mandated for them by making Qt the default toolkit.
The point is that it's just not going to happen.
If you really think these euros is too much, all it tells is that either you have no idea what it costs to have people employed, or that you are a cheap bastard that want first class tool for nothing.
Or, I'm a company with 5000+ developers and if I suddenly decided to put them all into Linux application development, I would go bankrupt.
A large part of the appeal of Linux is the fact that you are not dependent on single vendor. Suddenly jumping on to become completely dependent on the mercy of Trolltech is not good business sense, even if it is a fact on life in Windows world.
What if Trolltech suddenly decided to go evil and put on a price tag of, say, $10000? Would your boss enjoy the fact that you either pay through the nose or GPL your application? The idea of open source is that if you don't like something, you can fork the product. You can fork Qt only in it's GPL incarnation.
I'm not at all saying that the current licensing of Qt is bad - it's a good business model for Trolltech that allows them to profit enough to put out a first-class toolkit, which allows me to run a slick and snappy KDE. It's a win-win.
On the other hand, it would be a complete disaster if Qt suddenly became the "default" toolkit for Linux. The situation would be worse than in Windows, where you can use native GUI toolkits without royalties.
It's a shame that KDE and Gnome do not both use Qt. It would eliminate almost all of the compatibility issues, save memory on hybrid desktops, and allow them to compete on things that really matter like UI design."
It would also eliminate the option of creating closed source applications without paying thousands of euros for Qt licenses (or at least apps that fit the general UI look and feel).
Not in million years. Companies don't want to be that dependent on Trolltech.
This comes from a KDE user (KDE 3.4 is a gem). But I'm also a developer, and I don't see Qt as *strategically* viable route to bring Linux desktop forward.
(For those that don't know, Gtk is LGPL which is more free than GPL, which is the license Qt uses).
To me it seems like anything that makes it easy for users to install random software off the internet to be a REALLY BAD THING
I think they can create a "special edition" of the software, that requires you to type "all hail the emperor TUX, of which much software floweth" every time you are trying to install something. Then it's just doable, but not excessively convenient.