I've seen this happen often when attempting to view WMV files, which requires the use of a Windows DLL. I think I read somewhere that the problem is specific to RedHat/Fedora, and has to do with how the DLL is loaded at runtime. Unfortunately, I can't put my hands on the source of that info at the moment
Perhaps that's the reason, and perhaps you just still are using the release from nearly one year ago (pre7), and not a CVS version.
Unfortunately, neither VLC nor MPlayer can be included as libraries in other multimedia applications. Having to work with an embedded instance of VLC and MPlayer is a pain and not conducive to extending functionality in object-oriented fashion
Of course, working with an embedded instance of MPlayer would be just stupid. What people do instead, is using the library associated with MPlayer : FFMpeg. Now go look everywhere, you will see lots of projects using ffmpeg (like gstreamer). So your argument about xine-lib just fell flat.
Oh, bullshit. It sounds even stupider to non-gamers or very casual gamers(which I consider myself to be)
This is tiring BS really. This thing that american geeks have about names is sickness !
I'm european, and I just shake my head in disbelief each time I see another thread like this one, on a name. I see this as highly egocentric on the part of american speaking people. In France, we use "Oui" to say "Yes". Fortunately, we don't say it a lot, because given what I read here, american tourists would be often offended. Why ? Because "Oui" is pronounced exactly like "Wii" in french. Besides, that means that at least in France, where we are not all up on names, "Wii" has nothing bad. Japanese love french things, and the primary market of Wii will be Japan as always, so if marketed well, it won't be a problem at all in Japan. I bet in Europe Wii won't be a problem. Why do the american speaking people feel the need to say everyone will be offended ? We other gamers and non-gamers in the world sure enough don't want to be associated with american people whining about the name of a console.
I was looking around for the Japanese reaction to it, and at least on Slashdot Japan, there seems to be about as much bewilderment at the name as there is over here. The name doesn't have any bad meaning in Japan, but it still sounds wierd
Given what I've said earlier, I have a hard time believing what you say. URL please ?
I'm tired of these BS authors. He redefines what "freedom to run" is to prove his point. Well, his redefinition is just flawed. Freedom to run means just that : you can legally run the program within the license terms. User-friendly has NOTHING to do with it : many people will find GNU (s)ed, GNU grep, valgrind or GCC not easy to use or very complex. These programs "exclude people who do not possess high technical knowledge or advanced skills sets", and yet, they are free to use, but not for everyone. They are highly in use everywhere by people technical enough to use them. They are still free software, still free to run to most users and not a "hollow promise". So the redefinition of the author is contradictory and just a pile of stupid fallacies.
I do take the authors point that for a user to effectively maintain their freedom, free software must be usable
Sorry, this is nonsense to me. If the software is Free, it can be made usable, if it were not before. Even if the Free software is not usable, it is still Free though. So usability has nothing to do with freedom.
It goes back to the whole idea of Linux as an everyday operating system. Anyone who is not a geek, i.e. most of the population, is not going to adopt something that isn't easy to operate
This is just not true. You talk like most people try using everything before buying, which is just not true. People adopted VCR and lots of them had blinking '00:00', I even still know some people like that today. People will adopt what marketing tell them to.
I mean, there's no reason to make a Windows-like GUI for Linux unless you want people to actually think of Linux as an alternative to Windows. And while you might impress the average user with a Windows-like look and feel, unless it's just as easy to use out of the box as their Windows PC is now, there will be no great swell of converts
Sorry to disappoint you : I would never have installed Linux for people if it was as hard to use as Windows. The only thing that can make Windows even remotely easy to use is the few geeks you talk about. Lots of companies are making tons of money because Windows is hard to use, you know.
I've said it before: Linux's popularity depends on what it wants to be
BS, Linux does not want to be anything. Linux is what people want it to be.
If it wants to be the OS of geeks and hackers and multi-million dollar corporations, so be it. If Linux (or any of its derivatives) wish to compete against Windows for market share, there has to be a shift in thinking, away from kernel-centric, gizmos-and-gadgets way of thinking to the "what would a user want to do" mindset.
And before you talk "Linux this Linux that", I suggest you learn what Linux really is first. When you understand how what you say is just retarded, you'll have understand. Hint 1 : read at what I've written above. Hint 2 : learn that Linux is in TiVo, KISS, lots of network appliances, phones,... and that Linux never chose to be in any of these devices.
I have installed a few machines recently and not once did I have to hunt down drivers to have a functional machine.
Lucky guy.
Now there are cases where there are newer drivers that I could go get should I need them but they are not required.
Like SATA ?
The big difference between installing Linux versus XP? If I need drivers they most likely exist for XP.
Yeah, like for my miro TV card or my mustek scanner... NOT ! Fortunately, you said 'likely'. You still have to hunt, and a long time, as no one can assure you if there is a driver or not. At least on Linux, you don't hunt for long, you learn quickly if there is a driver or not.
Why should I constantly have to get new drivers when I upgrade Linux?
Because the new kernel bring lots of new features and improvements that are enforced ? Try to be credible at least : you constantly upgrade your kernel, which should at the same time upgrade most of your drivers, and you chose to use some external drivers that then need updating, but no, upgrading these is too hard. If that's the case, sorry, but you just acknowledged that the problem is in the drivers external to the kernel, not in the Linux kernel itself.
Often I have to recompile the old driver. Yea it isn't that hard for me to do but it is out side the comfort zone of about 99.9% of the computer using population!
The 99.9 % of the population which specifically DO NOT compile drivers, so for which there is no issue (the binary distros do it for them). Now that you've said your fallacy, do you feel better ?
Nvidia and ATI are not going to open source their drivers anytime soon
Now you confirm what I said earlier, you even specify that your problem is in your binary closed drivers. But strangely enough, you accept the burden put on you by ATI and NVidia, and blame Linux instead. Of course, it's easier.
We will keep using Nvidia and ATIs closed source drivers because they are 1. Free and 2. Work. Making it painful by not having a clean, stable, binary interface will not work. All it does is make users lives harder and slow adoption of Linux.
You're even more mistaken than I thought. Having to recompile your drivers have NOTHING to do with ABI compatibility most of the time. A change in ABI would mean that you'd have to patch your old driver, before recompiling it, for it to even load into the kernel. The check for concordance of kernel version is for stability purpose (which can't be insured anyway with a closed driver), and that's what preventing you from loading your old driver. There's a mechanism for not checking kernel version (dangerous).
When MS-DOS was first written, there was no such thing as directories. Everything lived in the root, and there was no need for path names or path separators. It quickly became necessary to pass arguments to commands, and the natural way to do this was to distinguish them from paramters by pre-pending a character. MS chose to use/.
BS, Unix was using them extensively already. Get your facts straight, MS said they did that to avoid being accused of copying Unix technology. The other reason is the one you cited. But directories existed already.
Time passed, and directories were invented. People started to use / as a path separator, in similar fashion to how references are built up - eg major part/minor part/whatever/etc, say "57b/6". MS obviously had to support directory trees, but didn't want to break backward compatibility (something they are loathe to do to this day), and so could not use/. Thus, they went with the next nearest thing, \.
BS again, '\' was there from the start, with a variable you could set to use '/' instead.
Alternatively, perhaps you're right, and they're petty and stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot by making themselves incompatible with every competing product at a time when they had little or no compelling advantage.
Which was the case. And they have a big advantage : they were working with IBM, which was a HUGE advantage. Again, get your facts straight.
Incidentally, try using / in a path in the address bar of Windows Explorer in a modern Windows (eg >= 2k). You might be surprised.
There is no reason why they couldn't embed C# support [or generically.NET] within bash or tcsh or whatever. That way you could still use the familiar but then extend into.NET crap if you wanted to.
BS, there are a LOT of technical and other reasons for not doing that. Do you understand you need to load all this when starting your OS ? On Unix, you are not even sure to have all your libraries when booting your OS.
Maybe so we don't have to parse and re-parse and re-re-re-parse the damn text every time. To say nothing of data that's nested. Of course we could all just use XML and YAML, we just have to rewrite every app to serialize and unserialize these grotesque formats.
Do you understand that the shell is suited for system administrators and not for programmers ? Well, programmers can use it too, that's a powerful feature, not a drawback. System admin don't need to parse and reparse and re-re-reparse anything. No BS about nested data either.
Frankly I don't see the need to justify the addition of functionality for people who do nothing but bitch about how real problems don't really exist. You stick to piping text everywhere, no one's taking it away from you.
To add functionality, the basics should be there. Do you understand that the shell does not just pipe text ? It does far more than that, it is portable and even helps boot some OS, you know. And in this case, piping is one minor feature, environment and managing jobs is far more important.
Anyway, it'll be cloned it within a month and then the slashdoterati will claim they invented it. Or maybe it'll run on Mono.
And a troll to add credibility to your argument... Pathetic.
Re:It'll exceed OSX and Linux eh?
on
How Vista Disappoints
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, I see your point, but I think you twist the facts to make it like NT4 was so much ahead, now let's see
I was using NT 4 back in 1996. Back then, it has SMP (scaled up to 32 processors, although the cheap version was limited to two). Linux was just starting to get SMP capability
NT4 had SMP and supported up to 32 processors on paper. Which does not mean it ever scaled. Support and scale, not the same thing. Linux was just starting to get SMP, but got it better (and no, it was still not right, but better) than NT4 already. Linux was not even scaling well to 4 processors, but was starting to be used far more than NT4 on these kind of setup. And I don't think cost was the sole reason, especially when you use such architectures. It must have to do with the fact that the number of processors is not all in these setup. If you can't manage your memory correctly between processors, supporting 32 processors is often useless.
It had native threading, which Linux only got last year
And Linux non native threading was already way faster than NT4 native threading. And Linux got native threading 2 years ago, increasing the gap with Windows even more.
It had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems? I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux
Youhave not seem is not an evidence of anything. At the time, ACL were considered unnecessary because too complicated to manage (that's still the case), and complexity is enemy of security. Well, it has finally been implemented and more, for nearly every FS Linux supports. But it still is not used a lot, because for most people, the base system is enough.
It had a GUI with a single, consistent, user interface toolkit. Linux got one of those in 2030?
Linux got that with KDE 2 and Gnome 2, which was in 2001 I think. Except that the GUI was not just like NT4, they were more advanced in lots of fields : i18n/l10n, multi user, multi session, cross platform, customisation, look, resolution agnostism,...
I can't remember the first time I got 3D acceleration of anything other than GLide working with Linux, but I don't think it was before 2000
And of course, this has nothing to do that 3DFX was king of 3D until the end of 1999...
It had a stable ABI and component system that allowed some basic introspection and management of reference counted objects. These objects still work on current versions of Windows[1]
I don't understand the advantage... Linux was working with lots of Unix programs, and shell and pipe still work very well today, and are still in wide use.
Did NT4 kill Linux? No. It was, however, a long way ahead of the competition
Sorry, but NT4 was the "Unix killer", and it didn't kill anything. On the other hand, Linux is way more on the way to kill Unix than NT4 ever was.
Vista may be ahead of the competition when it launches, but if it is then it will be by such a small margin that it will be the last release that is
It would be an improvement then. My perception is that WinXP was already behind the Linux GUI when it launched, and if Vista maintain the gap, I will already be impressed. I'm one of the rare people that never caved in to all the rants of stupid people thinking that MS would deliver, and that Vista would kill Linux. It's amazing, a few months ago, it seemed like Vista was going to kill everything. The tune has changed so fast, that the head of a lot of people must be spinning like mad.
When Microsoft originally announced Longhorn, people thought they might actually deliver
I never thought that, based entirely on past behaviour. It seems a lot of people never learn from history. I do, and computing is the first field where I feel like a psychi
I'm lost. Everything you say is contrary to what I hear every time from Windows fans. Specifically, that : - Windows is king of backward compatibility - its interface is consistent, even a model (yes, we all know that's not true) - it's usable - it's easy to use and learn
Who is wrong ? Both you and these people can they be right at the same time ? I doubt it.
Short : - they convey the thinking that most Linux users are snobs or that the problem is worse in Linux and FOSS - they convey the thinking that snobs are mostly a Linux problem - they say they talk about barrier to entrance for new Linux users, but strangely enough, these new Linux users always ask highly technical things
Because then, the trolls are out, you know, the people that talk about "snobs", and then, magically, these snobs transforms into "linux users". I'm refering to this : "Linux users need to understand that when disillusioned Windows users come to them asking for help with Linux, they effectively become representatives of Linux". Who says they don't ? Yes, the big straw men starts coming. And with them, the red herring, like : "While snobs can be encountered for just about any OS you care to name, the Linux snobs are particularly shrill". Wow !! You're a snob yourself, pretending to know every snobs for every OS, at least enough to say such a thing.
Abusing new Linux users for their lack of knowledge, rather than helping them to learn more, only harms the cause
OK, that's true. Now, I still have a hard time finding an example of Linux users abusing other Linux users on Linux questions, even in the article. I don't deny these people are snobs, but now, what are the questions asked ? They are : - How to launch a daemon ? - Which database is better ? - I can't migrate to the new HA cluster on Linux ? - I run a certain piece of software on my servers that logs its messages to a MySQL database (!!!) - RTFM jerks on freenode chat rooms (the C and C++ programing ones) -... To be fair, some ask about "which Linux distro is better". But most of the questions are not even Linux specific (they could be asked for Unix, Windows, Mac), but Linux snobs get the blame, the focus is on Linux snobs. Why ? And most of these questions are highly technical things, that should come way after a newbie has entered Linux world. So this article is utter flamebait, but well disguised. The worst, is when flamebait articles like these ones, try to make their argument right, pointing to digg.com, where people took the bait and flame away. What was the purpose of this article besides flamebait ? None : the few snobs are sure to reply with flames, and the others will go on doing their job correctly, just feeling less incentive, being insulted like they were snobs. These people are there to help in a FOSS environment, they are not psychanalists that can make the snobs shut their mouth. An article like that won't do any good, it doesn't even provides solutions.
If a Linux Distro is really open, should the user not have the freedom to choose if he wants to use open-source drivers or proprietary drivers
But there is no open Linux Distro, if that even means anything. There are Free distros, based on Free and Open Source licenses only. These licenses explain what freedom you have, and these licenses never said you were free to do anything you want. And anyway, no distro can prevent you from installing proprietaruy drivers on it, so your point is moot.
Being slavish to the 'open-source only' rule is in fact counter to the spirit of it all
As obeying the "open-source only rule" is a choice and not forced on you, I wonder how you can say it's "slavish" : it's the contrary ! You managed to make moderators believe sth that is completely backwards !! Choosing to use only open-source is a choice that comes naturally when you're burned by proprietary binaries not supported anymore, that don't work anymore. That's why we have so much FOSS tools now, and it's fully in the spirit of FOSS. Using proprietary when you can use free is what is counter to the spirit of it all.
Yeah, it's great to be an idealist, but there are some of us who want usable 3D. I fall squarely in the latter category, and I will continue to load proprietary modules into my kernel
But guess what, the pragmatists (that fall on the latter category) are those that want to block inclusion of proprietary modules in the kernel. This started with the choice of GPL as the kernel license.
Any move by the FSF to prohibit this will only drive people away from Linux, since it's not likely that NVidia and ATI will ever open their drivers completely
What you say goes against Free Software, and the FSF does not prohibit you of anything. The FSF provides a license, that is used in Linux. Now, those are Linus and kernel devs that don't want to be dependant on closed drivers.
Free Software is great for some things, but occasionally the FSF has to recognize that some proprietary elements are unavoidable
You would have to understand what the FSF is and does before you could understand how Free Software is great. You obviously don't know, as the FSF (and RMS) recognize that some proprietary elements are tolerated as long as a free solution is not available. You have the wrong culprit here, the Linux kernel devs are your culprits.
I say, use the proprietary drivers until approrpiate ones can be reverse engineered, then dump them for the open source versions
BS. Linux people using NVidia hardware are doing just that, and instead of the effect you describe, we see that there is no more 3D open source driver for NVidia hardware. You have no incentive to help developing and reverse engineering a driver when you have the short term confort zone. Even when the proprietary driver was crashing like mad.
If more and more people begin to use Linux systems, eventually the graphics systems manufacturers are going to have to cave to market forces and support the open source system
Even more BS. They already support Linux, all of them. Some better than others. But "support" does not mean "free drivers".
And they ship millions of units per year. So while every few years a few thousand people may clamor for them to change thier business models and practices (which is expensive to thier eyes), millions more happily use thier products without a problem
And there are a few movie studios, and yet, ATI and NVidia fought tooth and nail to get the market. There are other professionals too taht use Linux OS.
What do you think thier course of action would be here? They could lose every Linux customer they have, and it would probably not adversely affect thier bottom line too much
BS. There are some high profile professionals that use their products on, guess what, Linux OS. And I bet the competitors would be more than eager to take the place of NVidia as the provider of hardware for these systems. I think NVidia would actually see the difference on their bottom line.
My boss spent two months getting a set of robotics cameras to work with Mandrake 10, recompiling a bunch of custom kernels, getting various gurus in, working every day from january through march, just to get the camera data read properly by the libraries and the libraries working properly with the system
So now it works on Linux, OK.
We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu. An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.
He was still in shock because the library that worked on an at least 2 years older distro of Linux, worked on one of the lateste breed of Linux ? Welcome to the world of FOSS and it's great compatibility. This would have been no shock to me. Mandriva 10, despite being 2 years old, was already Linux 2.6, so it had big chances of working, especially if you have the source.
I have more than tripled that uptime on Windows XP without disabling much of anything. XP really is a pretty stable OS, contrary to what Microsoft booboys what you to believe
One of the Windows XP SP2 I'm using (I have 3 at work with a KVM...) has already more than tripled this uptime, this is the one with the Win9x look. The one using Luna just rebooted during the night this morning, so I can't tell you the uptime, but it's very low. And on both PC, I do basic things (firefox, office, putty), I don't use multimedia or CDROM. And yet, even the one with Win9x look will lock sometimes. So it locks on low activity computers. These computers are 3 GHz 1 Go RAM PCs with SATA disks !!! They were all prepared from the same master made by self-called Windows guru, arrogant zealots that, when they can't explain to me why their baby crashed, tell me it's because I'm a Linux user !!
The biggest killer of my uptime for Windows XP has been the security updates that require a restart in order for them to be installed. If it wasn't for these, gawd knows how long my uptime would be
Depends on your activity. I put a lot of load on my PC at home, and the biggest one have 1 Go RAM. Windows would not last 2 days with this treatment at home. I tried to bear with the slowness and long locks once, and Win XP stood 6 days before it definitely locked up. To compare, with the same treatment (and even worse, as we are several using the same PC at the same time), my current OS lasts months without showing any lock or slowdown or crash.
I can run Windows programs all the way down to ones made for Windows 3.1 on XP. Microsoft puts a lot of stock into backwards compatibility. Perhaps you should rethink that statement?
I have programs that don't run anymore, could you rethink your statement ? And launching a program is not enough, it has to work too. Virtualdub tool to acquire video from my TV card did not work anymore, the software for my Miro card won't even launch anymore on WIndows XP, Theme Park wil crash constantly when it launches. That's 2 examples, but there are way more. You people are such BS seller with your godly Windows backward compatibility.
Similarly, the OSS culture needs to integrate more artists to help polish clipart and GUI's, and writers to flesh out documentation and instruction manuals.
Yeah, it does
Yeah, we need more, but we are far better now than some years ago, when we could not even get good looking icons. Now, we are actually trying to level the work of artists, to have something usable.
However, trying to say to a Firefox coder that it would take up less space on a tab and be more useful if the Favicon of a tab would alternate with the close tab control when you hovered over the tab
Which goes against usability. To be more precise, it goes completely against discoverability. You see, people also say FOSS lacks usability experts, and when some try to do sth, they are called names, and the trolls say we give the usability people too much power. Your example is a perfect example of too much geekiness that needs to be leveled to have a usable desktop. Discoverability outweighs your need for leet thing like what you describe. My wife has problems using the same feature in a KDE program that uses the same effect : the result is that she rarely close the tabs.
That's just one real life example. When people with a sense of aesthetic try to get involved in most OSS projects, you get drowned out by the guys who think there's nothing wrong with their code if it doesn't have bugs
Straw man, you get drowned out by perfectly valid usability concerns that you are quick to forget. And I'm sure I forgot about other valid reasons.
It was one design decision: backwards compatibility
Of course this is BS. What of the complete turn over when they discovered that.NET was too slow, not tailored for big projects ? So much for.NET being so fast to develop with, being so good, with a little speed penalty, like so many fanboys rant about every time (yes, here on/.). I guess all the other OS people that tirelessly pointed all of that out were right after all, and that the Windows camp was the home of the zealots. It's going on with this BS about backwards compatibility. Excuse me ? I experienced first hand the change in the multimedia framework API, the drivers not working anymore (even a driver for a joystick converter, yes, a joystick converter, does not work anymore !!), the apps and games not working anymore (some working but very badly, needing lots of care and hacky patches),...
but they must be commended upon their due diligence on this one aspect
BS.
A lot of software from Windows 3.0 can still run on XP
And a lot don't work anymore. So what's the point ?
Man, where did you come from? People change. Companies change... believe it or not, sometimes for the better
You must be new in computing. Such faith still amaze me. Look, I won't argue with you, just use one word or expression for every nonsense you talk about.
The fact that Microsoft hired him and he has an (albeit small) team working on this stuff should be at least a sign of goodwill
ODF battle...
How can you call him "off message?"
ODF battle
I think this guy is right on the fucking money and Microsoft is finally pulling their heads out of their asses. Sure this is optimistic hope for the future of companies working hand in hand with OSS development projects but we have to believe it's going to happen or it won't!
ODF
But then people like yourself hop all over it and stomp down anything that might be construed as an olive branch
SCO ?
Congratulations, they call you a communist and you call them fascists. Let's all call names then, shall we? You'll probably find some names for me also. Where does that get us?
SCO
The cold hard truth is that you're just as closed minded as they are about working together and you're only screwing over the user when you do that
ODF
I don't know what they did to you or what happened to you in a previous life but please get over it
And that is/only/ for the C++ section of Kdevelop... but most of the Linux or OpenSource documentation provided is a joke
I have 2 big problems with what you say : - Kdevelop has nothing to do with an API, and most devs (me included, even though I'm no dev) can use it without doc. What's even better, you can ask the authors or the community about a feature you don't find or don't understand in Kdevelop. - You're quick to assume every doc in FOSS is in the same state So you failed to talk about the equivalent to what is asked of MS here, which would be kdevelop or KDE API, which are documented, and pretty well. Was this cluelessness or on purpose ? Even if they were not documented on KDE, the code is available. Which is not an option for MS, which is why everybody have trouble interoperating with them, which is the reason they are on trial. How could you
Seriously, I may sound as a troll here but, there is *no* way you can tell me that is better than even the documentation on Borland C++ IDE!!!
Of course not, you are comparing apple and oranges anyway !! The problem here is not the documentation of the IDE, it is the documentation of API, which is much more important.
this is one of the/thousands/ of details why some open source software just can not make it. And the people that closes their eyes and negate it will never get it...
People don't close their eyes nor negate it, but as long as everybody using KDevelop can use it without this doc, I don't see the problem. Switching topic won't prove anything BTW, and your rhetoric about "thousands of details why some open source software just can not make it" won't work either. It's just poor FUD.
Slightly OT, but have Linux and Schilling decided to let cdrecord work right when acting as an IDE device yet? Last I checked, it's still been broken since 2.6.8
No. I did not take side for Linux or Schilling before. My wife uses K3B, and I try to update kernel as soon as they are out lately on my desktop PC, because they have features that improve the desktop (and latest udev needs latest kernels). And when she comes telling me burning errors out, it's really irritating. When I saw that cdrdao works perfectly in K3B, I tried fixing cdrecord, believe me, I tried everything : it works with my LG burner, but refuse to work with my Plextor one, except on root. Last time I tried was the latest dev release of cdrecord. It didn't work, I gave up, wiped out cdrecord, and installed dvdrtools, with a symlink from cdrecord to dvdrecord. Now it works perfectly... So now, I take side with Linus, because I lost my time trying to make cdrecord work, and realise that the dvdrtools fork works just fine on new linux kernels, despite being older than the latest cdrecord version.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen this happen often when attempting to view WMV files, which requires the use of a Windows DLL. I think I read somewhere that the problem is specific to RedHat/Fedora, and has to do with how the DLL is loaded at runtime. Unfortunately, I can't put my hands on the source of that info at the moment
Perhaps that's the reason, and perhaps you just still are using the release from nearly one year ago (pre7), and not a CVS version.
Unfortunately, neither VLC nor MPlayer can be included as libraries in other multimedia applications. Having to work with an embedded instance of VLC and MPlayer is a pain and not conducive to extending functionality in object-oriented fashion
Of course, working with an embedded instance of MPlayer would be just stupid. What people do instead, is using the library associated with MPlayer : FFMpeg.
Now go look everywhere, you will see lots of projects using ffmpeg (like gstreamer).
So your argument about xine-lib just fell flat.
Oh, bullshit. It sounds even stupider to non-gamers or very casual gamers(which I consider myself to be)
This is tiring BS really.
This thing that american geeks have about names is sickness !
I'm european, and I just shake my head in disbelief each time I see another thread like this one, on a name.
I see this as highly egocentric on the part of american speaking people.
In France, we use "Oui" to say "Yes". Fortunately, we don't say it a lot, because given what I read here, american tourists would be often offended. Why ?
Because "Oui" is pronounced exactly like "Wii" in french.
Besides, that means that at least in France, where we are not all up on names, "Wii" has nothing bad.
Japanese love french things, and the primary market of Wii will be Japan as always, so if marketed well, it won't be a problem at all in Japan.
I bet in Europe Wii won't be a problem.
Why do the american speaking people feel the need to say everyone will be offended ?
We other gamers and non-gamers in the world sure enough don't want to be associated with american people whining about the name of a console.
I was looking around for the Japanese reaction to it, and at least on Slashdot Japan, there seems to be about as much bewilderment at the name as there is over here. The name doesn't have any bad meaning in Japan, but it still sounds wierd
Given what I've said earlier, I have a hard time believing what you say. URL please ?
I'm tired of these BS authors.
He redefines what "freedom to run" is to prove his point. Well, his redefinition is just flawed.
Freedom to run means just that : you can legally run the program within the license terms.
User-friendly has NOTHING to do with it : many people will find GNU (s)ed, GNU grep, valgrind or GCC not easy to use or very complex.
These programs "exclude people who do not possess high technical knowledge or advanced skills sets", and yet, they are free to use, but not for everyone.
They are highly in use everywhere by people technical enough to use them.
They are still free software, still free to run to most users and not a "hollow promise".
So the redefinition of the author is contradictory and just a pile of stupid fallacies.
I do take the authors point that for a user to effectively maintain their freedom, free software must be usable
Sorry, this is nonsense to me. If the software is Free, it can be made usable, if it were not before.
Even if the Free software is not usable, it is still Free though.
So usability has nothing to do with freedom.
It goes back to the whole idea of Linux as an everyday operating system. Anyone who is not a geek, i.e. most of the population, is not going to adopt something that isn't easy to operate
... and that Linux never chose to be in any of these devices.
This is just not true. You talk like most people try using everything before buying, which is just not true.
People adopted VCR and lots of them had blinking '00:00', I even still know some people like that today.
People will adopt what marketing tell them to.
I mean, there's no reason to make a Windows-like GUI for Linux unless you want people to actually think of Linux as an alternative to Windows. And while you might impress the average user with a Windows-like look and feel, unless it's just as easy to use out of the box as their Windows PC is now, there will be no great swell of converts
Sorry to disappoint you : I would never have installed Linux for people if it was as hard to use as Windows. The only thing that can make Windows even remotely easy to use is the few geeks you talk about. Lots of companies are making tons of money because Windows is hard to use, you know.
I've said it before: Linux's popularity depends on what it wants to be
BS, Linux does not want to be anything. Linux is what people want it to be.
If it wants to be the OS of geeks and hackers and multi-million dollar corporations, so be it. If Linux (or any of its derivatives) wish to compete against Windows for market share, there has to be a shift in thinking, away from kernel-centric, gizmos-and-gadgets way of thinking to the "what would a user want to do" mindset.
And before you talk "Linux this Linux that", I suggest you learn what Linux really is first.
When you understand how what you say is just retarded, you'll have understand.
Hint 1 : read at what I've written above.
Hint 2 : learn that Linux is in TiVo, KISS, lots of network appliances, phones,
I have installed a few machines recently and not once did I have to hunt down drivers to have a functional machine.
... NOT !
Lucky guy.
Now there are cases where there are newer drivers that I could go get should I need them but they are not required.
Like SATA ?
The big difference between installing Linux versus XP?
If I need drivers they most likely exist for XP.
Yeah, like for my miro TV card or my mustek scanner
Fortunately, you said 'likely'. You still have to hunt, and a long time, as no one can assure you if there is a driver or not.
At least on Linux, you don't hunt for long, you learn quickly if there is a driver or not.
Why should I constantly have to get new drivers when I upgrade Linux?
Because the new kernel bring lots of new features and improvements that are enforced ?
Try to be credible at least : you constantly upgrade your kernel, which should at the same time upgrade most of your drivers, and you chose to use some external drivers that then need updating, but no, upgrading these is too hard. If that's the case, sorry, but you just acknowledged that the problem is in the drivers external to the kernel, not in the Linux kernel itself.
Often I have to recompile the old driver. Yea it isn't that hard for me to do but it is out side the comfort zone of about 99.9% of the computer using population!
The 99.9 % of the population which specifically DO NOT compile drivers, so for which there is no issue (the binary distros do it for them).
Now that you've said your fallacy, do you feel better ?
Nvidia and ATI are not going to open source their drivers anytime soon
Now you confirm what I said earlier, you even specify that your problem is in your binary closed drivers.
But strangely enough, you accept the burden put on you by ATI and NVidia, and blame Linux instead. Of course, it's easier.
We will keep using Nvidia and ATIs closed source drivers because they are 1. Free and 2. Work. Making it painful by not having a clean, stable, binary interface will not work. All it does is make users lives harder and slow adoption of Linux.
You're even more mistaken than I thought. Having to recompile your drivers have NOTHING to do with ABI compatibility most of the time. A change in ABI would mean that you'd have to patch your old driver, before recompiling it, for it to even load into the kernel. The check for concordance of kernel version is for stability purpose (which can't be insured anyway with a closed driver), and that's what preventing you from loading your old driver. There's a mechanism for not checking kernel version (dangerous).
When MS-DOS was first written, there was no such thing as directories. Everything lived in the root, and there was no need for path names or path separators. It quickly became necessary to pass arguments to commands, and the natural way to do this was to distinguish them from paramters by pre-pending a character. MS chose to use /.
/. Thus, they went with the next nearest thing, \.
.NET] within bash or tcsh or whatever. That way you could still use the familiar but then extend into .NET crap if you wanted to.
BS, Unix was using them extensively already. Get your facts straight, MS said they did that to avoid being accused of copying Unix technology. The other reason is the one you cited. But directories existed already.
Time passed, and directories were invented. People started to use / as a path separator, in similar fashion to how references are built up - eg major part/minor part/whatever/etc, say "57b/6". MS obviously had to support directory trees, but didn't want to break backward compatibility (something they are loathe to do to this day), and so could not use
BS again, '\' was there from the start, with a variable you could set to use '/' instead.
Alternatively, perhaps you're right, and they're petty and stupid enough to shoot themselves in the foot by making themselves incompatible with every competing product at a time when they had little or no compelling advantage.
Which was the case. And they have a big advantage : they were working with IBM, which was a HUGE advantage. Again, get your facts straight.
Incidentally, try using / in a path in the address bar of Windows Explorer in a modern Windows (eg >= 2k). You might be surprised.
There is no reason why they couldn't embed C# support [or generically
BS, there are a LOT of technical and other reasons for not doing that.
Do you understand you need to load all this when starting your OS ? On Unix, you are not even sure to have all your libraries when booting your OS.
Maybe so we don't have to parse and re-parse and re-re-re-parse the damn text every time. To say nothing of data that's nested. Of course we could all just use XML and YAML, we just have to rewrite every app to serialize and unserialize these grotesque formats.
... Pathetic.
Do you understand that the shell is suited for system administrators and not for programmers ?
Well, programmers can use it too, that's a powerful feature, not a drawback.
System admin don't need to parse and reparse and re-re-reparse anything.
No BS about nested data either.
Frankly I don't see the need to justify the addition of functionality for people who do nothing but bitch about how real problems don't really exist. You stick to piping text everywhere, no one's taking it away from you.
To add functionality, the basics should be there. Do you understand that the shell does not just pipe text ? It does far more than that, it is portable and even helps boot some OS, you know. And in this case, piping is one minor feature, environment and managing jobs is far more important.
Anyway, it'll be cloned it within a month and then the slashdoterati will claim they invented it. Or maybe it'll run on Mono.
And a troll to add credibility to your argument
Well, I see your point, but I think you twist the facts to make it like NT4 was so much ahead, now let's see
...
...
... Linux was working with lots of Unix programs, and shell and pipe still work very well today, and are still in wide use.
I was using NT 4 back in 1996. Back then, it has SMP (scaled up to 32 processors, although the cheap version was limited to two). Linux was just starting to get SMP capability
NT4 had SMP and supported up to 32 processors on paper. Which does not mean it ever scaled. Support and scale, not the same thing.
Linux was just starting to get SMP, but got it better (and no, it was still not right, but better) than NT4 already.
Linux was not even scaling well to 4 processors, but was starting to be used far more than NT4 on these kind of setup.
And I don't think cost was the sole reason, especially when you use such architectures.
It must have to do with the fact that the number of processors is not all in these setup.
If you can't manage your memory correctly between processors, supporting 32 processors is often useless.
It had native threading, which Linux only got last year
And Linux non native threading was already way faster than NT4 native threading.
And Linux got native threading 2 years ago, increasing the gap with Windows even more.
It had full support for ACLs in the filesystem. Linux got that in, what, 2000? Does it even work with the standard filesystems? I've been using ACLs with UFS2 (the default FS) on FreeBSD for a couple of years, but I've not seen them in common use on Linux
Youhave not seem is not an evidence of anything.
At the time, ACL were considered unnecessary because too complicated to manage (that's still the case), and complexity is enemy of security.
Well, it has finally been implemented and more, for nearly every FS Linux supports.
But it still is not used a lot, because for most people, the base system is enough.
It had a GUI with a single, consistent, user interface toolkit. Linux got one of those in 2030?
Linux got that with KDE 2 and Gnome 2, which was in 2001 I think. Except that the GUI was not just like NT4, they were more advanced in lots of fields : i18n/l10n, multi user, multi session, cross platform, customisation, look, resolution agnostism,
I can't remember the first time I got 3D acceleration of anything other than GLide working with Linux, but I don't think it was before 2000
And of course, this has nothing to do that 3DFX was king of 3D until the end of 1999
It had a stable ABI and component system that allowed some basic introspection and management of reference counted objects. These objects still work on current versions of Windows[1]
I don't understand the advantage
Did NT4 kill Linux? No. It was, however, a long way ahead of the competition
Sorry, but NT4 was the "Unix killer", and it didn't kill anything. On the other hand, Linux is way more on the way to kill Unix than NT4 ever was.
Vista may be ahead of the competition when it launches, but if it is then it will be by such a small margin that it will be the last release that is
It would be an improvement then. My perception is that WinXP was already behind the Linux GUI when it launched, and if Vista maintain the gap, I will already be impressed.
I'm one of the rare people that never caved in to all the rants of stupid people thinking that MS would deliver, and that Vista would kill Linux.
It's amazing, a few months ago, it seemed like Vista was going to kill everything. The tune has changed so fast, that the head of a lot of people must be spinning like mad.
When Microsoft originally announced Longhorn, people thought they might actually deliver
I never thought that, based entirely on past behaviour. It seems a lot of people never learn from history.
I do, and computing is the first field where I feel like a psychi
I'm lost.
Everything you say is contrary to what I hear every time from Windows fans. Specifically, that :
- Windows is king of backward compatibility
- its interface is consistent, even a model (yes, we all know that's not true)
- it's usable
- it's easy to use and learn
Who is wrong ? Both you and these people can they be right at the same time ? I doubt it.
You know why I dislike these articles ?
...
Short :
- they convey the thinking that most Linux users are snobs or that the problem is worse in Linux and FOSS
- they convey the thinking that snobs are mostly a Linux problem
- they say they talk about barrier to entrance for new Linux users, but strangely enough, these new Linux users always ask highly technical things
Because then, the trolls are out, you know, the people that talk about "snobs", and then, magically, these snobs transforms into "linux users".
I'm refering to this : "Linux users need to understand that when disillusioned Windows users come to them asking for help with Linux, they effectively become representatives of Linux".
Who says they don't ? Yes, the big straw men starts coming.
And with them, the red herring, like : "While snobs can be encountered for just about any OS you care to name, the Linux snobs are particularly shrill".
Wow !!
You're a snob yourself, pretending to know every snobs for every OS, at least enough to say such a thing.
Abusing new Linux users for their lack of knowledge, rather than helping them to learn more, only harms the cause
OK, that's true. Now, I still have a hard time finding an example of Linux users abusing other Linux users on Linux questions, even in the article.
I don't deny these people are snobs, but now, what are the questions asked ? They are :
- How to launch a daemon ?
- Which database is better ?
- I can't migrate to the new HA cluster on Linux ?
- I run a certain piece of software on my servers that logs its messages to a MySQL database (!!!)
- RTFM jerks on freenode chat rooms (the C and C++ programing ones)
-
To be fair, some ask about "which Linux distro is better". But most of the questions are not even Linux specific (they could be asked for Unix, Windows, Mac), but Linux snobs get the blame, the focus is on Linux snobs. Why ?
And most of these questions are highly technical things, that should come way after a newbie has entered Linux world.
So this article is utter flamebait, but well disguised.
The worst, is when flamebait articles like these ones, try to make their argument right, pointing to digg.com, where people took the bait and flame away.
What was the purpose of this article besides flamebait ? None : the few snobs are sure to reply with flames, and the others will go on doing their job correctly, just feeling less incentive, being insulted like they were snobs.
These people are there to help in a FOSS environment, they are not psychanalists that can make the snobs shut their mouth. An article like that won't do any good, it doesn't even provides solutions.
If a Linux Distro is really open, should the user not have the freedom to choose if he wants to use open-source drivers or proprietary drivers
But there is no open Linux Distro, if that even means anything. There are Free distros, based on Free and Open Source licenses only.
These licenses explain what freedom you have, and these licenses never said you were free to do anything you want.
And anyway, no distro can prevent you from installing proprietaruy drivers on it, so your point is moot.
Being slavish to the 'open-source only' rule is in fact counter to the spirit of it all
As obeying the "open-source only rule" is a choice and not forced on you, I wonder how you can say it's "slavish" : it's the contrary !
You managed to make moderators believe sth that is completely backwards !!
Choosing to use only open-source is a choice that comes naturally when you're burned by proprietary binaries not supported anymore, that don't work anymore.
That's why we have so much FOSS tools now, and it's fully in the spirit of FOSS.
Using proprietary when you can use free is what is counter to the spirit of it all.
Yeah, it's great to be an idealist, but there are some of us who want usable 3D. I fall squarely in the latter category, and I will continue to load proprietary modules into my kernel
But guess what, the pragmatists (that fall on the latter category) are those that want to block inclusion of proprietary modules in the kernel.
This started with the choice of GPL as the kernel license.
Any move by the FSF to prohibit this will only drive people away from Linux, since it's not likely that NVidia and ATI will ever open their drivers completely
What you say goes against Free Software, and the FSF does not prohibit you of anything. The FSF provides a license, that is used in Linux.
Now, those are Linus and kernel devs that don't want to be dependant on closed drivers.
Free Software is great for some things, but occasionally the FSF has to recognize that some proprietary elements are unavoidable
You would have to understand what the FSF is and does before you could understand how Free Software is great. You obviously don't know, as the FSF (and RMS) recognize that some proprietary elements are tolerated as long as a free solution is not available.
You have the wrong culprit here, the Linux kernel devs are your culprits.
I say, use the proprietary drivers until approrpiate ones can be reverse engineered, then dump them for the open source versions
BS. Linux people using NVidia hardware are doing just that, and instead of the effect you describe, we see that there is no more 3D open source driver for NVidia hardware.
You have no incentive to help developing and reverse engineering a driver when you have the short term confort zone. Even when the proprietary driver was crashing like mad.
If more and more people begin to use Linux systems, eventually the graphics systems manufacturers are going to have to cave to market forces and support the open source system
Even more BS. They already support Linux, all of them. Some better than others. But "support" does not mean "free drivers".
And they ship millions of units per year. So while every few years a few thousand people may clamor for them to change thier business models and practices (which is expensive to thier eyes), millions more happily use thier products without a problem
And there are a few movie studios, and yet, ATI and NVidia fought tooth and nail to get the market.
There are other professionals too taht use Linux OS.
What do you think thier course of action would be here? They could lose every Linux customer they have, and it would probably not adversely affect thier bottom line too much
BS. There are some high profile professionals that use their products on, guess what, Linux OS. And I bet the competitors would be more than eager to take the place of NVidia as the provider of hardware for these systems. I think NVidia would actually see the difference on their bottom line.
My boss spent two months getting a set of robotics cameras to work with Mandrake 10, recompiling a bunch of custom kernels, getting various gurus in, working every day from january through march, just to get the camera data read properly by the libraries and the libraries working properly with the system
So now it works on Linux, OK.
We were talking about distros, and I mentioned that he might want to check out Ubuntu.
An hour or two later I get this incredibly emotional call from him. He had installed Ubuntu on the robot, one-click-built the camera packages, compiled the vision libraries, and it worked. 30 minutes of system install plus literally 10 minutes of compiling and he had just done what took him two months on another distro. He is still in shock over this.
He was still in shock because the library that worked on an at least 2 years older distro of Linux, worked on one of the lateste breed of Linux ?
Welcome to the world of FOSS and it's great compatibility. This would have been no shock to me.
Mandriva 10, despite being 2 years old, was already Linux 2.6, so it had big chances of working, especially if you have the source.
I have more than tripled that uptime on Windows XP without disabling much of anything. XP really is a pretty stable OS, contrary to what Microsoft booboys what you to believe
...) has already more than tripled this uptime, this is the one with the Win9x look.
One of the Windows XP SP2 I'm using (I have 3 at work with a KVM
The one using Luna just rebooted during the night this morning, so I can't tell you the uptime, but it's very low. And on both PC, I do basic things (firefox, office, putty), I don't use multimedia or CDROM.
And yet, even the one with Win9x look will lock sometimes. So it locks on low activity computers.
These computers are 3 GHz 1 Go RAM PCs with SATA disks !!!
They were all prepared from the same master made by self-called Windows guru, arrogant zealots that, when they can't explain to me why their baby crashed, tell me it's because I'm a Linux user !!
The biggest killer of my uptime for Windows XP has been the security updates that require a restart in order for them to be installed. If it wasn't for these, gawd knows how long my uptime would be
Depends on your activity. I put a lot of load on my PC at home, and the biggest one have 1 Go RAM.
Windows would not last 2 days with this treatment at home. I tried to bear with the slowness and long locks once, and Win XP stood 6 days before it definitely locked up.
To compare, with the same treatment (and even worse, as we are several using the same PC at the same time), my current OS lasts months without showing any lock or slowdown or crash.
I can run Windows programs all the way down to ones made for Windows 3.1 on XP. Microsoft puts a lot of stock into backwards compatibility. Perhaps you should rethink that statement?
I have programs that don't run anymore, could you rethink your statement ?
And launching a program is not enough, it has to work too.
Virtualdub tool to acquire video from my TV card did not work anymore, the software for my Miro card won't even launch anymore on WIndows XP, Theme Park wil crash constantly when it launches. That's 2 examples, but there are way more.
You people are such BS seller with your godly Windows backward compatibility.
Similarly, the OSS culture needs to integrate more artists to help polish clipart and GUI's, and writers to flesh out documentation and instruction manuals.
Yeah, it does
Yeah, we need more, but we are far better now than some years ago, when we could not even get good looking icons.
Now, we are actually trying to level the work of artists, to have something usable.
However, trying to say to a Firefox coder that it would take up less space on a tab and be more useful if the Favicon of a tab would alternate with the close tab control when you hovered over the tab
Which goes against usability. To be more precise, it goes completely against discoverability.
You see, people also say FOSS lacks usability experts, and when some try to do sth, they are called names, and the trolls say we give the usability people too much power. Your example is a perfect example of too much geekiness that needs to be leveled to have a usable desktop.
Discoverability outweighs your need for leet thing like what you describe. My wife has problems using the same feature in a KDE program that uses the same effect : the result is that she rarely close the tabs.
That's just one real life example. When people with a sense of aesthetic try to get involved in most OSS projects, you get drowned out by the guys who think there's nothing wrong with their code if it doesn't have bugs
Straw man, you get drowned out by perfectly valid usability concerns that you are quick to forget. And I'm sure I forgot about other valid reasons.
It was one design decision: backwards compatibility
.NET was too slow, not tailored for big projects ? .NET being so fast to develop with, being so good, with a little speed penalty, like so many fanboys rant about every time (yes, here on /.). ...
Of course this is BS. What of the complete turn over when they discovered that
So much for
I guess all the other OS people that tirelessly pointed all of that out were right after all, and that the Windows camp was the home of the zealots.
It's going on with this BS about backwards compatibility. Excuse me ? I experienced first hand the change in the multimedia framework API, the drivers not working anymore (even a driver for a joystick converter, yes, a joystick converter, does not work anymore !!), the apps and games not working anymore (some working but very badly, needing lots of care and hacky patches),
but they must be commended upon their due diligence on this one aspect
BS.
A lot of software from Windows 3.0 can still run on XP
And a lot don't work anymore. So what's the point ?
Man, where did you come from? People change. Companies change ... believe it or not, sometimes for the better
...
... in this life.
You must be new in computing. Such faith still amaze me. Look, I won't argue with you, just use one word or expression for every nonsense you talk about.
The fact that Microsoft hired him and he has an (albeit small) team working on this stuff should be at least a sign of goodwill
ODF battle
How can you call him "off message?"
ODF battle
I think this guy is right on the fucking money and Microsoft is finally pulling their heads out of their asses. Sure this is optimistic hope for the future of companies working hand in hand with OSS development projects but we have to believe it's going to happen or it won't!
ODF
But then people like yourself hop all over it and stomp down anything that might be construed as an olive branch
SCO ?
Congratulations, they call you a communist and you call them fascists. Let's all call names then, shall we? You'll probably find some names for me also. Where does that get us?
SCO
The cold hard truth is that you're just as closed minded as they are about working together and you're only screwing over the user when you do that
ODF
I don't know what they did to you or what happened to you in a previous life but please get over it
ODF, SCO,
And that is /only/ for the C++ section of Kdevelop... but most of the Linux or OpenSource documentation provided is a joke
/thousands/ of details why some open source software just can not make it. And the people that closes their eyes and negate it will never get it...
I have 2 big problems with what you say :
- Kdevelop has nothing to do with an API, and most devs (me included, even though I'm no dev) can use it without doc. What's even better, you can ask the authors or the community about a feature you don't find or don't understand in Kdevelop.
- You're quick to assume every doc in FOSS is in the same state
So you failed to talk about the equivalent to what is asked of MS here, which would be kdevelop or KDE API, which are documented, and pretty well. Was this cluelessness or on purpose ?
Even if they were not documented on KDE, the code is available. Which is not an option for MS, which is why everybody have trouble interoperating with them, which is the reason they are on trial. How could you
Seriously, I may sound as a troll here but, there is *no* way you can tell me that is better than even the documentation on Borland C++ IDE!!!
Of course not, you are comparing apple and oranges anyway !! The problem here is not the documentation of the IDE, it is the documentation of API, which is much more important.
this is one of the
People don't close their eyes nor negate it, but as long as everybody using KDevelop can use it without this doc, I don't see the problem.
Switching topic won't prove anything BTW, and your rhetoric about "thousands of details why some open source software just can not make it" won't work either.
It's just poor FUD.
Slightly OT, but have Linux and Schilling decided to let cdrecord work right when acting as an IDE device yet? Last I checked, it's still been broken since 2.6.8
...
No. I did not take side for Linux or Schilling before.
My wife uses K3B, and I try to update kernel as soon as they are out lately on my desktop PC, because they have features that improve the desktop (and latest udev needs latest kernels). And when she comes telling me burning errors out, it's really irritating.
When I saw that cdrdao works perfectly in K3B, I tried fixing cdrecord, believe me, I tried everything : it works with my LG burner, but refuse to work with my Plextor one, except on root.
Last time I tried was the latest dev release of cdrecord. It didn't work, I gave up, wiped out cdrecord, and installed dvdrtools, with a symlink from cdrecord to dvdrecord. Now it works perfectly
So now, I take side with Linus, because I lost my time trying to make cdrecord work, and realise that the dvdrtools fork works just fine on new linux kernels, despite being older than the latest cdrecord version.