The problem he would have had would have bin in how to print his pictures. There are no printers that can match a good platinum photo paper. And even if you could get some kind of digital enlarger to do the printing process the gradation curve of digital images looks different from that of photographic films and the match between photographic paper and the digital negative would have bin much harder. And mathing image, negative and print was what the zone system that ansel adamsn developed and used was good for. So I suppose he would have used old fashioned photographic processes after all.
This is not to say that digital photography have no value. Most photographers doesn't have the time or assistants to produce the fine quality prints like Ansel Adams did for his exhibitions, and for them digigal photograpy is j ust fine.
Perhaps it's a good thing that they don't add KDE. That way people can install a KDE that works like KDE was intended to by its developers.
I don't know how many times I have had unprintable thaughts about Red Hat tweaking KDE to something unrecognizable. Since RH7.2 I havn't even bothered to install the RH packages and instead compiled KDE from source.
Now it's not only KDE that gets maltreaded by RH and other distros, the same can be said about Gnome in most distros including RH.
I wish that companies that wanted to contribute to the Linux GUI would do so by contributing to KDE, Gnome or whatever GUI they feel like tweaking. Users should not be forced to learn Gnome, KDE on RH, Gnome, KDE on Suse, Gnome on Sun because each distro tweaks it beyond all recognition They should just have to learn Gnome (or whatever GUI the favor)
Hope that Sun has made a better job in preserving the Gnome feeling in their new java desktop than RH have done in the past.
Even if you pay money for a SCO fire ensurance you would still have to follow GPL as SCO doen't own the rigths to the major part of Linux, if the own any of it at all that is.
And if the SCO licence and GPL is incompatible (very likely) you can't legally use Linux at all.
Unfortunately, they can still distribute other GPLed software e.g. samba. But on the other hand, if SCO loses, there will not be any SCO when IBM and Red Hat are done with them.
The price of QT licences is hardly going to stop commersial use. Good development tools like QT pay for themselves very quickly in less spent developer time.
But you are probably right, they will most likely pick Gnome. They will do it for usability reasons. The average desktop user can't or won't handle all that configurability that is offered by KDE.
As a long time KDE user I feel that this is quite sad. It is sad because I don't know how many times the KDE people have tried to rearange the control panel to make it more usable, but failed to address things that affect everyday work much more than system configuration. I'm thinking about having single click to open things as default, even though usability studies shows that people can't handle it. I think of far too long right menu button menus etc. KDE is full of such things and it makes it the choise of the geek. But unfortunately there are too few geeks in the world to make KDE a commersial success.
The windows way of doing things have become a defacto standard that it is too late to change. Whatever the future free desktop for common use will look like, it will be very similar to windows, just like every car have a steering wheel, brake, and accellerator in standard places the defacto standard for how a computer desktop should behave.
On the other hand, Gnome offers a lot of eye candy so perhaps I could get used to it in case it was to become the defacto standard for the free desctop.
The important thing is that we get a standard that commercial developers can develop for. Both KDE and Gnome are good choises for such a standard, at least provided the KDE people provide default settings that people are more accustomed to.
Both Gnome and KDE have some rough edges. What's needed is not dropping Gnome or KDE. Instead we need to make the choise between the two be a choise for developers and not for users.
That is, let Gnome be skinnable to look like KDE, and KDE skinnable to look like Gnome. Then make sure that drag & drop etc work well between the two environments. By doing this the users would have a large set of applications that worked well and looked good together on the end user desktop.
One of the few things that is actually better in Fedora than in previous Redhat products is that you can use apt and yum archives as sources for the redhat up2date tool.
The distro also ships with yum by default. Like with apt-get this simplyfies package and depandency finding a lot. If you prefer apt-get that is avilable too, but the functionality is very similar.
You probably havn't tried Linux for a while. Nowdays things usually work directly. This is why the poor quality of Fedora is news worth mentioning.
I tried to install it on my old IBM Thinkpad 600 and it failed to automacically recognize both my sound card, my screen, and my network card. All of them was identified perfectly in Fedora predecessers RH 7.2, 7.3, 8 and 9.
Now I finally got it to work, but it requred some tinkering that a newbie p but robably wouldn't have figured out how to do. In all fairness, it was not harder than installing winNT4 that it came with. But just the same a big step backwards for Linux.
Yes, but you will also have to pay saleries to your developers. If you can cut down development time, you will not only save money, you will also get a shorter time to market.
Normally, you would also have marketing costs that have to be paid before any gain can be made from your development efforts. These costs are normally way bigger than the cost of the QT-licnece.
If you can't afford such comparably small fee as the QT licence before getting into a software project you should seriously think twise about what you are getting into, or try to get some kind of financial backing.
The worst part is not the extra hazzle activation causes, but that it may lock you out from your own intellectual property. And when I say property I don't mean the program you have licenced, but the documents you have created using it.
What do you do if the company you have licenced your software from goes out of business, and you need to reinstall the software on a new computer? What do you do if they no longer support the product? What if communicatios with the company is broken due to war or other circumstances out of your control?
Even if Microsoft somehow manages to show that they are less expensive, they do not fulfil the requrements of open well documented document formats. This is needed for free exchange of information between the government and the citizens. Such information exchange is essential to the democratic process in the digital age.
This is a great improvement of free web authoring tools, but today most websites do not consist of static pages. This worries me as this tool doesn't seam to handle that.
To be a Frontpage/Dreamweaver killer it need to handle database driven websites in a simple fashion. It also need to handle serverside scripting like jsp/php.
I think your "selling a car without a warrenty" analogy fits better to propriatory software.
Free software is more like getting a new car for free including the factory needed to build the next model. But as you say some PHBs havn't got that yet. But they will, or they will end up as just PHs.
Well, there are other dreamweaver killers in the workings check out Kafka (http://kafka.kde.org/mailinglist.htm) The project is still in very early stages, but give it a year or two.
And I also think that you overestimate the cost of making a Dreamweaver port to Linux. Large parts of Dreamweaver is written in Javascript. They still need to port rendering engines and such though.
Porting to Linux would be beneficial to Macromedia as they by doing so would get the foothold in a new and growing market.
It's good as it allows people to use a popular windows app in Linux x86. But it's bad because now there is less pressure on Macromedia to develop a native port or for somebody else to write a free Dreamweaver killer.
I personally would have preferred if some good programer had enhanced Mozilla composer to the same level of feature richnes as the Macromedia suite. That way not only x86 Linux users would have a content development tool but also users of other Linux platforms would have a good content development tool. Not to mention that it would also likely have run on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, MacOS-X and windows.
OpenOffice and KOffice have very different approach to word processing. KWord uses textflow oriented editing and is in that respect much more like FrameMaker than MS-Word or OpenOffice that both uses a document centric approach.
However it would be nice if we could import OpenOffice documents as textflows into KOffice. The other way round is harder, but I suppose one could always export each KOffice textflow as an OpenOffice document.
I suspect that this kind of expart/import functionality will emerge quite soon as both programs use XML based file formats. A little XSL should do the trick.
All in all, I think there is room for both KOffice and OpenOffice.
We can compare code all day long. The fact that there are similarieties doesn't say anything on who wrote the code.
Luckily SGI have only found few similar lines that could be open to dispute. But even so, SCO will proclaim those few similarities a great vicorty without proving that it actuall is their code.
The result of all this, is probably just a press release from ths SCO information minister, helping him to pump and dump his stock.
I agree that the availability of good developer tools is essential for the price of an application.
But you seam to think that the tools available for Linux is much worse than windows tools. That may have bin true a couple of years ago, but today this is certainly not the case.
It's not harder to drag a button from the controls palette to the application canvas in IDEs like Netbeans than it is in VB. Of course you would need to know java and its accompanying class libraries. But java is not harder to learn than VB.NET.
Java and.Net class libraries are quite similar. But this also means that the idea that a cheap low educated VB-hacker is up to the job, no longer applies in the new.Net world of Microsoft. As VB in its new VB.Net incarnation have grown to a more fullblown programming environment, it will require real developers that will ask for about the same salary as java or C++ developers.
And as for simple office related GUI stuff, Open/StarOffice contains a VBA clone including a good IDE. In fact your $60 VB developer might be more productive in this environment than in Microsofts new VB.Net
"Ok, cool. But why would someone do that on a Saturday? Should have done it during the week when their customers might be more likely to try to get to their site."
Its not part of SCO business model to have customers.
The site is down for maintenance as they needed to do a search & replace operation on all their webpages, to replace the word "customer" with the word "defendent"
When the evidence SCO showed at their developer conference turned out to be bogus. The price of the SCO stock rose significantly, and now when the SCO CEO makes statements that sounds like if they orginated directly from the funny farm, ths price is going up even more.
To any normal invester this would be signs to sell SCO, not buy. What is going on? Could it be and we are seing a hostile takeover in working?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem he would have had would have bin in how to print his pictures. There are no printers that can match a good platinum photo paper. And even if you could get some kind of digital enlarger to do the printing process the gradation curve of digital images looks different from that of photographic films and the match between photographic paper and the digital negative would have bin much harder.
And mathing image, negative and print was what the zone system that ansel adamsn developed and used was good for.
So I suppose he would have used old fashioned photographic processes after all.
This is not to say that digital photography have no value. Most photographers doesn't have the time or assistants to produce the fine quality prints like Ansel Adams did for his exhibitions, and for them digigal photograpy is j
ust fine.
Distributed Denial of Stock?
SCO quicly respond by sending a quickfix pressrelease.
Perhaps it's a good thing that they don't add KDE. That way people can install a KDE that works like KDE was intended to by its developers.
I don't know how many times I have had unprintable thaughts about Red Hat tweaking KDE to something unrecognizable. Since RH7.2 I havn't even bothered to install the RH packages and instead compiled KDE from source.
Now it's not only KDE that gets maltreaded by RH and other distros, the same can be said about Gnome in most distros including RH.
I wish that companies that wanted to contribute to the Linux GUI would do so by contributing to KDE, Gnome or whatever GUI they feel like tweaking. Users should not be forced to learn Gnome, KDE on RH, Gnome, KDE on Suse, Gnome on Sun because each distro tweaks it beyond all recognition They should just have to learn Gnome (or whatever GUI the favor)
Hope that Sun has made a better job in preserving the Gnome feeling in their new java desktop than RH have done in the past.
Don't worry, as soon SEC start to investigate SCO Darl will start it for you to destroy the evidence.
Even if you pay money for a SCO fire ensurance
you would still have to follow GPL as SCO doen't
own the rigths to the major part of Linux, if the own any of it at all that is.
And if the SCO licence and GPL is incompatible (very likely) you can't legally use Linux at all.
Unfortunately, they can still distribute other GPLed software e.g. samba. But on the other hand, if SCO loses, there will not be any SCO when IBM and Red Hat are done with them.
The price of QT licences is hardly going to stop commersial use. Good development tools like QT pay for themselves very quickly in less spent developer time.
But you are probably right, they will most likely pick Gnome. They will do it for usability reasons. The average desktop user can't or won't handle all that configurability that is offered by KDE.
As a long time KDE user I feel that this is quite sad. It is sad because I don't know how many times the KDE people have tried to rearange the control panel to make it more usable, but failed to address things that affect everyday work much more than system configuration. I'm thinking about having single click to open things as default, even though usability studies shows that people can't handle it. I think of far too long right menu button menus etc. KDE is full of such things and it makes it the choise of the geek. But unfortunately there are too few geeks in the world to make KDE a commersial success.
The windows way of doing things have become a defacto standard that it is too late to change.
Whatever the future free desktop for common use will look like, it will be very similar to windows, just like every car have a steering wheel, brake, and accellerator in standard places the defacto standard for how a computer desktop should behave.
On the other hand, Gnome offers a lot of eye candy so perhaps I could get used to it in case it was to become the defacto standard for the free desctop.
The important thing is that we get a standard that commercial developers can develop for. Both KDE and Gnome are good choises for such a standard, at least provided the KDE people provide default settings that people are more accustomed to.
Both Gnome and KDE have some rough edges. What's needed is not dropping Gnome or KDE. Instead we need to make the choise between the two be a choise for developers and not for users.
That is, let Gnome be skinnable to look like KDE, and KDE skinnable to look like Gnome. Then make sure that drag & drop etc work well between the two environments. By doing this the users would have a large set of applications that worked well and looked good together on the end user desktop.
One of the few things that is actually better in Fedora than in previous Redhat products is that you can use apt and yum archives as sources for the redhat up2date tool.
The distro also ships with yum by default. Like with apt-get this simplyfies package and depandency finding a lot. If you prefer apt-get that is avilable too, but the functionality is very similar.
You probably havn't tried Linux for a while. Nowdays things usually work directly. This is why the poor quality of Fedora is news worth mentioning.
I tried to install it on my old IBM Thinkpad 600 and it failed to automacically recognize both my sound card, my screen, and my network card. All of them was identified perfectly in Fedora predecessers RH 7.2, 7.3, 8 and 9.
Now I finally got it to work, but it requred some tinkering that a newbie p but robably wouldn't have figured out how to do. In all fairness, it was not harder than installing winNT4 that it came with. But just the same a big step backwards for Linux.
Yes, but you will also have to pay saleries to your developers. If you can cut down development time, you will not only save money, you will also get a shorter time to market.
Normally, you would also have marketing costs that have to be paid before any gain can be made from your development efforts. These costs are normally way bigger than the cost of the QT-licnece.
If you can't afford such comparably small fee as the QT licence before getting into a software project you should seriously think twise about what you are getting into, or try to get some kind of financial backing.
The worst part is not the extra hazzle activation causes, but that it may lock you out from your own intellectual property. And when I say property I don't mean the program you have licenced, but the documents you have created using it.
What do you do if the company you have licenced your software from goes out of business, and you need to reinstall the software on a new computer? What do you do if they no longer support the product? What if communicatios with the company is broken due to war or other circumstances out of your control?
Real slashdotters doesn't see this as a problem.
Even if Microsoft somehow manages to show that they are less expensive, they do not fulfil the requrements of open well documented document formats. This is needed for free exchange of information between the government and the citizens.
Such information exchange is essential to the democratic process in the digital age.
This is a great improvement of free web authoring tools, but today most websites do not consist of static pages. This worries me as this tool doesn't seam to handle that.
To be a Frontpage/Dreamweaver killer it need to handle database driven websites in a simple fashion. It also need to handle serverside scripting like jsp/php.
Anyway it's a start.
Read any EUALAs of propriatory software lately?
I think your "selling a car without a warrenty" analogy fits better to propriatory software.
Free software is more like getting a new car for free including the factory needed to build the next model. But as you say some PHBs havn't got that yet. But they will, or they will end up as just PHs.
Well, there are other dreamweaver killers in the workings check out Kafka (http://kafka.kde.org/mailinglist.htm)
The project is still in very early stages, but give it a year or two.
And I also think that you overestimate the cost of making a Dreamweaver port to Linux. Large parts of Dreamweaver is written in Javascript. They still need to port rendering engines and such though.
Porting to Linux would be beneficial to Macromedia as they by doing so would get the foothold in a new and growing market.
I don't know if this is god or bad.
It's good as it allows people to use a popular windows app in Linux x86. But it's bad because now there is less pressure on Macromedia to develop a native port or for somebody else to write a free Dreamweaver killer.
I personally would have preferred if some good programer had enhanced Mozilla composer to the same level of feature richnes as the Macromedia suite. That way not only x86 Linux users would have a content development tool but also users of other Linux platforms would have a good content development tool. Not to mention that it would also likely have run on Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, MacOS-X and windows.
OpenOffice and KOffice have very different approach to word processing. KWord uses textflow oriented editing and is in that respect much more like FrameMaker than MS-Word or OpenOffice that both uses a document centric approach.
However it would be nice if we could import OpenOffice documents as textflows into KOffice.
The other way round is harder, but I suppose one could always export each KOffice textflow as an OpenOffice document.
I suspect that this kind of expart/import functionality will emerge quite soon as both programs use XML based file formats. A little XSL should do the trick.
All in all, I think there is room for both KOffice and OpenOffice.
We can compare code all day long. The fact that there are similarieties doesn't say anything on who wrote the code.
Luckily SGI have only found few similar lines that could be open to dispute. But even so, SCO will proclaim those few similarities a great vicorty without proving that it actuall is their code.
The result of all this, is probably just a press release from ths SCO information minister, helping him to pump and dump his stock.
If SCO comes here I would show them the road
I agree that the availability of good developer tools is essential for the price of an application.
.Net class libraries are quite similar. But this also means that the idea that a cheap low educated VB-hacker is up to the job, no longer applies in the new .Net world of Microsoft. As VB in its new VB.Net incarnation have grown to a more fullblown programming environment, it will require real developers that will ask for about the same salary as java or C++ developers.
But you seam to think that the tools available for Linux is much worse than windows tools. That may have bin true a couple of years ago, but today this is certainly not the case.
It's not harder to drag a button from the controls palette to the application canvas in IDEs like Netbeans than it is in VB. Of course you would need to know java and its accompanying class libraries. But java is not harder to learn than VB.NET.
Java and
And as for simple office related GUI stuff, Open/StarOffice contains a VBA clone including a good IDE. In fact your $60 VB developer might be more productive in this environment than in Microsofts new VB.Net
No, they wouldn't need to pay any licence fee for the alledgedly SCO owned parts of Linux.
But if there are such code in Linux, the parts not owned by SCO would be unlicenced, as the GPL in that case is revoked.
"Ok, cool. But why would someone do that on a Saturday? Should have done it during the week when their customers might be more likely to try to get to their site."
Its not part of SCO business model to have customers.
The site is down for maintenance as they needed to do a search & replace operation on all their webpages, to replace the word "customer" with the word "defendent"
When the evidence SCO showed at their developer conference turned out to be bogus. The price of the SCO stock rose significantly, and now when the SCO CEO makes statements that sounds like if they orginated directly from the funny farm, ths price is going up even more.
To any normal invester this would be signs to sell SCO, not buy. What is going on? Could it be and we are seing a hostile takeover in working?