How much you get for $50? You can get a linux distribution for the same price and less. A typical linux distribution includes software that windows will charge you thousands of $ for. Office software, database software, webserver, development environments, code & script editors, games and much more.
Functionally they do the same thing as ms stuff. Like openoffice, if you want to make a spreadsheet or a presentation there really is no need to fork down $450 for office anymore. Set up a small website with database; no need to fork over $ for IIS and MS Sql server.
When is $50 a lot of money? when you can get a competing product for less that has and does more.
The thing is as a car manufacturer you can't really afford NOT to invest in it, can't afford not to have any of the related patents. Automobility is strongly related to robotics and for those that will have the knowhow and the patents this is going to pay off huge. Japan is ahead of the rest of the pack in showing off cute models but a good bet is that the rest of them are not sitting on their hands either.
Go Go do it:) - my mom is in holland and both me and my brother are linux zealots living abroad. She now has a hardware firewall with ssh passthrough for us - just like you said; apt-get (albeit we actually use yum) the updates. I was tempted to install 2.6 remotely but I will be there soon anyway.. Not that she doesn't know how to reboot, it's an upgrade from win98 after all:)
We migrated my mom from a win98 pc with openoffice/mozilla and a yahoo mail account to a fedora core 1 with openoffice/mozilla and the same yahoo account:) It now runs kde 3.2. The nice thing about linux distributions is all the great software that comes free on the cds.
It's also nice that kde 3.2 runs even faster than 3.1 and that when we upgrade the kernel it'll run even faster still... What else can you ask for on old hardware.
An upgrade to windows xp would have required a serious hardware upgrade and I don't know how long it would take to download all required patches over her internet connection.
We did consider a mac (the new ibook g4 with wireless internet would be awesome for her) but while below $999 she doesn't want us to spend that money on something she doesn't use that often anyway. If money is no object osx is the way to go.
It is mostly behind other people's computers that I miss these tools. For quick fixes i still carry around Turbo C++ 2.0 for dos - loads like a flash! hmmm talking about flashes maybe i should get one of those USB flash disks and park some of these goodies on it;)
When I installed a linux desktop for my mother about a year ago the trouble she really had was with the concept of the mouse and clicking. That the motion of the mouse in horizontal space translates into motion of an icon in vertical space, that a click OR double click means activation... She had to learn all those things and it took a while. The whole idea of icon and menu based computing was new to her and still isn't demystified.
When she worked she worked with DOS based programs. I guess now these are so much easier to understand because you actually "talk" to the computer albeit through a keyboard and with a very limited command set. Maybe the mouse driven GUI is a bad inbetween step from the keyboard-only days to a time when computers understand conversation.
One of the things I really miss when I sit behind a windows computer is a bash shell, tab completion, gcc, vi... and you usually arent allowed to install cygwin on people's systems:)
Yeah it wont be easy to write a 'neutral' comparison:)
About the licensing; You're absolutely right. Trolltech and KDE have worked out an agreement http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p hp that I think addresses most issues people have with the QT license. Trolltech has developed a great desktop environment and cross OS development toolkit and commercial licensing has paid for much of it (which in turn allowed Kdevelop to become such an incredible tool for linux/windows/osx GPL development). Still I fully understand that the QT license makes it legally difficult to freely commercialise the desktop.
On the other hand a lot of people believe the GPL is the way forward for QT and KDE.
Maybe these differences cannot be bridged; I do hope so but it won't be easy. And perhaps it isn't all that necessary either. Both KDE and Gnome have much better and faster function libraries; computers get faster; apt-get and yum make updating so much easier.. In a few years it won't hurt to have both installed and freedesktop.org will hopefully allow for theme unification.
I'm a KDE fan mostly because of the immense productivity gains that kioslaves offer. It's wonderful to be able to open a remote file through sftp in kate or konqueror simply by entering its URL and edit it as if it's a local file. Whether it's uglier.. I think that's a matter of taste, gnome is much cleaner but KDE can be adjusted to be much cleaner in appearance as well.
It's unwise to say that kde is better than gnome on slashdot. It isn't true either. A lot of people will appreciate the way gnome works, nautilus reminds me of the finder in mac os pre osx - some people love it, some hate it, most don't care.
It'll be interesting to read a decent "neutral" KDE 3.2 vs Gnome 2.6 article though! And it also has to be said that the competition between KDE and Gnome really had driven both communities to excellence. Als competition has not deterred them from cooperating in freedesktop.org - something to be encouraged until hopefully one day somehow the libraries can be unified.........
Games that do run natively on linux (such as quake3) in my experience run better than on windows on the 2.4 kernel and MUCH better on 2.6.
Still developers other than ID software and some others are not going to develop games for linux because there are hardly any sales. Even apple has trouble getting developers to port to Mac despite the corporate support. Seems like most of the large games that now run on osx run on it because they use the q3 engine and ID doesn't seem to mind porting and does in fact dislike the monopoly (so it seems).
It'll take many many more years for Linux to replace windows on the desktop. People that have been repeatedly infected through outlook express and MSIE still use these products even though they often know there is an alternative, that they are still at risk and what is at fault.
Linux already is much better, it's cheaper, easier (and faster) to install and comes with a TON of software that you have to pay a lot extra for on windows. It's much more secure, it runs on many different hardware platforms, and usually opens media better out of the box (windows doesn't come shipped with realplayer, quicktime nor acrobat reader but such files all open up without problem on a modern linux distro).
It's possible that the rapid development of technology as we've seen it over the last century/centuries will allow humanity to meaningfully colonize Mars within the next two to three centuries. I think the space elevator is a piece of the puzzle since it will allow very low cost orbital deployment.
The moon should be able to home self sustaining colonies; energy is abundant and apparently water is present. From the Moon to Mars and beyond.. It'll take a huge scientific breakthrough to escape the solar system, but it's only a century ago people first took to the skies.
There's one pretty good rationale, that's that this planet's ecosystem won't exist forever, if it isnt wiped out by an impact it could be destroyed by a nearby start going nova. If the ecosystem is lucky it'll survive another 4 billion years until the sun itself goes nova. Actually there are several extremely good rationales having to do with survival of the human race in the longer term.
Nobody's going to venus because the temperature on the planet is over 400 centigrade.
So it's pretty much totally worthless for the coming centuries. Mars is a different story. While its atmosphere is toxic and its air pressure too low the temperature around the equator wouldn't bother a Canadian (gets above freezing at times). It also has water. Pretty decent planet.
Actually when he got to earth he decided to use the name Ford Prefect because he saw it on so many cars and thought it would be inconspicuous. The Prefect was the name of a Ford model that was marketed in the UK at the time.
They're about as communist as European socialists are socialist. After all Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder are socialists. And at one time all Americans were liberals, democrats and republicans all at one...
As of this moment I have 49 replies to my post most of whom have in fact used the feedback form on the bbc website to express their opinion. I didn't intend to actually cause a slashdotting of their feedback form. Still, similar action (writing letters to the editor) has caused better journalism on this subject at the economist and other publications. Sending in your opinion is the only way to get to a better standard of journalism, and most journalists are encouraged by positive feedback. In this case I think most of us agreed (in our expert opinion as geeks) that the author was so way off base in his accusations that the article is unsalvageable.
If you don't like their reporting, use the feedback form: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3281777.stm
"Linux cyber-battle turns nasty"
Is your reporter Stephen Evans aware that MyDoom is a virus that is perpetrated by MS Windows machines? Meaning the virus was written to run ON windows BY a windows programmer...
Could Mr. Evans please next time indicate where on earth he finds the factual evidence to support his amazing theory that mydoom is the "wrath of internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all", or are we now to believe the BBC supports baseless ranting against a group as diverse as those who support open source software? Couldn't it easily have been caused by disgruntled shareholders, maglignant ex employees or al quaeda for that matter?
Thank god you didn't have a luminary such as Mr. Evans sexing up Iraqi WMD stories.
Yes I suppose it comes down to what you're being taught early on about your own potential for achievement.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
I don't believe in talent really - I think it takes skill (which you can learn by simply doing) and passion, desire, drive, tireless motivation.
People that are uninspired and take things from a rational or utilitarian perspective never will achieve an artistic greatness in their creations. And that's what you need to float on top in entertainment content production nowadays. Most people either rationalize or worry too much to get to the passion.
Passion is a skill too, you get it by loosing the tendency to either rationalize or worry - drop the self consciousness to achieve greatness. The great artists are such extravagant people because they stopped caring what people think.
More than that I think it is rather naieve to think he stands a chance getting a job if he hasn't started making doom 1 wad files back in the early 90s and is not a well known mapper by now. Some extremely competent map designers have tried but failed to get a job because they didn't quite cut it. It's pretty much like getting a job in the movie industry helping with movie sets, you need a serious track record and good connections to get inside.
Everything is attainable but you've got to be passionate about attaining it - Utawoutau the poster seems not very passionate about mapping if he failed to produce any maps, mods, models, etc, so far.
Map designing takes a lot of skill, passion, and interest in a huge variety of subjects such as architecture, interior decorating, gaming experience, multiplayer, psychology... the works.
MicroSoft created a weapon that any moron geek and half witted terrorist can now use to attack their pet peeve.
Nothing in all of this should take the focus away from MicroSoft failing to secure its products, products that are amazingly unsafe and dangerous. How long have we given them time to fix this? How many more times does it need to happen, how massive the loss before the whole software industry gets totally regulated for this? Once the software industry gets regulated it's bye bye to the Open Source community and MS might actually win from it in the long term.
MicroSoft is becoming ever more serious a liability to worldwide internet security and the national security of pretty much all nations. Imagine if Ford had made all its cars remotely controllable (Outlook express'& Windows design flaws make it practically remotely controllable, MS patches but doesnt fix the flawed design!!) and a terrorist could mobilize and crash them into any place at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
Functionally they do the same thing as ms stuff. Like openoffice, if you want to make a spreadsheet or a presentation there really is no need to fork down $450 for office anymore. Set up a small website with database; no need to fork over $ for IIS and MS Sql server.
When is $50 a lot of money? when you can get a competing product for less that has and does more.
The thing is as a car manufacturer you can't really afford NOT to invest in it, can't afford not to have any of the related patents. Automobility is strongly related to robotics and for those that will have the knowhow and the patents this is going to pay off huge. Japan is ahead of the rest of the pack in showing off cute models but a good bet is that the rest of them are not sitting on their hands either.
Go Go do it :) - my mom is in holland and both me and my brother are linux zealots living abroad. She now has a hardware firewall with ssh passthrough for us - just like you said; apt-get (albeit we actually use yum) the updates. I was tempted to install 2.6 remotely but I will be there soon anyway.. Not that she doesn't know how to reboot, it's an upgrade from win98 after all :)
It's also nice that kde 3.2 runs even faster than 3.1 and that when we upgrade the kernel it'll run even faster still... What else can you ask for on old hardware.
An upgrade to windows xp would have required a serious hardware upgrade and I don't know how long it would take to download all required patches over her internet connection.
We did consider a mac (the new ibook g4 with wireless internet would be awesome for her) but while below $999 she doesn't want us to spend that money on something she doesn't use that often anyway. If money is no object osx is the way to go.
It is mostly behind other people's computers that I miss these tools. For quick fixes i still carry around Turbo C++ 2.0 for dos - loads like a flash! hmmm talking about flashes maybe i should get one of those USB flash disks and park some of these goodies on it ;)
When she worked she worked with DOS based programs. I guess now these are so much easier to understand because you actually "talk" to the computer albeit through a keyboard and with a very limited command set. Maybe the mouse driven GUI is a bad inbetween step from the keyboard-only days to a time when computers understand conversation.
One of the things I really miss when I sit behind a windows computer is a bash shell, tab completion, gcc, vi... and you usually arent allowed to install cygwin on people's systems :)
About the licensing; You're absolutely right. Trolltech and KDE have worked out an agreement http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p hp that I think addresses most issues people have with the QT license. Trolltech has developed a great desktop environment and cross OS development toolkit and commercial licensing has paid for much of it (which in turn allowed Kdevelop to become such an incredible tool for linux/windows/osx GPL development). Still I fully understand that the QT license makes it legally difficult to freely commercialise the desktop.
On the other hand a lot of people believe the GPL is the way forward for QT and KDE.
Maybe these differences cannot be bridged; I do hope so but it won't be easy. And perhaps it isn't all that necessary either. Both KDE and Gnome have much better and faster function libraries; computers get faster; apt-get and yum make updating so much easier.. In a few years it won't hurt to have both installed and freedesktop.org will hopefully allow for theme unification.
I'm a KDE fan mostly because of the immense productivity gains that kioslaves offer. It's wonderful to be able to open a remote file through sftp in kate or konqueror simply by entering its URL and edit it as if it's a local file. Whether it's uglier.. I think that's a matter of taste, gnome is much cleaner but KDE can be adjusted to be much cleaner in appearance as well.
It'll be interesting to read a decent "neutral" KDE 3.2 vs Gnome 2.6 article though! And it also has to be said that the competition between KDE and Gnome really had driven both communities to excellence. Als competition has not deterred them from cooperating in freedesktop.org - something to be encouraged until hopefully one day somehow the libraries can be unified.........
Still developers other than ID software and some others are not going to develop games for linux because there are hardly any sales. Even apple has trouble getting developers to port to Mac despite the corporate support. Seems like most of the large games that now run on osx run on it because they use the q3 engine and ID doesn't seem to mind porting and does in fact dislike the monopoly (so it seems).
It'll take many many more years for Linux to replace windows on the desktop. People that have been repeatedly infected through outlook express and MSIE still use these products even though they often know there is an alternative, that they are still at risk and what is at fault.
Linux already is much better, it's cheaper, easier (and faster) to install and comes with a TON of software that you have to pay a lot extra for on windows. It's much more secure, it runs on many different hardware platforms, and usually opens media better out of the box (windows doesn't come shipped with realplayer, quicktime nor acrobat reader but such files all open up without problem on a modern linux distro).
actually i says "the geek will inherit the earth" - oh wait its the "meek"
The moon should be able to home self sustaining colonies; energy is abundant and apparently water is present. From the Moon to Mars and beyond.. It'll take a huge scientific breakthrough to escape the solar system, but it's only a century ago people first took to the skies.
There's one pretty good rationale, that's that this planet's ecosystem won't exist forever, if it isnt wiped out by an impact it could be destroyed by a nearby start going nova. If the ecosystem is lucky it'll survive another 4 billion years until the sun itself goes nova. Actually there are several extremely good rationales having to do with survival of the human race in the longer term.
So it's pretty much totally worthless for the coming centuries. Mars is a different story. While its atmosphere is toxic and its air pressure too low the temperature around the equator wouldn't bother a Canadian (gets above freezing at times). It also has water. Pretty decent planet.
Actually when he got to earth he decided to use the name Ford Prefect because he saw it on so many cars and thought it would be inconspicuous. The Prefect was the name of a Ford model that was marketed in the UK at the time.
Funny but useless things, labels are.
http://dba.openoffice.org really nice and versatile. Can do forms as well.
Guess what R2/D2 saw in the sandcrawler that you DID NOT see in the movie!!!
As of this moment I have 49 replies to my post most of whom have in fact used the feedback form on the bbc website to express their opinion. I didn't intend to actually cause a slashdotting of their feedback form. Still, similar action (writing letters to the editor) has caused better journalism on this subject at the economist and other publications. Sending in your opinion is the only way to get to a better standard of journalism, and most journalists are encouraged by positive feedback. In this case I think most of us agreed (in our expert opinion as geeks) that the author was so way off base in his accusations that the article is unsalvageable.
If you don't like their reporting, use the feedback form:m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3281777.st
"Linux cyber-battle turns nasty"
Is your reporter Stephen Evans aware that MyDoom is a virus that is perpetrated by MS Windows machines? Meaning the virus was written to run ON windows BY a windows programmer...
Could Mr. Evans please next time indicate where on earth he finds the factual evidence to support his amazing theory that mydoom is the "wrath of internet zealots who believe that code should be free to all", or are we now to believe the BBC supports baseless ranting against a group as diverse as those who support open source software? Couldn't it easily have been caused by disgruntled shareholders, maglignant ex employees or al quaeda for that matter?
Thank god you didn't have a luminary such as Mr. Evans sexing up Iraqi WMD stories.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
Melson Mandela, presidential inaugural speech.
I thought you would appreciate it:)
I don't believe in talent really - I think it takes skill (which you can learn by simply doing) and passion, desire, drive, tireless motivation. People that are uninspired and take things from a rational or utilitarian perspective never will achieve an artistic greatness in their creations. And that's what you need to float on top in entertainment content production nowadays. Most people either rationalize or worry too much to get to the passion. Passion is a skill too, you get it by loosing the tendency to either rationalize or worry - drop the self consciousness to achieve greatness. The great artists are such extravagant people because they stopped caring what people think.
Everything is attainable but you've got to be passionate about attaining it - Utawoutau the poster seems not very passionate about mapping if he failed to produce any maps, mods, models, etc, so far.
Map designing takes a lot of skill, passion, and interest in a huge variety of subjects such as architecture, interior decorating, gaming experience, multiplayer, psychology... the works.
MicroSoft created a weapon that any moron geek and half witted terrorist can now use to attack their pet peeve. Nothing in all of this should take the focus away from MicroSoft failing to secure its products, products that are amazingly unsafe and dangerous. How long have we given them time to fix this? How many more times does it need to happen, how massive the loss before the whole software industry gets totally regulated for this? Once the software industry gets regulated it's bye bye to the Open Source community and MS might actually win from it in the long term. MicroSoft is becoming ever more serious a liability to worldwide internet security and the national security of pretty much all nations. Imagine if Ford had made all its cars remotely controllable (Outlook express'& Windows design flaws make it practically remotely controllable, MS patches but doesnt fix the flawed design!!) and a terrorist could mobilize and crash them into any place at any time.
IANAL but you sure sound like one :)