Good luck, I had pretty much the same experience as you, no real problems with mandrake 7.1. However, conisdering the problems I ran into when installing mandrake, I must warn you to be carefull with your data. Whatever you do, keep that bootdisk lying around to fix problems.
When mandrake 7.2 was released, I thought. Hell why not! I had a 1.7 GB partition left on my windows 2000 machine which seemed perfect for trying out mandrake. My experience with this distribution up to then had been very good. Mandrake 7.1 is probably one of the best distributions around in terms of usability, configurability and compatibility. However, 7.2 should in my opinion not have been released. What a piece of shit!
Things that gave me trouble:
- choosing expert mode disables a lot of stuff (e.g. DrakConf). This is hard to fix afterwards, unless you know the names of the packages you need to install manually.
- I was presented with the choice of xfree 3.3.6 (3d accelerated), 4.01 (no 3d) or just 3.3.6 without acceleration (i have a matrox g200). I chose 4.01. The install finished, I rebooted and X did not launch. It was complaining about missing libraries. Again, this is probably easy to fix if you know all the packages you are supposed to install.
- The default install requires over 2.5 Gb (talk about bloat). I really hate the package selection in Mandrake, unless you know what each package does, you are left with no choice other than to slide the bar to get a lower percentage of packages. This needs much improvement. What the hell am I going to do wth these isdn tools for instance? Or how about ppp connection tools, palmpilot synchronization tools, cdrecording tools. I don't have isdn or even a modem. I use a LAN connection. I don't have a cdrecorder. Finding all these packages manually is difficult, especially if you are uncertain about what each package does. Why not group them under 'modem tools' and 'cd recording tools'. The same goes for development tools. The only reason I install them is because I want to be able to compile and install stuff. I have no need for fortran or other obscure languages that are rarely used anymore.
- The installation 'died' a few times (I was using the ftp install). It then displays a message the installation died and that's it! Tip, if this happens to you press cancel a few times (worked for me, I think there was a problem with the connection).
- I installed the grub boot loader once (was selected by default). Since my partition is at the end of my harddrive, it had some trouble recognizing it. Unfortunately the install does not detect this problem and you are faced with an unbootable system afterwards! I fixed it by booting from a disk, and installing lilo (which had no trouble with my partition). Note this also happened to me with red hat 7!
I had other minor complaints about mandrake. However, I'll save those for a later day. My point is that this is not release quality software. This software was rushed out without proper testing. Considering Mandrake explicitly targets newby linux users, there's just too much things that can go wrong. I was able to fix some obvious problems, but then I'm not a newby linux user. If I was not, I would probably have given up.
If MS releases a piece of shit like this everybody complains. So, I don't see why I should shut up now. Mandrake 7.2 is not release quality. The best they can do at Mandrake now is mark it as beta and continue testing and fixing for a few more months. There's really a few nice, innovative things in this distribution. But things like an installation should be more robust. The expert mode should tell me what is going on and not just silently disable essential packages.
"Why this hassle about configuring systems in an X environment?"
Very simple, it is easy. Editing config files by hand is only an option if you know how to do it. Learning how to do it is time consuming, and will in many cases not deliver you significantly more performance. Example: I want to share a directory over the network with a windows user. I can either learn how to configure samba using the config file (prepare for some HOWTO browsing) or open linux conf, add a new share, click OK.
What is efficient for you depends on the context you are in. In my case the last option is to be preferred because I really don't want to be bothered with all the details of SAMBA configuration.
So if you are like me (which you obviously are not), you'll love mandrake because it does all the boring configuring for you. After installation you are presented with a system with correct display settings, a working sound card, a working network card, automatically mounting floppies and cdroms and convenient tools to administer your system.
applies to more companies than just novell
on
Is Novell Doomed?
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· Score: 2
It is a bad idea to keep relying on one product in the software industry. Eventually the interesting features get duplicated in competing products. That's why you have to keep innovating. MS understands this and is moving away from relying on just OS/office sales. They know it is a dying market. Linux and other free alternatives are setting the price for a lot of types of software: free (0$).
I wouldn't go as far as to say that novell is doomed (right now), but if they don't come with something new, they will become more and more irrelevant. Probably they'll be bought up at some time.
I agree, any PC bought within the past three years should be able to run any office application (given enough memory, i.e. >= 64Mb). However, if you look at the current market, a 700 Mhz processor is indeed lowend, intel nor AMD produces processors that are slower than that anymore. So while your 300 Mhz machine might be more than adequate for what you use it for, it might be hard to find it on the market because the components it was made of are no longer being manufactored.
I currently have a PIII500Mhz, I think it is pretty fast and have not found any games I can't run with it. That makes you wonder what you'd do with a 1.5 P4. Probably pretty much the same thing. I could use some extra crispyness when playing divx movies, but aside from that I'd be more happy with extra storage space. I don't think I would notice the extra speed in day to day usage if it was put in my PC. I found the difference between 233 Mhz (my previous pc) and 500 Mhz already undetectable for most of my apps.
You forgot the third, IMHO most important, part of Java: the huge set of APIs and frameworks. Sure the language is nice, sure this cross platform VM is a nice gimmick but the API is what is responsible for the reduction in development time many developers are experiencing.
What MS should do (and probably already has done) is leave room for the protocol to be added later. When MS decides it is time to add ipv6 support to their operating systems, they'll just make it available as a automatic update. Users that need the protocol can then click ok when the update tool prompts them or they can download it manually.
Clearly, the last thing they want to do is to massively roll out a relatively untested implementation of their IP v6 stack before it is widely used. Imagine the flamewars if there's a bug in the prematurely released stack! Considering this and that there's no point in having client machines support ipv6 if the networks to which these machines connect don't support ipv6 it is perfectly understandable that MS waits with adding ipv6 to their operating systems.
check out HP's experiment where they emulated a processor using dynamic compilation. It turned out that the emulation was about 25% faster than the real thing.
Dynamic compilation is the future, now we just need a good portable, free, open, bytecode spec to which we can conform.
Of course not. Who cares what kernel is running on the system? It's the applications that matter. Applications depend on API's, not on kernel implementations. I don't expect my mobile phone to run the same kernel as a mainframe. If they do run the same kernel, one of them is running less than optimal because these two types of computers have very different, most likely conflicting requirements (think of real time vs. multiprocessing requirements for instance).
The linux community needs to learn to deal with this fact of life. X windows is not the best solution on all platforms. The linux kernel is not the best possible solution on all possible solutions.
Open Source is a method of licensing software, not a way of creating software. Of course there are a few advantages of having your software open sourced:
- peer review, anyone can look at your software and help find bugs
- free development, if your product is interesting enough, people will contribute to it
However, you still need:
- a plan. This can be a design, a roadmap. Just dumping 8 million lines of code into the community, as Sun did last week, has no short term advantages because it takes time to grasp what it is doing.
- a process. Large open source projects all have some sort of management/programmer elite that manage the project
- people, people will not just start working on your product. There has to be some advantage. In all open source projects I know of there is some form of mutual interest. Open sourcing your propietary system designed for internal use will probably not attract many outsiders.
There are disadvantages as well:
- if your software contains some innovative solution for a problem, your direct competitors will benefit as soon as you open source your stuff and you may lose your competitive edge.
- you are not in control (though you can have a strong influence through active participation in development) of the software .
- you may run into legal trouble if you decide to use commercial components. So you may have to spend time reinventing the wheel
That's all I can think of. Think of open source as resource sharing. The idea is that you use less resources if you share.
I don't know about these minidisks. I live in the netherlands but I have no use for them. Nor do I know anybody who owns one. Apparently if you buy a Sony stereo set it has a player. So I think it's more or less a failure everywhere.
Of course there are people who buy this shit, but I think philips cd recorder (for in your stereo set) has been a bigger hit.
In any case, I don't care for sony's new super audio cd. I won't consider buying one until there is a massive amount of content for it. I think it's rather naive to tie a streaming format to hardware these days. What about playing these things on my PC? Can create mp3 from it? Can I convert my existing music collection?
Answer: probably not. So, no thanks. Both philips and Sony have made some mistakes in the hardware/content area. Philips had the CDI (do you americans even know what that is?) which was soon nicknamed the poorman's cdrom. I think a lot of people regret buying one. Both philips and sony had their video tape formats, sony currently has their minidisk which was obsolete at introduction time.
This thing has failure written all over it. The media of the future is DVD, nobody wants yet another completely incompatible cd standard.
As linux matures, the programs get bigger. So, it is only logical that development starts to suffer from the same problems windows develop suffers from. I was reading something about the KDE release candidate yesterday. Somebody was complaining that he couldn't keep konquerer running for more than a day.
That doesn't surprise me, it just takes a certain amount of time to do proper field testing. Open source is not a silver bullet when it comes to software development. Software quality problems don't just go away when you GPL your source. So yes, as linux is maturing you are experiencing the same problems windows has experienced.
To get back to mozilla, everybody is complaining that it takes ages for mozilla to be released. However, I think less then two years (I'm counting from the moment they threw away the old netscape sourcecode) is very reasonable for such a complex product. The main competitor (microsoft) has only done minor bug fixing and minor feature additions to their product in the same time.
Jesus, ignorance like this pisses me off. Mozilla is not developing a JVM. However, they still want java support. So they did what any clever software engineer would do, rather then reinventing the wheel allow third parties to plug in their own wheel. This means that if you download a nightly build, you won't find the jvm installer bundled (probably due to license issues). However, if you download the netscape prerelease you can (optionally) download Java as well.
Most people seem to be completely unaware that for the first time you can choose your own jvm rather than having to use whatever netscape chooses to include (and we all know what that is in netscape 4). This means that when the beta's for jdk 1.4 start to appear, you will be able to use it as a plugin in mozilla and it will run your applets. If netscape had been that clever five years ago, applets might have become a little more popular.
How can I really give Mozilla a try when it segfaults on startup?
Try to figure out what is wrong/different on your system because apparently it works for a lot of other people. You're running linux (I assume): Don't expect everybody to hold your hand when trying out beta software! After all if it would work for everybody they might as well release it as final.
A good start might be to read the faqs and readme's.
I tried netscape pr3 on windows today here's my impression:
- loads fast, (appr. 5 seconds)
- install seems slow, probably because of the AOL bloat. The nightly builds install much faster.
- seems stable
- it did freeze on one occasion, I could not reproduce it.
- Java works
- Sites load & render fast (i normally run ie 5.5 so I know what fast is)
- a lot of AOL links and clutter
- starts to look and act like a finished product
- there are some known UI issues that still are not fixed (e.g. IE favourites importing is not fixed in this version, bug 47961, reported it myself:)
- it seems feature complete (mostly)
Not bad for a beta/pre release! I expect that there will be a release candidate out for testing in one or two months. Plenty of time to fix bugs.
I played the demo and it was boring. Sure the graphics were OK (thank you John Carmack) but the gameplay was boring. Basically you had to shoot your way through whole armies of nearly identical monsters. In between the levels are some videos that tell the story. If you can bear watching a single star trek episode more than once, you'll probably enjoy replaying the game. However, for most of us the video's get boring after you've seen them once. Also the information in the videos is not very relevant to the game anyway.
The wow factor of the graphics doesn't last very long, and after that you're left with a pretty average first person shooter.
Petitions are a way of showing a government that a large part of the electorate supports a certain issue. Knowing and dealing with these issues is essential to any democratically elected government because failing to do so will hurt them.
However, I think that it is to early for governments to adopt this sort of technology for voting and petitions. My main objection is that only a small portion of the population can be reached this way. In my opinion having an AOL account does not actually mean you know how to use the internet in an efficient way. Seen in this light, you'd reach about 20% (guestimate, don't kill me for it) of the popuation, dominantly male and generally with good education. Not exactly a representative sample of the population and basing government policies on the opinion of this elite would not be a good thing for democracy. Although you might argue that this is exactly the portion of the population that comes up with good ideas frequently.
So maybe in a few years this when most of us know how to use the internet and related technologies (i.e. past the 'wow this is cool' stage) this is a good idea but not now.
There's a chicken egg problem here. Digital signatures will not be safe&secure before we use them and technical issues won't surface untill we use them. Using them will have to involve legal recognition.
People will get burned using digital signatures, companies providing the technology for these signatures will respond by improving their technology.
Of course nobody will want to be the person to get burned. My trust in both analog and digital signatures is not very high. Yet I sign checks, contracts, etc. all the time. However, in the long term I think it will be a lot harder to forge a digital signature than it is to forge an analog signature.
I think the main issues are not technical. Would I trust AOL to manage my signatures? Probably not. Would I trust the dutch government (you guessed it, I'm dutch) to manage my signatures? Maybe, provided that they have some process in place that maintains a certain level of quality.
It's all a matter of trust. Trust no one is not an option and will hurt you economically if others do take the risk, nor is trust anyone. The truth is in the middle. I live in a country where I think I can trust the government to provide me this kind of services.
Countries all over the world are already giving digital signatures legal status. I know of several european countries and now apparently also the US. From now on its a matter of economics. Digital signatures make it easier to do ecommerce which leads to certain cost savings. Countries which opt out won't benefit and will suffer economically. Remember, countries tried to opt out of the internet and most of them failed. Most of them are opening up or suffering economically because they refuse to do so.
So, whether you trust it or not is not very relevant. The major advancement here is legalization. The technology is already in place and legalization will put it to the test.
"No. Most X apps run fine under any window manager or Desktop Environment. For the vast majority of X apps it's which widget sets you have installed that make the difference, not which wm."
There's a difference between running (i.e. not crashing upon launch) and working together/integrating nicely with the rest of your software. Most X applications I've seen don't come even close to working together.
"Those apps specifically designed for Gnome almost all have KDE equivalents - and where you find ones that don't you do find volunteers rapidly remedying the situation."
My experiences are different. Anyway, you prove my point. It mostly depends on the applications you need what environment you run. That's why users generally have both KDE and Gnome installed (i.e. they don't choose).
I find the current situation with GUIs on unix reducing choice. I can very well imagine people waiting for the dust to settle before porting their apps. Adding yet another environment delays this moment. Regardless which environment you target as a developer, you can expect that over half of the users runs something else.
Three holy wars just means a bigger mess. Really, what's a windows application developer going to do when faced with the task of porting his windows app to unix. Right! He's going to choose. So it's not the users who choose but the developers.
That's what unix is about: choice for developers. Mere users, are left with no choice. If you choose KDE, your Gnome apps suffer, if you choose Gnome your KDE apps work lousy. And now some nerd reinvented the wheel again! Please, I don't need another window manager. I already have five installed. I don't need another desktop environment (I already have three fighting for control over my apps). I need usable applications on top of my window managers and desktop environments. I don't want application developers to reinvent window minimizing/maximizing, cut&paste, file managing, and other stuff my MS Windows and Apple environments have been able to do quite satisfyingly for nearly a decade!!!!
Please developers, grow up and start working on the apps of tomorrow rather than reinventing the wheel.
a 400MhzpII with 192 MB is by all means a modest PC if programming is your profession. Really, a programmer earning between 50 and 100K annually (pessimistic for good programmers) should have some decent equipment to do his/her work. Contrary to the common belief, memory is much more important than processor speed.
I think it is very brave of you to even try running java 1.2 on a 32 MB PC. I recall running jdk 1.2 beta1 on a 133 Mhz machine (64MB, it doubled as a server machine). It worked fine, I could even launch the swing demo (for non Java people, this loads just about all available swing components). Of course the application response was terrible, but hey what do you expect?
However, with sufficient memory (192 MB is about the mininimum for JBuilder) it should work.
JBuilder refusing to install with a newer JDK is entirely borlands fault. Apparently they have some dependencies on non standardized parts. The windows version of JBuilder 3.0 came with its own JDK. Replacing it with the superior 1.3 beta from sun (there was no final version yet) wouldn't work and was not supported by borland. Even the released 1.2 did not work. You had to use the borland JDK. This was one of the reasons I refuse to use IDE's such as those provided by borland or IBM. You always get locked into obsolete software at some point. Don't misunderstand me, both deliver excellent products. But if you want to use the latest and greatest, you'll run into problems. Visual age for instance used jdk 1.1 long after 1.2 was released. Apparently it is now possible to use 1.3 with it.
So I have to agree with your last line: simplicity is better. Don't get locked into some IDE. Always keep the way open to use something else.
Ironically, their action probably had the reverse effect. OO code in C++ is better maintainable than OO code in C. The ++ in the language name means that some usefull features were added to the C language. No (or hardly) any features were taken away.
It's a pitty that eazel went to work with gnome instead of kde. At least their developers recognized kde it as technically superior. This is extra sad now that the license issues are resolved. Luckily the KDE developers didn't wait for somebody else to fix their problems and created Konquerer and KOffice.
It's a 6.5 MB download (win32 installer), once installed the programm takes approximately 15 MB of your harddrive (complete install, including 2 skins). The install does not include the optional jre or any plugins (e.g. flash).
Once running, your mileage may vary, between 20 and 30 MB used memory in win32 is normal.
Not bad for an alpha product. It is now nearly feature complete. Due to limitations of linux, the linux version still feels a little slow. However, the win32 builds are quite snappy.
There are still a lot of minor (i.e. non fatal) bugs left. No doubt these bugs will get the full attention for the next few milestones. As far as I can see, mozilla is nearly (like 99%) feature complete. Some features are a bit shaky.
The nightly builds are quite good, but you should check with mozillazine before downloading one. Occasionally, after bigger changes, there are some regressions. Don't judge the builds by that because this type of error is usually fixed within a few days. Last week for instance there was a problem with skin switching. Yesterdays build was much better.
People on slashdot don't understand mozilla. They complain it is bloated, takes too much memory and contains too many features. What they don't seem to understand is that mozilla has to replace communicator and compete with internet explorer and outlook express. All this must be done while remaining cross platform and easy to maintain.
Mozilla is not a browser, it is a platform. The killer app for this platform happens to be a browser. But there are lots of other interesting applications that it supports. Mozilla's architecture is brilliant. It supports all of the above. That by the way includes a small, fast browser as the Galeon browser proves. The Galeon browser would not be possible without gecko and necko. Once finished these components will find their way to PC's, unix workstations, pda's, settopboxes and maybe even mobile phones.
I must admit that there were times that I have doubted mozilla was such a good idea. But I've seen the nightly builds. I know it is just an alpha build but still I sometimes forget I'm not using IE. As for IE, my biggest fear was that MS would continue to 'innovate' and 'improve' ie. Yet, all they have done since version 4 is bug fixing and standards tweaking. In essence the 5.5 version looks and feels pretty much the same as the 4.0 version.
stands for resource definition format (i think). It's a xml based standard for encoding meta data. I think it's a w3c standard and I know mozilla uses it for various things.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck, I had pretty much the same experience as you, no real problems with mandrake 7.1. However, conisdering the problems I ran into when installing mandrake, I must warn you to be carefull with your data. Whatever you do, keep that bootdisk lying around to fix problems.
Hi,
When mandrake 7.2 was released, I thought. Hell why not! I had a 1.7 GB partition left on my windows 2000 machine which seemed perfect for trying out mandrake. My experience with this distribution up to then had been very good. Mandrake 7.1 is probably one of the best distributions around in terms of usability, configurability and compatibility. However, 7.2 should in my opinion not have been released. What a piece of shit!
Things that gave me trouble:
- choosing expert mode disables a lot of stuff (e.g. DrakConf). This is hard to fix afterwards, unless you know the names of the packages you need to install manually.
- I was presented with the choice of xfree 3.3.6 (3d accelerated), 4.01 (no 3d) or just 3.3.6 without acceleration (i have a matrox g200). I chose 4.01. The install finished, I rebooted and X did not launch. It was complaining about missing libraries. Again, this is probably easy to fix if you know all the packages you are supposed to install.
- The default install requires over 2.5 Gb (talk about bloat). I really hate the package selection in Mandrake, unless you know what each package does, you are left with no choice other than to slide the bar to get a lower percentage of packages. This needs much improvement. What the hell am I going to do wth these isdn tools for instance? Or how about ppp connection tools, palmpilot synchronization tools, cdrecording tools. I don't have isdn or even a modem. I use a LAN connection. I don't have a cdrecorder. Finding all these packages manually is difficult, especially if you are uncertain about what each package does. Why not group them under 'modem tools' and 'cd recording tools'. The same goes for development tools. The only reason I install them is because I want to be able to compile and install stuff. I have no need for fortran or other obscure languages that are rarely used anymore.
- The installation 'died' a few times (I was using the ftp install). It then displays a message the installation died and that's it! Tip, if this happens to you press cancel a few times (worked for me, I think there was a problem with the connection).
- I installed the grub boot loader once (was selected by default). Since my partition is at the end of my harddrive, it had some trouble recognizing it. Unfortunately the install does not detect this problem and you are faced with an unbootable system afterwards! I fixed it by booting from a disk, and installing lilo (which had no trouble with my partition). Note this also happened to me with red hat 7!
I had other minor complaints about mandrake. However, I'll save those for a later day. My point is that this is not release quality software. This software was rushed out without proper testing. Considering Mandrake explicitly targets newby linux users, there's just too much things that can go wrong. I was able to fix some obvious problems, but then I'm not a newby linux user. If I was not, I would probably have given up.
If MS releases a piece of shit like this everybody complains. So, I don't see why I should shut up now. Mandrake 7.2 is not release quality. The best they can do at Mandrake now is mark it as beta and continue testing and fixing for a few more months. There's really a few nice, innovative things in this distribution. But things like an installation should be more robust. The expert mode should tell me what is going on and not just silently disable essential packages.
"Why this hassle about configuring systems in an X environment?"
Very simple, it is easy. Editing config files by hand is only an option if you know how to do it. Learning how to do it is time consuming, and will in many cases not deliver you significantly more performance. Example: I want to share a directory over the network with a windows user. I can either learn how to configure samba using the config file (prepare for some HOWTO browsing) or open linux conf, add a new share, click OK.
What is efficient for you depends on the context you are in. In my case the last option is to be preferred because I really don't want to be bothered with all the details of SAMBA configuration.
So if you are like me (which you obviously are not), you'll love mandrake because it does all the boring configuring for you. After installation you are presented with a system with correct display settings, a working sound card, a working network card, automatically mounting floppies and cdroms and convenient tools to administer your system.
It is a bad idea to keep relying on one product in the software industry. Eventually the interesting features get duplicated in competing products. That's why you have to keep innovating. MS understands this and is moving away from relying on just OS/office sales. They know it is a dying market. Linux and other free alternatives are setting the price for a lot of types of software: free (0$).
I wouldn't go as far as to say that novell is doomed (right now), but if they don't come with something new, they will become more and more irrelevant. Probably they'll be bought up at some time.
I agree, any PC bought within the past three years should be able to run any office application (given enough memory, i.e. >= 64Mb). However, if you look at the current market, a 700 Mhz processor is indeed lowend, intel nor AMD produces processors that are slower than that anymore. So while your 300 Mhz machine might be more than adequate for what you use it for, it might be hard to find it on the market because the components it was made of are no longer being manufactored.
I currently have a PIII500Mhz, I think it is pretty fast and have not found any games I can't run with it. That makes you wonder what you'd do with a 1.5 P4. Probably pretty much the same thing. I could use some extra crispyness when playing divx movies, but aside from that I'd be more happy with extra storage space. I don't think I would notice the extra speed in day to day usage if it was put in my PC. I found the difference between 233 Mhz (my previous pc) and 500 Mhz already undetectable for most of my apps.
You forgot the third, IMHO most important, part of Java: the huge set of APIs and frameworks. Sure the language is nice, sure this cross platform VM is a nice gimmick but the API is what is responsible for the reduction in development time many developers are experiencing.
What MS should do (and probably already has done) is leave room for the protocol to be added later. When MS decides it is time to add ipv6 support to their operating systems, they'll just make it available as a automatic update. Users that need the protocol can then click ok when the update tool prompts them or they can download it manually.
Clearly, the last thing they want to do is to massively roll out a relatively untested implementation of their IP v6 stack before it is widely used. Imagine the flamewars if there's a bug in the prematurely released stack! Considering this and that there's no point in having client machines support ipv6 if the networks to which these machines connect don't support ipv6 it is perfectly understandable that MS waits with adding ipv6 to their operating systems.
check out HP's experiment where they emulated a processor using dynamic compilation. It turned out that the emulation was about 25% faster than the real thing.
Dynamic compilation is the future, now we just need a good portable, free, open, bytecode spec to which we can conform.
yes indeed, it says more about your instructor (hopelessly stuck in the past) than about Java.
can one linux kernel fit all?
Of course not. Who cares what kernel is running on the system? It's the applications that matter. Applications depend on API's, not on kernel implementations. I don't expect my mobile phone to run the same kernel as a mainframe. If they do run the same kernel, one of them is running less than optimal because these two types of computers have very different, most likely conflicting requirements (think of real time vs. multiprocessing requirements for instance).
The linux community needs to learn to deal with this fact of life. X windows is not the best solution on all platforms. The linux kernel is not the best possible solution on all possible solutions.
Open Source is a method of licensing software, not a way of creating software. Of course there are a few advantages of having your software open sourced:
- peer review, anyone can look at your software and help find bugs
- free development, if your product is interesting enough, people will contribute to it
However, you still need:
- a plan. This can be a design, a roadmap. Just dumping 8 million lines of code into the community, as Sun did last week, has no short term advantages because it takes time to grasp what it is doing.
- a process. Large open source projects all have some sort of management/programmer elite that manage the project
- people, people will not just start working on your product. There has to be some advantage. In all open source projects I know of there is some form of mutual interest. Open sourcing your propietary system designed for internal use will probably not attract many outsiders.
There are disadvantages as well:
- if your software contains some innovative solution for a problem, your direct competitors will benefit as soon as you open source your stuff and you may lose your competitive edge.
- you are not in control (though you can have a strong influence through active participation in development) of the software .
- you may run into legal trouble if you decide to use commercial components. So you may have to spend time reinventing the wheel
That's all I can think of. Think of open source as resource sharing. The idea is that you use less resources if you share.
I don't know about these minidisks. I live in the netherlands but I have no use for them. Nor do I know anybody who owns one. Apparently if you buy a Sony stereo set it has a player. So I think it's more or less a failure everywhere.
Of course there are people who buy this shit, but I think philips cd recorder (for in your stereo set) has been a bigger hit.
In any case, I don't care for sony's new super audio cd. I won't consider buying one until there is a massive amount of content for it. I think it's rather naive to tie a streaming format to hardware these days. What about playing these things on my PC? Can create mp3 from it? Can I convert my existing music collection?
Answer: probably not. So, no thanks. Both philips and Sony have made some mistakes in the hardware/content area. Philips had the CDI (do you americans even know what that is?) which was soon nicknamed the poorman's cdrom. I think a lot of people regret buying one. Both philips and sony had their video tape formats, sony currently has their minidisk which was obsolete at introduction time.
This thing has failure written all over it. The media of the future is DVD, nobody wants yet another completely incompatible cd standard.
As linux matures, the programs get bigger. So, it is only logical that development starts to suffer from the same problems windows develop suffers from. I was reading something about the KDE release candidate yesterday. Somebody was complaining that he couldn't keep konquerer running for more than a day.
That doesn't surprise me, it just takes a certain amount of time to do proper field testing. Open source is not a silver bullet when it comes to software development. Software quality problems don't just go away when you GPL your source. So yes, as linux is maturing you are experiencing the same problems windows has experienced.
To get back to mozilla, everybody is complaining that it takes ages for mozilla to be released. However, I think less then two years (I'm counting from the moment they threw away the old netscape sourcecode) is very reasonable for such a complex product. The main competitor (microsoft) has only done minor bug fixing and minor feature additions to their product in the same time.
RTFM,
Jesus, ignorance like this pisses me off. Mozilla is not developing a JVM. However, they still want java support. So they did what any clever software engineer would do, rather then reinventing the wheel allow third parties to plug in their own wheel. This means that if you download a nightly build, you won't find the jvm installer bundled (probably due to license issues). However, if you download the netscape prerelease you can (optionally) download Java as well.
Most people seem to be completely unaware that for the first time you can choose your own jvm rather than having to use whatever netscape chooses to include (and we all know what that is in netscape 4). This means that when the beta's for jdk 1.4 start to appear, you will be able to use it as a plugin in mozilla and it will run your applets. If netscape had been that clever five years ago, applets might have become a little more popular.
How can I really give Mozilla a try when it segfaults on startup?
:)
Try to figure out what is wrong/different on your system because apparently it works for a lot of other people. You're running linux (I assume): Don't expect everybody to hold your hand when trying out beta software! After all if it would work for everybody they might as well release it as final.
A good start might be to read the faqs and readme's.
I tried netscape pr3 on windows today here's my impression:
- loads fast, (appr. 5 seconds)
- install seems slow, probably because of the AOL bloat. The nightly builds install much faster.
- seems stable
- it did freeze on one occasion, I could not reproduce it.
- Java works
- Sites load & render fast (i normally run ie 5.5 so I know what fast is)
- a lot of AOL links and clutter
- starts to look and act like a finished product
- there are some known UI issues that still are not fixed (e.g. IE favourites importing is not fixed in this version, bug 47961, reported it myself
- it seems feature complete (mostly)
Not bad for a beta/pre release! I expect that there will be a release candidate out for testing in one or two months. Plenty of time to fix bugs.
I played the demo and it was boring. Sure the graphics were OK (thank you John Carmack) but the gameplay was boring. Basically you had to shoot your way through whole armies of nearly identical monsters. In between the levels are some videos that tell the story. If you can bear watching a single star trek episode more than once, you'll probably enjoy replaying the game. However, for most of us the video's get boring after you've seen them once. Also the information in the videos is not very relevant to the game anyway.
The wow factor of the graphics doesn't last very long, and after that you're left with a pretty average first person shooter.
Petitions are a way of showing a government that a large part of the electorate supports a certain issue. Knowing and dealing with these issues is essential to any democratically elected government because failing to do so will hurt them.
However, I think that it is to early for governments to adopt this sort of technology for voting and petitions. My main objection is that only a small portion of the population can be reached this way. In my opinion having an AOL account does not actually mean you know how to use the internet in an efficient way. Seen in this light, you'd reach about 20% (guestimate, don't kill me for it) of the popuation, dominantly male and generally with good education. Not exactly a representative sample of the population and basing government policies on the opinion of this elite would not be a good thing for democracy. Although you might argue that this is exactly the portion of the population that comes up with good ideas frequently.
So maybe in a few years this when most of us know how to use the internet and related technologies (i.e. past the 'wow this is cool' stage) this is a good idea but not now.
There's a chicken egg problem here. Digital signatures will not be safe&secure before we use them and technical issues won't surface untill we use them. Using them will have to involve legal recognition.
People will get burned using digital signatures, companies providing the technology for these signatures will respond by improving their technology.
Of course nobody will want to be the person to get burned. My trust in both analog and digital signatures is not very high. Yet I sign checks, contracts, etc. all the time. However, in the long term I think it will be a lot harder to forge a digital signature than it is to forge an analog signature.
I think the main issues are not technical. Would I trust AOL to manage my signatures? Probably not. Would I trust the dutch government (you guessed it, I'm dutch) to manage my signatures? Maybe, provided that they have some process in place that maintains a certain level of quality.
It's all a matter of trust. Trust no one is not an option and will hurt you economically if others do take the risk, nor is trust anyone. The truth is in the middle. I live in a country where I think I can trust the government to provide me this kind of services.
Countries all over the world are already giving digital signatures legal status. I know of several european countries and now apparently also the US. From now on its a matter of economics. Digital signatures make it easier to do ecommerce which leads to certain cost savings. Countries which opt out won't benefit and will suffer economically. Remember, countries tried to opt out of the internet and most of them failed. Most of them are opening up or suffering economically because they refuse to do so.
So, whether you trust it or not is not very relevant. The major advancement here is legalization. The technology is already in place and legalization will put it to the test.
"No. Most X apps run fine under any window manager or Desktop Environment. For the vast majority of X apps it's which widget sets you have installed that make the difference, not which wm."
There's a difference between running (i.e. not crashing upon launch) and working together/integrating nicely with the rest of your software. Most X applications I've seen don't come even close to working together.
"Those apps specifically designed for Gnome almost all have KDE equivalents - and where you find ones that don't you do find volunteers rapidly remedying the situation."
My experiences are different. Anyway, you prove my point. It mostly depends on the applications you need what environment you run. That's why users generally have both KDE and Gnome installed (i.e. they don't choose).
I find the current situation with GUIs on unix reducing choice. I can very well imagine people waiting for the dust to settle before porting their apps. Adding yet another environment delays this moment. Regardless which environment you target as a developer, you can expect that over half of the users runs something else.
Three holy wars just means a bigger mess. Really, what's a windows application developer going to do when faced with the task of porting his windows app to unix. Right! He's going to choose. So it's not the users who choose but the developers.
That's what unix is about: choice for developers. Mere users, are left with no choice. If you choose KDE, your Gnome apps suffer, if you choose Gnome your KDE apps work lousy. And now some nerd reinvented the wheel again! Please, I don't need another window manager. I already have five installed. I don't need another desktop environment (I already have three fighting for control over my apps). I need usable applications on top of my window managers and desktop environments. I don't want application developers to reinvent window minimizing/maximizing, cut&paste, file managing, and other stuff my MS Windows and Apple environments have been able to do quite satisfyingly for nearly a decade!!!!
Please developers, grow up and start working on the apps of tomorrow rather than reinventing the wheel.
a 400MhzpII with 192 MB is by all means a modest PC if programming is your profession. Really, a programmer earning between 50 and 100K annually (pessimistic for good programmers) should have some decent equipment to do his/her work. Contrary to the common belief, memory is much more important than processor speed.
I think it is very brave of you to even try running java 1.2 on a 32 MB PC. I recall running jdk 1.2 beta1 on a 133 Mhz machine (64MB, it doubled as a server machine). It worked fine, I could even launch the swing demo (for non Java people, this loads just about all available swing components). Of course the application response was terrible, but hey what do you expect?
However, with sufficient memory (192 MB is about the mininimum for JBuilder) it should work.
JBuilder refusing to install with a newer JDK is entirely borlands fault. Apparently they have some dependencies on non standardized parts. The windows version of JBuilder 3.0 came with its own JDK. Replacing it with the superior 1.3 beta from sun (there was no final version yet) wouldn't work and was not supported by borland. Even the released 1.2 did not work. You had to use the borland JDK. This was one of the reasons I refuse to use IDE's such as those provided by borland or IBM. You always get locked into obsolete software at some point. Don't misunderstand me, both deliver excellent products. But if you want to use the latest and greatest, you'll run into problems. Visual age for instance used jdk 1.1 long after 1.2 was released. Apparently it is now possible to use 1.3 with it.
So I have to agree with your last line: simplicity is better. Don't get locked into some IDE. Always keep the way open to use something else.
Ironically, their action probably had the reverse effect. OO code in C++ is better maintainable than OO code in C. The ++ in the language name means that some usefull features were added to the C language. No (or hardly) any features were taken away.
It's a pitty that eazel went to work with gnome instead of kde. At least their developers recognized kde it as technically superior. This is extra sad now that the license issues are resolved. Luckily the KDE developers didn't wait for somebody else to fix their problems and created Konquerer and KOffice.
It's a 6.5 MB download (win32 installer), once installed the programm takes approximately 15 MB of your harddrive (complete install, including 2 skins). The install does not include the optional jre or any plugins (e.g. flash).
Once running, your mileage may vary, between 20 and 30 MB used memory in win32 is normal.
Not bad for an alpha product. It is now nearly feature complete. Due to limitations of linux, the linux version still feels a little slow. However, the win32 builds are quite snappy.
There are still a lot of minor (i.e. non fatal) bugs left. No doubt these bugs will get the full attention for the next few milestones. As far as I can see, mozilla is nearly (like 99%) feature complete. Some features are a bit shaky.
The nightly builds are quite good, but you should check with mozillazine before downloading one. Occasionally, after bigger changes, there are some regressions. Don't judge the builds by that because this type of error is usually fixed within a few days. Last week for instance there was a problem with skin switching. Yesterdays build was much better.
People on slashdot don't understand mozilla. They complain it is bloated, takes too much memory and contains too many features. What they don't seem to understand is that mozilla has to replace communicator and compete with internet explorer and outlook express. All this must be done while remaining cross platform and easy to maintain.
Mozilla is not a browser, it is a platform. The killer app for this platform happens to be a browser. But there are lots of other interesting applications that it supports. Mozilla's architecture is brilliant. It supports all of the above. That by the way includes a small, fast browser as the Galeon browser proves. The Galeon browser would not be possible without gecko and necko. Once finished these components will find their way to PC's, unix workstations, pda's, settopboxes and maybe even mobile phones.
I must admit that there were times that I have doubted mozilla was such a good idea. But I've seen the nightly builds. I know it is just an alpha build but still I sometimes forget I'm not using IE. As for IE, my biggest fear was that MS would continue to 'innovate' and 'improve' ie. Yet, all they have done since version 4 is bug fixing and standards tweaking. In essence the 5.5 version looks and feels pretty much the same as the 4.0 version.
Yes, now you can actually physically transport a running program from A to B. Mobile agents are the future!
But seriously, what else should you run to achieve the same functionality at the same development cost?
stands for resource definition format (i think). It's a xml based standard for encoding meta data. I think it's a w3c standard and I know mozilla uses it for various things.