is anyone else here sick of seeing people closely tied to the kde project taking cheap shots at the gnome people? back when kde 1 was released, it was the other way around. the gnome hackers/supporters were notorious about making derogatory remarks about the kde project, wheras the kde developers had more a reputation as "shut up and code" types. they proved they were better by writing better software.
but now several times within the last few months i have seen key kde people making cheap shots at the gnome project. this guy was constantly calling gnome unstable and hard to use. i use helix gnome, and for me it has been extremely stable and easy to use exactly the way i want to (my one big criticism of the kde group, btw) i can't say anything about ease of development for either environment, not having really done any (although coding for qt sucks ass IMO, or at least did, back in the 1.44 days. coding for gtk+ was way better). all of his shots at the gnome project about being unstable and hard to use are quite unwarranted.
and if this guy has a problem with people comparing te current stable version of gnome with the current stable version of kde, get over it. not everybody is out there downloading beta's or cvs builds so they can see what the next big thing is.
FWIW, i have downloaded and used kde2. first of all, it is not stable enough for regular use, unless you don't mind restarting your X session every now and then. it looks like it will defeinitely be a great product, and i would use it now except for one big beef. it's perfect if you use your environment the wway the kde developers do. i don't. i don't use kwrite, and i can't get it to open stuff in vim by default. (not easily anyway) i don't like the keybindings in their wm, and i can't set my own. i have two mice in my X configuration, but kde decides i only need one (and before you tell me this can't be a kde thing, they both work fine in everything else but kde). and of course none of the cool stuff in kde2 (except konqueror) can be used with any other window manager. i loved kde1 and gnome, because you could use all of the parts that you wanted and none of the parts you didn't. kde2 doesn't let you do that, and until i find a window manager that lets me use all of their cool stuff, or hack theirs to work the way i want it too (not sure which is a lesser task) i won't use it. easy to use doesn't mean squat if i can't use it the way i want to.
ok, something weird is going on here. i definitely hit preview on that one, and it did not look like that. one more try....
this statement in the judge's ruling surprised me: Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.
was this ever a part of the argument of either side? i can see how it would be beneficial to the MPAA to try and argue this interpretation of the case, but it would seem to be a very difficult claim to support. how could the judge make such a wildly inaccurate statement regarding the purpose and significance of this case?
this statement in the judge's ruling surprised me:
<i>Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.</i>
<BR><BR>
was this ever a part of the argument of either side? i can see how it would be beneficial to the MPAA to try and argue this interpretation of the case, but it would seem to be a very difficult claim to support. how could the judge make such a wildly inaccurate statement regarding the purpose and significance of this case?
any form of combustion forms nitrous oxides as a result. jet engines iirc are more notiorious than most (there being no particularly good way to tack a catalytic converter on the back of a jet engine, for rather obvious reasons) nitrous oxides are one of the many gases that are, or were at one time, suspected of being unfriendly to the ozone. while this is a minor issue for normal airliners, it is a much more hotly debated issue for the concorde (and any other high altitude jet aircraft) as they fly in the altitude range where these ozone depleting gases can do the most damage.
so yes, it's basically just a function of it's burning fuel, except that it's burning fuel at the altitude where it could potentially be most hazardous. i don't recall if this was ever proven or not, however.
you are really obsessed with this whole command line thing aren't you. go back and read the anti-mac paper again. they never said that this thing should be command line based. just that language should be able to be used as a method of describing things.
example: suppose you needed to look at the server logs from 3 of your webservers for saturday statistics over the last two months. you could sort by server, or by date, or in a gui with a lot of bells and whistles, maybe even by day of the week. but none of those is really what you would want. you would still have to hunt around through the list of logs picking out the ones of interest to you. But if you gui had a text box where you could type in "saturday logs from charlie,snoopy,lucy", then the system could show you what it thinks you want, and if necessary, you could give further specifications of what you needed to see.
the usefulness of natural language can be applied to a gui just as it can to a command line. the writers of the paper never advocated giving up the gui and going back to the command line. they merely argue for adding the power of language to the gui, since "Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts." their use of ls and other cli commands as an example should not be confused as a suggestion of how to build future systems.
i still use perl 5.005 since you can't compile vim with the "--enable-perl-interp" option with perl 5.6
being one version behind the current isn't all that unreasonable, especially when the current version involves major changes that other projects may need to catch up with. at least they're not still using 5.003 or something
your experience with ati cards is much different than mine. admittedly, i have never used my rage128 in windows, so i have no idea what it's drivers are like. but my previous ati card was the xpert@work. the drivers that came with this card worked perfectly straigt out of the box, and were never updated. i never once had a problem with it, and it is still being used today in my parents computer. i much preferred that to my voodoo3, for which new beta drivers were still being released over six months after i got the card (and it was not even new when i got it)
a few other people have said 3dfx. i have one and am happy with it, although i don't think it is what i would reccomend, especially if you are not planning on playing many games on it.
for 2D performance (i.e. an insanely huge desktop at hig res/refresh rates) matrox is probably that card to go with. for the longest time the XFree86 developers cited the matrox milleniums as the fastest drivers they had. i have personally never used a matrox, but i have had friends who were vey happy with them. i tend to buy ati video cards. i imagine it will be a while before this new one is well supported in linux, but i am quite happy with the xpert128 that i have now and the xpert@work (mach 64 rage 3d pro) that i had before this card.
ati and matrox both make very high quality and fairly affordable 2d cards with some 3d support under linux. for true 3d support, though, you should go with the aforementioned 3dfx cards, as thaqt is really the only way currently to get good open 3d support in linux.
quite frankly it's not nearly that simple. i couldcare less about the qt license, but i very much prefer the current stable release of gnome to the current stable release of kde. i've used both to great extent at one point or another, and i just like gnome better. and i'm pretty sure im not the only one. i would find it hard to believe that i am the only person in the world that uses gnome and doesnt care whether qt is free or not (especially since i have three other friends that i live with that also use gnome, and as far as i can tell could also not care less what license qt is released under)
i'm quite the agnostic when it comes to window managers, desktop environments, toolkits... i've used at one time or another windowmaker, afterstep, enlightenment and saw{mill|fish}, qt and gtk+, and gnome and kde. when the next version of kde comes out, i will probably try it out as well, and i may use it for some time. but i think it is ridiculous to say that kde would win hands down if qt were free, because there are a lot of people that just like gnome better. (and gtk+. good lord is qt ugly. it's a good thing they're adding theming support...) having used both, i much prefer gnome 1.2 and a slightly hacked gmc to kde/kfm 1.1.2 (and before anyone says that's not a fair comparison, those are the most current stable release of either platform, which is all i really care about)
as a last note, i will add that the gnome calculator absolutely blows compared to the kde calculater. for the longest time i kept kde installed just so i could use a decent calculator without having to dig around for my ti-85.
a windows port of xmms will not be necessary. there is little that aol can do that will prevent you from playing current mp3's in the next version of winamp. if you are familiar with the structure of winamp, you know that the program uses input plugins to support various different file formats. anything that aol wishes to do regarding secure music would have to be done at the input plugin level, since many of the formats supported by winamp (e.g. cd's and.wav files) have no security built in. the only way that aol could force you to use their secure format with winamp would be to remove the current mp3 plugin from the next version of winamp and only distribute winamp with their secure format plugin. however, if they did this, the mp3 format and the winamp plugin interface are documented (publicly in the case of winamp, i'm not sure about the mp3 codec) well enough for a third party to make and distribute their own mp3 plugin. aol will gain nothing and lose face to the users of winamp, and aol would not do this. the next version of winamp will still support mp3 as well as aol's new secure music format.
quite honestly, mp3 will always be around, and no corporation can make it go away (except maybe frauhauffer [sp?], but it's definately not in their interests to make that happen) there will always be players for mp3's, and there will always be encoders for mp3's. no one can make these go away, and so no one can force anyone to stop using mp3's, except by legal action in the case that they can prove that specific person to have mp3's that were illegitimately obtained. for all the talk that has been around for secure digital music formats, no one can force a person to use a secure format that does not offer significant advantages over the use of mp3, or vorbis, or whatever the best freely available non-encrypted music format of the time is.
that, by the way, is why it is important that someone develop a high quality, open video codec soon....
the significance of the fortran compiler is not necessarily because of any particular optimizing techniques that the compiler used. Rather the invention of the optimizing fortran compiler is significant because it was the first time that a compiler was written that could be as efficient or more efficient than a reasonably experience programmer doing his own hand rolled assembly. The compiler was written specifically with the goal of being efficient at numerical operations while still using normal mathematical notation (ie. w = x + y + z; as opposed to add w, x, y; add w, w, z; ) this allowed programmers to be much more efficient without sacrificing execution speed. this was a vastly innovative concept as the time, as the reigning concept at the time was that no good programmer would use a compiled language, it being too much slower than writing the program in straight assembler.
it was also instrumental in the vast popularity of the (IBM?) computer it was originally developed for and sold with.
disclaimer: this is all stuff that i remember from my programming languages class last year. it may not be completely correct, as i don't really know anything about fortran other than what i learned in that class...
a friend of mine was writing a simple assembler in Perl for a class project he was working on. the assembler consisted of two parts, the first being the preprocessor that would strip out comments and replace labels with addresses and such, and th second part being the actual assembler.
each part worked perfectly fine by itself, but for some reason the assembler as a whole was not working. finally he was fed up enough that in the middle of the program he wrote the preprocessed assembly out to a file and then read it all back in before continuing on with the program. it worked!!! this of course made no sense whatsoever, since he was merely writing the contents of an array to a fil and reading the exact same data back in. but for some reason that made the difference in whether or not the program would run successfully.
being rather confused at this point, he commented out the lines that he had just added to the program and ran it again. lo and behold, it still worked. but when he rmoved those lines entirely, it stopped working.
in the end, he turned in the project with the code in the middle still in place, commented out, preceded with a comment about how utterly strange it was and a warning that the commented code should not be removed for any reason...
only time i've ever seen comments affect the actuall execution of a program.....
depends which version of outlook you are using
on
David Faure Interview
·
· Score: 1
my understanding is that in older versions of outlook (ie outlok 97 and outlook express) one has to actually open/run the attachment. however, for the convenience of their users, microsoft added a feature to outlook 2000 that will automatically execute embedded scripts for you when you open the email. this actually isn't a new idea though, as the netscape email client has for some time had the ability to automatically execute javascript embedded in html emails (a feature that, thank goodness, was turned off by default)
my point was that whoever is responsible for setting up the boxes that the employees use (in most companies there is one person or small group of people who do this) can choose a default setup that they will use on their computers. now the default setup for abc company may not be the same as the default setup for xyz company, but it will be the same throughout abc company and is therefore "a default". anybody new at abc company should therefore have an entire company of people who can help them out if they have a problem.
besides, most of the new people have with linux is administration: how difficult is it for some one who is familiar with windows to figure out how to use kde or gnome? there is still a start button, pretty much the same window controls and the desktop. the problems they have are "how do i get my sound to work right?" and "how do i get this to print?" that's a part of making a system easy to administer. maybe you call it easy to use, but its the same thing....
In any case, from your comments I gather that you are not working in an ordinary office since you are all running linux. This thread is about how to use stuff like linux in a common office situation.
i would say it was a common enough office situation. my department was the only department that used linux. most of the rest used windows, and a few people used macs. we had a solaris box running sendmail/pop for our email, so we avoided the whole ms exchange issue, but we did have to deal with the office suite issue. in the end we managed to get the rest of the company to accept the fact that if they were sending us a document that we needed to see, they needed to save it in a format that was cross platform compatible: i.e. save documents as rtf, or use the "save as html" feature that, as far as i know, is provided on any decent office suite.
So anyway, in summary, my point was that a) if you want to use linux in your company, you can choose a standard install that enough of the people are comfortable with and is reasonably easy to use, and then people without experience have people to ask, because everyone has a decent grasp of the company's standard install. b) if there are enough people in the company who don't use microsoft office, you can have the people who do use office to save in standard/open formats. (word does save in other formats than.doc you know...)
Linux is just too customizable. It looks and feels different on nearly each desktop. That's not good if you have an office full of non techie people who need to work with the software.
I've seen this argument way too many times, and it is just plain wrong. customizeability is not a bad thing. i don't know about mac, but windows can also be customized to the point that no one else would be able to use it if one wants to. i have been in a company where my entire department used linux, including about half a dozen people who had little to no experience using administering linux. there is always a default setup for a linux system. at my company it was debian and windowmaker (the sysadmin being a big windowmaker fan and a debian user) as long as there is somebody there who knows how to administer and provide support for this default setup that's all you need. He just made it clear that anyone who chose to use something else as their setup had to be able to admin their own boxes. of course this was long enough ago that anyone who knew how to setup and customize their own box was probably very well capable of administering it themselves, but at any rate, there were only two of us in the department that chose to use a different setup, both of us preferring redhat over debian.
at any rate, your problem of linux being "too customizable" is not a problem at all. as long as someone chooses a standard install and makes sure that everyone who wants to depart from that standard knows that they are on their own, people who dont know what they are doing will be able to get plenty of support.
My only question is what happens in the cases of a virus like the famed "Melissa" who automatically passes it's self around? "
um, perhaps i am missing something here, but isn't that the definition of a virus? people seem to have forgotten what a computer viru is, and generally just associate "virus" with malicious program. a virus is a program or part of a program whose primary purpose is to propagate itself to other programs/computers. (i say programs because in the old days before outlook and office, viruses could only affect executable files, and when those executable files were run, they would infect other executable files on the disk) it doesn't have to be malicious. you might never even know you have one, even though it has put copies of itself all over your computer and everyone's you know.
anyway, the point to all of this is that the question "what about viruses that spread themselves?" is a dumb question, because if it doesn't spread itself, it is not a virus. malicious code perhaps, but not a virus...
i find it irrratating that the only bugs he mentions about xfree 4.0 are related to playing games. because the article isn't directed towards gamers. at the end he made a comment that "i doubt you're a serious cutting edge linux user if you're not using 4.0". god forbid there be cutting edge users that dont use their linux boxen for games. what about the bugs that i care about? like that fact that when i ctrl-alt-f1 to another virtual terminal and then ctrl-alt-f7 back to x, the screen is all black until i can trick the monitor into switching modes? (activating xscreensaver seems to do the trick). or the fact that i can't use an image with black in it as my desktop wallpaper, because it not ever redraw that area of the desktop? there are plenty of bugs other than the ones he mentioned. and despite the recent kick for games on linux, there are still plenty of us who dont use linux for games.
that being said, i use xfree 4.0 and am fairly happy with it. it is fairly stable. i have never had it crash on me, and all of the bugs that i have found are pretty much just minor annoyances. (although it would be nice to be able to use transparent Eterms again....
it seems to have been said enough times already but:
the comments containing the entire document (or large portions thereof) should be removed. they are microsoft documents, and posting them is against any copyright law, DMCA or not... i liked the suggestion of somebody further up that said they should be replaced with something like: this text removed because it was a verbatim reproduction of copyrighted material that the copyright owner asked us to remove. any additional comments the user made could be retained, just replace the text of the document.
On the otherhand, the links to the document and the instructions on how to bypass the agreement should not be taken down. i dont think microsoft has any legitimate right to ask that those be removed, and if they insist on persuing this, i think it's a battle worth fighting.
i do believe in copyrights and intellectual property, but there need to be some limits to what the copyright holders can get away with.
the suit against napster is more concerned with napster the server than it is with napster the software. gtknapster, knapster, gnomenapster, xnapster, etc. all use the same napster server. if this lawsuit would succeed in shutting down the napster server, there would be no point and no need for the riaa or metallica to come down on the authors of *napster, because all of these dozens of napster clients are now useless.
while i am a very strong believer in free software, i still think there is a very important place for proprietary software. for example:
solaris is proprietary software. even if you can get the source now, it is still proprietary. many large internet companies use high end sparc hardware (ie enterprize 5K or 10K) to run their sites. on this hardware, they run solaris, because nothing else will measure up to their needs. 5 years from now, there will be free operating systems that can outperform the current version of solaris on this high end hardware. by that time sun had better have developed something new, or solaris will die out.
as long as proprietary vendors offer products that have some advantage in quality or performance over what is available freely, and are responsive to costomers needs, problems, etc. then i think they will survive, and do well.
in my eyes, the value of free software is that it gives us a choice, and therefore keeps proprietary vendors honest about what they do, and forces them to continue to offer better products, or else they will be surpassed by free products.
now to the question: do you feel that there is any value or any place at all for proprietary software? from what i have read of your philosophy, you seem to believe that all software should be free, and that success for the FSF would mean nothing short of the elimination of proprietary software. do you really see this as being desirable or reasonable? i have seen you liken using proprietary software to being slaves to the software vendors. but the way i see it, we are not their slaves as long as we have a choice. the company i work for uses oracle for our database. i do not feel that we are slaves to oracle. we have the choice of a number of different databases to use, some of them free. and if oracle is not responsive enough to what we need as a customer we will leave.
to me, the purpose of free software should be to compete with proprietary vendors to get them to offer better products. if proprietary vendors die out, then free software will begin to stagnate without competition, just as many proprietary software vendors had begun to stagnate before the explosion of free and open source software.
Yes, I know this is a beta, but I have yet to see any program improve 200% over a preview version, which is what this needs.
i have actually seen this happen in one program before. ie4 improved in speed several orders of magnitude between the first preview releases and the actual released browser. although to be fair to ie, most of he speed improvement was in the "desktop integration" area, not the browser itself (meaning the preview releases slowed down your whole system, not just the web browser). the other thing was that the preview releases allowed you to do a lot of things with the desktop integration that was removed from the final release, presumably because there was no way that you could do what they were trying to do without crushing even the most modern hardware at the time.
still, that kind of speed increase between a preview and a release product is possible, but probably only with a sacrifice in features.
Seeing that KDE runs on Qt, if Qt/Embedded is source compatible, then the problem is solved. KDE on non-X displays.
whoa... hold on a second here. i haven't looked at the kde code enough to prove this, but i kinda doubt that kde uses only qt. im pretty sure kde uses a lot of X calls as well. so if you have this new qt which doesn't use X, kde will not automatically compile for you. i may be wrong about this, and i would appreciate if someone would verify this for me, but i don't think kde can do all of the things it does based solely on the qt libs.
but that's actually my secondary point. the more important part is this: For set top boxes, and consumer Linux installations, windowing can be provided by KDE, or any other Window Manager that is ported to Qt.
now this i do know enough about to comment on, because i have worked with window manager code before. just porting a window manager to qt will do squat for you. in the most basic sense, the window manager does very little really. all it does is give you the means to move your windows around and resize them, and maybe close/shade/iconify them. X is what actually does the work of creating and displaying the windows. the wondow manager uses X library calls to modify the windows state, and do the other things it does. take away x, and oops! our wondow manager is now useless. want proof? run x without starting a windowmanager. see, you still get all of your windows, you just can't move them around. and you lose al of the little control options your window manager gives you. now try starting your window manager without x? what's that? you cant? ohhh.... ok, this isn't really proof, but it does illustrate my point. with this qt, the best you could do is a sort of MDI thing. you would write one big qt app that swallows smaller ones, kinda like the gnome control center. but this doesn't completely work, because all of your pre written qt apps wouldn't run inside this monster app. you'd need to rewrite them at least a little bit to make them compatible with an MDI scheme.
> Sure it's nice for embedded stuff, but a lot of people seem to have the idea that they're getting a small, fast, free X11 replacement for their desktops. And for those who are looking to run their Qt/KDE applications, they are.
nope, sorry. you are right about the framebuffer thing providing the video drivers, but it doesn't provide the windowing system for you, and kde, while it is an excellent desktop, is not a windowing system. so at best, you'd be able to run one app fullscreen on each of your 6 or so consoles, or run screen and switch between n different fullscreen apps, just like you would use it now to switch between a bunch of curses programs running on the console. (or the previously mentioned MDI app, with it's custom "applets")
this is supposed to be a stable release, but they are acknowledging that there is a lot of new stuff in the code base, radically new stuff at that, and there are chances that they missed things. in fact it's probably likely. the 3.3.x series has a long history, and it is likely that any serious bug in that series have been found and squished long long ago. if you are only interested in stablilty and don't need any of the new features of XFree 4.0, you're probably better off staying with 3.3.x for a while longer. this is not to say anything bad about 4.0. it's just common sense. it's the same reason that a lot of people running linux 2.0 on production systems waited until well into the 2.2.x cycle before they switched over to 2.2. for that matter, linux 2.2.0, a supposedly stable release was replaced by 2.2.1 in barely a days time. anyway, the point of this rambling is that in a major new release, it's impossible to guarantee perfect stability, because in any major new chunk of code, there will always be something that got overlooked along the way.
Slashdot Mirror
is anyone else here sick of seeing people closely tied to the kde project taking cheap shots at the gnome people? back when kde 1 was released, it was the other way around. the gnome hackers/supporters were notorious about making derogatory remarks about the kde project, wheras the kde developers had more a reputation as "shut up and code" types. they proved they were better by writing better software.
but now several times within the last few months i have seen key kde people making cheap shots at the gnome project. this guy was constantly calling gnome unstable and hard to use. i use helix gnome, and for me it has been extremely stable and easy to use exactly the way i want to (my one big criticism of the kde group, btw) i can't say anything about ease of development for either environment, not having really done any (although coding for qt sucks ass IMO, or at least did, back in the 1.44 days. coding for gtk+ was way better). all of his shots at the gnome project about being unstable and hard to use are quite unwarranted.
and if this guy has a problem with people comparing te current stable version of gnome with the current stable version of kde, get over it. not everybody is out there downloading beta's or cvs builds so they can see what the next big thing is.
FWIW, i have downloaded and used kde2. first of all, it is not stable enough for regular use, unless you don't mind restarting your X session every now and then. it looks like it will defeinitely be a great product, and i would use it now except for one big beef. it's perfect if you use your environment the wway the kde developers do. i don't. i don't use kwrite, and i can't get it to open stuff in vim by default. (not easily anyway) i don't like the keybindings in their wm, and i can't set my own. i have two mice in my X configuration, but kde decides i only need one (and before you tell me this can't be a kde thing, they both work fine in everything else but kde). and of course none of the cool stuff in kde2 (except konqueror) can be used with any other window manager. i loved kde1 and gnome, because you could use all of the parts that you wanted and none of the parts you didn't. kde2 doesn't let you do that, and until i find a window manager that lets me use all of their cool stuff, or hack theirs to work the way i want it too (not sure which is a lesser task) i won't use it. easy to use doesn't mean squat if i can't use it the way i want to.
(posted from konqueror 1.92)
ok, something weird is going on here. i definitely hit preview on that one, and it did not look like that. one more try....
this statement in the judge's ruling surprised me:
Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.
was this ever a part of the argument of either side? i can see how it would be beneficial to the MPAA to try and argue this interpretation of the case, but it would seem to be a very difficult claim to support. how could the judge make such a wildly inaccurate statement regarding the purpose and significance of this case?
this statement in the judge's ruling surprised me:
<i>Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.</i>
<BR><BR>
was this ever a part of the argument of either side? i can see how it would be beneficial to the MPAA to try and argue this interpretation of the case, but it would seem to be a very difficult claim to support. how could the judge make such a wildly inaccurate statement regarding the purpose and significance of this case?
any form of combustion forms nitrous oxides as a result. jet engines iirc are more notiorious than most (there being no particularly good way to tack a catalytic converter on the back of a jet engine, for rather obvious reasons) nitrous oxides are one of the many gases that are, or were at one time, suspected of being unfriendly to the ozone. while this is a minor issue for normal airliners, it is a much more hotly debated issue for the concorde (and any other high altitude jet aircraft) as they fly in the altitude range where these ozone depleting gases can do the most damage.
so yes, it's basically just a function of it's burning fuel, except that it's burning fuel at the altitude where it could potentially be most hazardous. i don't recall if this was ever proven or not, however.
you are really obsessed with this whole command line thing aren't you. go back and read the anti-mac paper again. they never said that this thing should be command line based. just that language should be able to be used as a method of describing things.
example:
suppose you needed to look at the server logs from 3 of your webservers for saturday statistics over the last two months. you could sort by server, or by date, or in a gui with a lot of bells and whistles, maybe even by day of the week. but none of those is really what you would want. you would still have to hunt around through the list of logs picking out the ones of interest to you. But if you gui had a text box where you could type in "saturday logs from charlie,snoopy,lucy", then the system could show you what it thinks you want, and if necessary, you could give further specifications of what you needed to see.
the usefulness of natural language can be applied to a gui just as it can to a command line. the writers of the paper never advocated giving up the gui and going back to the command line. they merely argue for adding the power of language to the gui, since "Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts." their use of ls and other cli commands as an example should not be confused as a suggestion of how to build future systems.
i still use perl 5.005 since you can't compile vim with the "--enable-perl-interp" option with perl 5.6
being one version behind the current isn't all that unreasonable, especially when the current version involves major changes that other projects may need to catch up with. at least they're not still using 5.003 or something
your experience with ati cards is much different than mine. admittedly, i have never used my rage128 in windows, so i have no idea what it's drivers are like. but my previous ati card was the xpert@work. the drivers that came with this card worked perfectly straigt out of the box, and were never updated. i never once had a problem with it, and it is still being used today in my parents computer. i much preferred that to my voodoo3, for which new beta drivers were still being released over six months after i got the card (and it was not even new when i got it)
a few other people have said 3dfx. i have one and am happy with it, although i don't think it is what i would reccomend, especially if you are not planning on playing many games on it.
for 2D performance (i.e. an insanely huge desktop at hig res/refresh rates) matrox is probably that card to go with. for the longest time the XFree86 developers cited the matrox milleniums as the fastest drivers they had. i have personally never used a matrox, but i have had friends who were vey happy with them. i tend to buy ati video cards. i imagine it will be a while before this new one is well supported in linux, but i am quite happy with the xpert128 that i have now and the xpert@work (mach 64 rage 3d pro) that i had before this card.
ati and matrox both make very high quality and fairly affordable 2d cards with some 3d support under linux. for true 3d support, though, you should go with the aforementioned 3dfx cards, as thaqt is really the only way currently to get good open 3d support in linux.
Want KDE to win? Make Qt free. Game over.
quite frankly it's not nearly that simple. i couldcare less about the qt license, but i very much prefer the current stable release of gnome to the current stable release of kde. i've used both to great extent at one point or another, and i just like gnome better. and i'm pretty sure im not the only one. i would find it hard to believe that i am the only person in the world that uses gnome and doesnt care whether qt is free or not (especially since i have three other friends that i live with that also use gnome, and as far as i can tell could also not care less what license qt is released under)
i'm quite the agnostic when it comes to window managers, desktop environments, toolkits... i've used at one time or another windowmaker, afterstep, enlightenment and saw{mill|fish}, qt and gtk+, and gnome and kde. when the next version of kde comes out, i will probably try it out as well, and i may use it for some time. but i think it is ridiculous to say that kde would win hands down if qt were free, because there are a lot of people that just like gnome better. (and gtk+. good lord is qt ugly. it's a good thing they're adding theming support...) having used both, i much prefer gnome 1.2 and a slightly hacked gmc to kde/kfm 1.1.2 (and before anyone says that's not a fair comparison, those are the most current stable release of either platform, which is all i really care about)
as a last note, i will add that the gnome calculator absolutely blows compared to the kde calculater. for the longest time i kept kde installed just so i could use a decent calculator without having to dig around for my ti-85.
a windows port of xmms will not be necessary. there is little that aol can do that will prevent you from playing current mp3's in the next version of winamp. if you are familiar with the structure of winamp, you know that the program uses input plugins to support various different file formats. anything that aol wishes to do regarding secure music would have to be done at the input plugin level, since many of the formats supported by winamp (e.g. cd's and .wav files) have no security built in. the only way that aol could force you to use their secure format with winamp would be to remove the current mp3 plugin from the next version of winamp and only distribute winamp with their secure format plugin. however, if they did this, the mp3 format and the winamp plugin interface are documented (publicly in the case of winamp, i'm not sure about the mp3 codec) well enough for a third party to make and distribute their own mp3 plugin. aol will gain nothing and lose face to the users of winamp, and aol would not do this. the next version of winamp will still support mp3 as well as aol's new secure music format.
quite honestly, mp3 will always be around, and no corporation can make it go away (except maybe frauhauffer [sp?], but it's definately not in their interests to make that happen) there will always be players for mp3's, and there will always be encoders for mp3's. no one can make these go away, and so no one can force anyone to stop using mp3's, except by legal action in the case that they can prove that specific person to have mp3's that were illegitimately obtained. for all the talk that has been around for secure digital music formats, no one can force a person to use a secure format that does not offer significant advantages over the use of mp3, or vorbis, or whatever the best freely available non-encrypted music format of the time is.
that, by the way, is why it is important that someone develop a high quality, open video codec soon....
the significance of the fortran compiler is not necessarily because of any particular optimizing techniques that the compiler used. Rather the invention of the optimizing fortran compiler is significant because it was the first time that a compiler was written that could be as efficient or more efficient than a reasonably experience programmer doing his own hand rolled assembly. The compiler was written specifically with the goal of being efficient at numerical operations while still using normal mathematical notation (ie. w = x + y + z; as opposed to add w, x, y; add w, w, z; ) this allowed programmers to be much more efficient without sacrificing execution speed. this was a vastly innovative concept as the time, as the reigning concept at the time was that no good programmer would use a compiled language, it being too much slower than writing the program in straight assembler.
it was also instrumental in the vast popularity of the (IBM?) computer it was originally developed for and sold with.
disclaimer: this is all stuff that i remember from my programming languages class last year. it may not be completely correct, as i don't really know anything about fortran other than what i learned in that class...
a friend of mine was writing a simple assembler in Perl for a class project he was working on. the assembler consisted of two parts, the first being the preprocessor that would strip out comments and replace labels with addresses and such, and th second part being the actual assembler.
each part worked perfectly fine by itself, but for some reason the assembler as a whole was not working. finally he was fed up enough that in the middle of the program he wrote the preprocessed assembly out to a file and then read it all back in before continuing on with the program. it worked!!! this of course made no sense whatsoever, since he was merely writing the contents of an array to a fil and reading the exact same data back in. but for some reason that made the difference in whether or not the program would run successfully.
being rather confused at this point, he commented out the lines that he had just added to the program and ran it again. lo and behold, it still worked. but when he rmoved those lines entirely, it stopped working.
in the end, he turned in the project with the code in the middle still in place, commented out, preceded with a comment about how utterly strange it was and a warning that the commented code should not be removed for any reason...
only time i've ever seen comments affect the actuall execution of a program.....
my understanding is that in older versions of outlook (ie outlok 97 and outlook express) one has to actually open/run the attachment. however, for the convenience of their users, microsoft added a feature to outlook 2000 that will automatically execute embedded scripts for you when you open the email. this actually isn't a new idea though, as the netscape email client has for some time had the ability to automatically execute javascript embedded in html emails (a feature that, thank goodness, was turned off by default)
my point was that whoever is responsible for setting up the boxes that the employees use (in most companies there is one person or small group of people who do this) can choose a default setup that they will use on their computers. now the default setup for abc company may not be the same as the default setup for xyz company, but it will be the same throughout abc company and is therefore "a default". anybody new at abc company should therefore have an entire company of people who can help them out if they have a problem.
.doc you know...)
besides, most of the new people have with linux is administration: how difficult is it for some one who is familiar with windows to figure out how to use kde or gnome? there is still a start button, pretty much the same window controls and the desktop. the problems they have are "how do i get my sound to work right?" and "how do i get this to print?" that's a part of making a system easy to administer. maybe you call it easy to use, but its the same thing....
In any case, from your comments I gather that you are not working in an ordinary office since you are all running linux. This thread is about how to use stuff like linux in a common office situation.
i would say it was a common enough office situation. my department was the only department that used linux. most of the rest used windows, and a few people used macs. we had a solaris box running sendmail/pop for our email, so we avoided the whole ms exchange issue, but we did have to deal with the office suite issue. in the end we managed to get the rest of the company to accept the fact that if they were sending us a document that we needed to see, they needed to save it in a format that was cross platform compatible: i.e. save documents as rtf, or use the "save as html" feature that, as far as i know, is provided on any decent office suite.
So anyway, in summary, my point was that
a) if you want to use linux in your company, you can choose a standard install that enough of the people are comfortable with and is reasonably easy to use, and then people without experience have people to ask, because everyone has a decent grasp of the company's standard install.
b) if there are enough people in the company who don't use microsoft office, you can have the people who do use office to save in standard/open formats. (word does save in other formats than
Linux is just too customizable. It looks and feels different on nearly each desktop. That's not good if you have an office full of non techie people who need to work with the software.
I've seen this argument way too many times, and it is just plain wrong. customizeability is not a bad thing. i don't know about mac, but windows can also be customized to the point that no one else would be able to use it if one wants to. i have been in a company where my entire department used linux, including about half a dozen people who had little to no experience using administering linux. there is always a default setup for a linux system. at my company it was debian and windowmaker (the sysadmin being a big windowmaker fan and a debian user) as long as there is somebody there who knows how to administer and provide support for this default setup that's all you need. He just made it clear that anyone who chose to use something else as their setup had to be able to admin their own boxes. of course this was long enough ago that anyone who knew how to setup and customize their own box was probably very well capable of administering it themselves, but at any rate, there were only two of us in the department that chose to use a different setup, both of us preferring redhat over debian.
at any rate, your problem of linux being "too customizable" is not a problem at all. as long as someone chooses a standard install and makes sure that everyone who wants to depart from that standard knows that they are on their own, people who dont know what they are doing will be able to get plenty of support.
your comment reminds me of a quote i found on this page (discussing duff's device) that said:
"A second poster tried the test, but botched the implementation, proving only that with diligence it is possible to make anything run slowly."
My only question is what happens in the cases of a virus like the famed "Melissa" who automatically passes it's self around? "
um, perhaps i am missing something here, but isn't that the definition of a virus? people seem to have forgotten what a computer viru is, and generally just associate "virus" with malicious program. a virus is a program or part of a program whose primary purpose is to propagate itself to other programs/computers. (i say programs because in the old days before outlook and office, viruses could only affect executable files, and when those executable files were run, they would infect other executable files on the disk) it doesn't have to be malicious. you might never even know you have one, even though it has put copies of itself all over your computer and everyone's you know.
anyway, the point to all of this is that the question "what about viruses that spread themselves?" is a dumb question, because if it doesn't spread itself, it is not a virus. malicious code perhaps, but not a virus...
it would figure that x would have to crash on me right after i post that, just to spite me...
i find it irrratating that the only bugs he mentions about xfree 4.0 are related to playing games. because the article isn't directed towards gamers. at the end he made a comment that "i doubt you're a serious cutting edge linux user if you're not using 4.0". god forbid there be cutting edge users that dont use their linux boxen for games. what about the bugs that i care about? like that fact that when i ctrl-alt-f1 to another virtual terminal and then ctrl-alt-f7 back to x, the screen is all black until i can trick the monitor into switching modes? (activating xscreensaver seems to do the trick). or the fact that i can't use an image with black in it as my desktop wallpaper, because it not ever redraw that area of the desktop? there are plenty of bugs other than the ones he mentioned. and despite the recent kick for games on linux, there are still plenty of us who dont use linux for games.
that being said, i use xfree 4.0 and am fairly happy with it. it is fairly stable. i have never had it crash on me, and all of the bugs that i have found are pretty much just minor annoyances. (although it would be nice to be able to use transparent Eterms again....
it seems to have been said enough times already but:
the comments containing the entire document (or large portions thereof) should be removed. they are microsoft documents, and posting them is against any copyright law, DMCA or not... i liked the suggestion of somebody further up that said they should be replaced with something like:
this text removed because it was a verbatim reproduction of copyrighted material that the copyright owner asked us to remove.
any additional comments the user made could be retained, just replace the text of the document.
On the otherhand, the links to the document and the instructions on how to bypass the agreement should not be taken down. i dont think microsoft has any legitimate right to ask that those be removed, and if they insist on persuing this, i think it's a battle worth fighting.
i do believe in copyrights and intellectual property, but there need to be some limits to what the copyright holders can get away with.
the suit against napster is more concerned with napster the server than it is with napster the software. gtknapster, knapster, gnomenapster, xnapster, etc. all use the same napster server. if this lawsuit would succeed in shutting down the napster server, there would be no point and no need for the riaa or metallica to come down on the authors of *napster, because all of these dozens of napster clients are now useless.
while i am a very strong believer in free software, i still think there is a very important place for proprietary software. for example:
solaris is proprietary software. even if you can get the source now, it is still proprietary. many large internet companies use high end sparc hardware (ie enterprize 5K or 10K) to run their sites. on this hardware, they run solaris, because nothing else will measure up to their needs. 5 years from now, there will be free operating systems that can outperform the current version of solaris on this high end hardware. by that time sun had better have developed something new, or solaris will die out.
as long as proprietary vendors offer products that have some advantage in quality or performance over what is available freely, and are responsive to costomers needs, problems, etc. then i think they will survive, and do well.
in my eyes, the value of free software is that it gives us a choice, and therefore keeps proprietary vendors honest about what they do, and forces them to continue to offer better products, or else they will be surpassed by free products.
now to the question:
do you feel that there is any value or any place at all for proprietary software? from what i have read of your philosophy, you seem to believe that all software should be free, and that success for the FSF would mean nothing short of the elimination of proprietary software. do you really see this as being desirable or reasonable? i have seen you liken using proprietary software to being slaves to the software vendors. but the way i see it, we are not their slaves as long as we have a choice. the company i work for uses oracle for our database. i do not feel that we are slaves to oracle. we have the choice of a number of different databases to use, some of them free. and if oracle is not responsive enough to what we need as a customer we will leave.
to me, the purpose of free software should be to compete with proprietary vendors to get them to offer better products. if proprietary vendors die out, then free software will begin to stagnate without competition, just as many proprietary software vendors had begun to stagnate before the explosion of free and open source software.
Yes, I know this is a beta, but I have yet to see any program improve 200% over a preview version, which is what this needs.
i have actually seen this happen in one program before. ie4 improved in speed several orders of magnitude between the first preview releases and the actual released browser. although to be fair to ie, most of he speed improvement was in the "desktop integration" area, not the browser itself (meaning the preview releases slowed down your whole system, not just the web browser). the other thing was that the preview releases allowed you to do a lot of things with the desktop integration that was removed from the final release, presumably because there was no way that you could do what they were trying to do without crushing even the most modern hardware at the time.
still, that kind of speed increase between a preview and a release product is possible, but probably only with a sacrifice in features.
Seeing that KDE runs on Qt, if Qt/Embedded is source compatible, then the problem is solved. KDE on non-X displays.
whoa... hold on a second here. i haven't looked at the kde code enough to prove this, but i kinda doubt that kde uses only qt. im pretty sure kde uses a lot of X calls as well. so if you have this new qt which doesn't use X, kde will not automatically compile for you. i may be wrong about this, and i would appreciate if someone would verify this for me, but i don't think kde can do all of the things it does based solely on the qt libs.
but that's actually my secondary point. the more important part is this: For set top boxes, and consumer Linux installations, windowing can be provided by KDE, or any other Window Manager that is ported to Qt.
now this i do know enough about to comment on, because i have worked with window manager code before. just porting a window manager to qt will do squat for you. in the most basic sense, the window manager does very little really. all it does is give you the means to move your windows around and resize them, and maybe close/shade/iconify them. X is what actually does the work of creating and displaying the windows. the wondow manager uses X library calls to modify the windows state, and do the other things it does. take away x, and oops! our wondow manager is now useless. want proof? run x without starting a windowmanager. see, you still get all of your windows, you just can't move them around. and you lose al of the little control options your window manager gives you. now try starting your window manager without x? what's that? you cant? ohhh.... ok, this isn't really proof, but it does illustrate my point. with this qt, the best you could do is a sort of MDI thing. you would write one big qt app that swallows smaller ones, kinda like the gnome control center. but this doesn't completely work, because all of your pre written qt apps wouldn't run inside this monster app. you'd need to rewrite them at least a little bit to make them compatible with an MDI scheme.
> Sure it's nice for embedded stuff, but a lot of people seem to have the idea that they're getting a small, fast, free X11 replacement for their desktops.
And for those who are looking to run their Qt/KDE applications, they are.
nope, sorry. you are right about the framebuffer thing providing the video drivers, but it doesn't provide the windowing system for you, and kde, while it is an excellent desktop, is not a windowing system. so at best, you'd be able to run one app fullscreen on each of your 6 or so consoles, or run screen and switch between n different fullscreen apps, just like you would use it now to switch between a bunch of curses programs running on the console. (or the previously mentioned MDI app, with it's custom "applets")
this is supposed to be a stable release, but they are acknowledging that there is a lot of new stuff in the code base, radically new stuff at that, and there are chances that they missed things. in fact it's probably likely. the 3.3.x series has a long history, and it is likely that any serious bug in that series have been found and squished long long ago. if you are only interested in stablilty and don't need any of the new features of XFree 4.0, you're probably better off staying with 3.3.x for a while longer. this is not to say anything bad about 4.0. it's just common sense. it's the same reason that a lot of people running linux 2.0 on production systems waited until well into the 2.2.x cycle before they switched over to 2.2. for that matter, linux 2.2.0, a supposedly stable release was replaced by 2.2.1 in barely a days time. anyway, the point of this rambling is that in a major new release, it's impossible to guarantee perfect stability, because in any major new chunk of code, there will always be something that got overlooked along the way.