Now, I realize that choice is a good thing. I think it's a good thing that Linux has two major consumer desktops (KDE, Gnome) and all of the standalone WMs that form much of the workstation market (AfterStep, CDE, etc). But really, is it better to start a new project for this kind of activity?
I think it would be better for these developers to contribute to the existing projects. It's kind of a waste of man-hours to go about writing another window manager if Sawmill, Blackbox or E will meet their needs. Similarly, I think it's kind of a waste of man hours to go about trying to build another project with similar goals to KDE and Gnome.
Besides, it may be special that they're starting to build this product, but who really believes that it will surpass Gnome/KDE? Even if they take the existing Gnome codebase and add modifications, I think it's unreasonable to expect that anyone else will be able to improve Gnome faster than the Gnome team. Both Gnome and KDE have built communities of developers and users, which help them develop better products. I don't think that this new entry will be able to do any more than the existing products, or advance at a quicker pace.
Of course, I could be wrong. Actually, I hope I am. Best of luck, guys.
From my experiences with voice recognition, I've found that the software has trouble picking up sounds a long distance from the microphone (depending on the quality of the microphone), and has difficulty recognizing commands from a voice it's not trained for.
This, to me, suggests that these stories are urban legends. If they're not, then they are indicative of a horribly stupid implementation of voice recognition : In a moderately loud area, or an area where more than one person will be using voice rec, headset mics with 6" pickups should be used.
Don't blame on the voice recognition software what is in reality caused by inepitude and lack of foresight.
I want voice recognition on my _workstation_! Is anyone listening???
The ViaVoice SDK comes close, but I havn't found any well-done frontends to that, even. I wish Dragon or L&H would release a product for Linux, or at least one that works with Wine.
What Linux needs is a way to uninstall applications. I don't mind compiling and installing stuff, or using.deb or.rpm packages, but I want to know that when I get rid of stuff, it gets rid of stuff.
Currently, uninstall options aren't all that promising. If you installed with 'make install', then good luck. If you still have the source around, maybe you can read the makefile and find out what went where. If you installed with RPM or the Debian package manager, you still have application-created data lying around.
I think most people have had the experience of doing a 'ls -a' in their ~ for the first time in a while and finding megs of old config data. When I uninstall enlightenment, I want it to take all seven megs of it's config info with it. Same goes for gimp or KDE.
>But this "article"? This isn't a report. >It's not research.
Very good. This is an ARTICLE about a report. I've found the Bloor group to be pretty good (a hell of a lot better than Gardner, that's for sure), so I think the report would be worth reading.
But you can't judge the report from what this particular reporter decided was important for a lay-audience. Remember : what you read wasn't the report, it was a sound-byted summary of it's conclusions by a reporter we may or may not trust.
Notice they don't say what exactly constitues a memory problem. I've had memory problems that cause crashes all the time (I like to call them segment violations) that are caused by single-bit errors in my memory.
Linux, however, will terminate a program with such a fault. Six times out of ten (in my purely anecdotal experience), NT will require a reboot for a segv in a non-trivial app. That is an important thing to look at for anyone considering using either of these two as servers.
If I ssh into my webserver to do some remote admin, and I segv linuxconf (as if I'd use it, but...), I can be safe in the knowledge that Apache is still running.
Ever crashed the remote admin stuff on NT? You take down one Backoffice App, and they all go on sympathy strike.
People running servers in the real world need to know these things.
before everyone gets all pissed off at Bloor, let's all look at the URL on that page.
Huh?... Wait a second! This is from a NEWS SITE (and not a very reputable or technically inclined one, at that). That article is not the report. The report, if it's a typical Bloor report, will be a three hundred page monster that includes serial numbers for the hardware used and core dumps of every application fault.
This is some reporter's sypnosis of the Bloor report, and as such will obviously cut down on the detail. Maybe it's not enough for you. But maybe it's enough to convince a few CIO's out there to purchase the actual report and see how the products compare.
You can't criticize the report until you've actually seen it.
The link you read wasn't the study - it was an article, written by a reporter, outlining the major points of the study.
Man, calm down... If these little details bother you so much, go out and drop a few grand to buy the actual study. That _is_ how these gruops operate, ya know? They don't just give away the fruit of their labours.
What you've read is akin to that new bestseller's blurb in your local paper - you can't pick apart the plot line based on that. You want to right to complain about details, go and buy the book!
I don't wanna rain on your parade, but the DVD CCA charges a licensing fee of USD$10,000 to developers wishing to write a DVD-decoder. For a company like Xing, IBM, or Microsoft, this is small change. However, I defy you to find an open-source project that has this kind of funding, and is willing to spend it on what is, in the long run, a relatively small part of Linux.
Your only hope is that Corel or RedHat (or someone with some IPO money - wink, wink, Andover) picks up the cause, but I doubt they're willing to drop that kind of cash on DVD, either.
The point is, people already purchase a DVD drive from one of the DVD CCA's licensed vendors, and purchase the DVD CCA licensed studio's movie (and it's associated rights) from a DVD CCA licensed distributor. Why should we have to pay for the software to make these two items (from which the DVD CCA already collected their due) talk to our video/sound system?
In summary, your assertion that some OS developer could just go and write a DVD player is false, and shows that you havn't been reading these threads much (the USD$10,000 licensing fee has been thoroughly discussed, and that information is available from the DVD CCA). Barring the intervention of the local lottery, or a very benevolent corporate sponsor, licensed DVD playback is beyond the means of the open-source community.
What _else_ does this 'superbug' do? I think I'd like to know what it produces as by-products, and what other environment effects it may have, before we start throwing them around every toxic waste dump we havn't yet exported.
Besides, I was under the impression that toxic/radioactive waste was often stored in solid state (ie. encased in glass, or as metals) - how is a bacteria going to deal with this? The article even says that they won't deal with metals.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little wary of throwing bioengineered bateria around, especially if they may not be addressing the real problem.
In almost all of these articles I've seen, people drop little hints that the cable service Americans get is very much substandard to what I'm getting.
For example, instead of 368kbps, 512kpbs or anything of the sort, I get a full 10Mbps link. Actually, the modem goes to 30Mbps, but I only have a 10BaseT NIC. Each trunk link carries ~1200Mbps in channels 1, 14, 18 and 88-120 (which have been dedicated for Internet access). The best part is, my cable company limits the usage to 50 modems per trunk line (before they split the line), so I'm getting a dedicated 2.4Mbps even at the busiest times. That's better than most of the ADSL I've seen.
Security has never been an issue - I don't know how they do it, but the issues that I've seen raised just don't apply. SMB doesn't work unless you tunnel it to an IP over TCP/IP, just like you'd have to for any other Internet host. The only ways to get to my neighbor's machine is are standard Internet connections (telnet, FTP, etc). Of course, my local network works fine.
The best part, to me, is COST. This author mentioned USD$51.50. I'm paying $34.96, and since a Canadian dollar is worth ~USD$0.60, that'd be USD$21.50, which is what most people pay for 56k dialup.
I think I'm going to call my cable company and thank them now.
No, that's not what it means. What this means is that your toaster could serve you a single static page. Whoopee.
All these tiny servers are pretty useless, because they're basically single function devices. There's a massive difference between serving a page and enabling web-based control over an appliance.
I'm betting that a device to allow dynamic content/CGI/whatever you need to control an appliance would be exponentially more expensive and bigger than anything we've seen here. At least PalmPilot sized.
--- I switched to NT when Linux crashed five times in one day. Funny, I used to tell people Linux was superior due to its stability.
And if this came about, unionized sysadmins would never be able to get a job, no matter how qualified. I don't want to hire a sysadmin whose primary loyalty lies outside my company, and I can't think of any company that would - especially if that external leige had a policy or precedent that would damage the company.
Most minorites aren't looking for a handout, all we want is a fair chance.
I applaud your idealism, and I will fight to the death for your right to what you claim you want. However, it has been my unfortunate experience that most of the people who advocate affirmative action don't want equality, they want superiority.
I've had this argument with many people of many backgrounds. I try very hard not to be racist. But when it comes down to it, I refuse to accept responsibility for the actions of people who lived three or eight or twenty generations before me -- of any race. We learn from the mistakes they make, and we move on. A lot of minority advocates of affirmative-racism seem to want nothing more than revenge, and that I cannot condone.
As to your assertion that America(?) would waste a lot of potential talent if it excluded minorities, I would like to say that some might accuse you of being racist for refusing to realize that the same principle applies to all nations, and all races. I know that it was merely a figure of speech, and I'm not accusing you of anything, but the point stands. In direct response to that assertion, I would like to say that a lot of companies that I have personal experience with are forced to turn down a lot of talent because of affirmative action policies, too. In Ontario, Canada, corporations are virtually forced to hire specific ratios of certain races, religions and genders. This means that if my company has a position that only three people in the province are qualified for, and two are male caucasians and one is a female Aboriginal, I may be forced to hire an unqualified person of {pick a minority} because of these policies. Thus, not only does affirmative action harm white-supremacist capitalist dogs, but it also harms minority citizens who have worked their asses off to get their fair chance.
Now, just so that I can say that this post is slightly on-topic, I'd like to refer back to my previous point -- we should learn from pst mistakes, but that does not condone revenge. Are we going to destroy a corporation that employs thousands of Americans and foreign nationals alike, and pours billions of dollars into the North American economies, simply because of poor (read: over-aggressive, psycotically paranoid) management? Personally, I feel there are better ways.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, I realize that choice is a good thing. I think it's a good thing that Linux has two major consumer desktops (KDE, Gnome) and all of the standalone WMs that form much of the workstation market (AfterStep, CDE, etc). But really, is it better to start a new project for this kind of activity?
I think it would be better for these developers to contribute to the existing projects. It's kind of a waste of man-hours to go about writing another window manager if Sawmill, Blackbox or E will meet their needs. Similarly, I think it's kind of a waste of man hours to go about trying to build another project with similar goals to KDE and Gnome.
Besides, it may be special that they're starting to build this product, but who really believes that it will surpass Gnome/KDE? Even if they take the existing Gnome codebase and add modifications, I think it's unreasonable to expect that anyone else will be able to improve Gnome faster than the Gnome team. Both Gnome and KDE have built communities of developers and users, which help them develop better products. I don't think that this new entry will be able to do any more than the existing products, or advance at a quicker pace.
Of course, I could be wrong. Actually, I hope I am. Best of luck, guys.
From my experiences with voice recognition, I've found that the software has trouble picking up sounds a long distance from the microphone (depending on the quality of the microphone), and has difficulty recognizing commands from a voice it's not trained for.
This, to me, suggests that these stories are urban legends. If they're not, then they are indicative of a horribly stupid implementation of voice recognition : In a moderately loud area, or an area where more than one person will be using voice rec, headset mics with 6" pickups should be used.
Don't blame on the voice recognition software what is in reality caused by inepitude and lack of foresight.
I want voice recognition on my _workstation_! Is anyone listening???
The ViaVoice SDK comes close, but I havn't found any well-done frontends to that, even. I wish Dragon or L&H would release a product for Linux, or at least one that works with Wine.
What Linux needs is a way to uninstall applications. I don't mind compiling and installing stuff, or using .deb or .rpm packages, but I want to know that when I get rid of stuff, it gets rid of stuff.
Currently, uninstall options aren't all that promising. If you installed with 'make install', then good luck. If you still have the source around, maybe you can read the makefile and find out what went where. If you installed with RPM or the Debian package manager, you still have application-created data lying around.
I think most people have had the experience of doing a 'ls -a' in their ~ for the first time in a while and finding megs of old config data. When I uninstall enlightenment, I want it to take all seven megs of it's config info with it. Same goes for gimp or KDE.
>But this "article"? This isn't a report.
>It's not research.
Very good. This is an ARTICLE about a report. I've found the Bloor group to be pretty good (a hell of a lot better than Gardner, that's for sure), so I think the report would be worth reading.
But you can't judge the report from what this particular reporter decided was important for a lay-audience. Remember : what you read wasn't the report, it was a sound-byted summary of it's conclusions by a reporter we may or may not trust.
Notice they don't say what exactly constitues a memory problem. I've had memory problems that cause crashes all the time (I like to call them segment violations) that are caused by single-bit errors in my memory.
Linux, however, will terminate a program with such a fault. Six times out of ten (in my purely anecdotal experience), NT will require a reboot for a segv in a non-trivial app. That is an important thing to look at for anyone considering using either of these two as servers.
If I ssh into my webserver to do some remote admin, and I segv linuxconf (as if I'd use it, but...), I can be safe in the knowledge that Apache is still running.
Ever crashed the remote admin stuff on NT? You take down one Backoffice App, and they all go on sympathy strike.
People running servers in the real world need to know these things.
before everyone gets all pissed off at Bloor, let's all look at the URL on that page.
Huh?... Wait a second! This is from a NEWS SITE (and not a very reputable or technically inclined one, at that). That article is not the report. The report, if it's a typical Bloor report, will be a three hundred page monster that includes serial numbers for the hardware used and core dumps of every application fault.
This is some reporter's sypnosis of the Bloor report, and as such will obviously cut down on the detail. Maybe it's not enough for you. But maybe it's enough to convince a few CIO's out there to purchase the actual report and see how the products compare.
You can't criticize the report until you've actually seen it.
The link you read wasn't the study - it was an article, written by a reporter, outlining the major points of the study.
Man, calm down... If these little details bother you so much, go out and drop a few grand to buy the actual study. That _is_ how these gruops operate, ya know? They don't just give away the fruit of their labours.
What you've read is akin to that new bestseller's blurb in your local paper - you can't pick apart the plot line based on that. You want to right to complain about details, go and buy the book!
I don't wanna rain on your parade, but the DVD CCA charges a licensing fee of USD$10,000 to developers wishing to write a DVD-decoder. For a company like Xing, IBM, or Microsoft, this is small change. However, I defy you to find an open-source project that has this kind of funding, and is willing to spend it on what is, in the long run, a relatively small part of Linux.
Your only hope is that Corel or RedHat (or someone with some IPO money - wink, wink, Andover) picks up the cause, but I doubt they're willing to drop that kind of cash on DVD, either.
The point is, people already purchase a DVD drive from one of the DVD CCA's licensed vendors, and purchase the DVD CCA licensed studio's movie (and it's associated rights) from a DVD CCA licensed distributor. Why should we have to pay for the software to make these two items (from which the DVD CCA already collected their due) talk to our video/sound system?
In summary, your assertion that some OS developer could just go and write a DVD player is false, and shows that you havn't been reading these threads much (the USD$10,000 licensing fee has been thoroughly discussed, and that information is available from the DVD CCA). Barring the intervention of the local lottery, or a very benevolent corporate sponsor, licensed DVD playback is beyond the means of the open-source community.
What _else_ does this 'superbug' do? I think I'd like to know what it produces as by-products, and what other environment effects it may have, before we start throwing them around every toxic waste dump we havn't yet exported.
Besides, I was under the impression that toxic/radioactive waste was often stored in solid state (ie. encased in glass, or as metals) - how is a bacteria going to deal with this? The article even says that they won't deal with metals.
I don't know about you guys, but I'm a little wary of throwing bioengineered bateria around, especially if they may not be addressing the real problem.
In almost all of these articles I've seen, people drop little hints that the cable service Americans get is very much substandard to what I'm getting.
For example, instead of 368kbps, 512kpbs or anything of the sort, I get a full 10Mbps link. Actually, the modem goes to 30Mbps, but I only have a 10BaseT NIC. Each trunk link carries ~1200Mbps in channels 1, 14, 18 and 88-120 (which have been dedicated for Internet access). The best part is, my cable company limits the usage to 50 modems per trunk line (before they split the line), so I'm getting a dedicated 2.4Mbps even at the busiest times. That's better than most of the ADSL I've seen.
Security has never been an issue - I don't know how they do it, but the issues that I've seen raised just don't apply. SMB doesn't work unless you tunnel it to an IP over TCP/IP, just like you'd have to for any other Internet host. The only ways to get to my neighbor's machine is are standard Internet connections (telnet, FTP, etc). Of course, my local network works fine.
The best part, to me, is COST. This author mentioned USD$51.50. I'm paying $34.96, and since a Canadian dollar is worth ~USD$0.60, that'd be USD$21.50, which is what most people pay for 56k dialup.
I think I'm going to call my cable company and thank them now.
No, that's not what it means. What this means is that your toaster could serve you a single static page. Whoopee.
All these tiny servers are pretty useless, because they're basically single function devices. There's a massive difference between serving a page and enabling web-based control over an appliance.
I'm betting that a device to allow dynamic content/CGI/whatever you need to control an appliance would be exponentially more expensive and bigger than anything we've seen here. At least PalmPilot sized.
---
I switched to NT when Linux crashed five times in one day. Funny, I used to tell people Linux was superior due to its stability.
Is there a difference between
if( foo )
bar();
else
bat();
and
foo ? bar() : bat();
No - nothing except $9.00.
And if this came about, unionized sysadmins would never be able to get a job, no matter how qualified. I don't want to hire a sysadmin whose primary loyalty lies outside my company, and I can't think of any company that would - especially if that external leige had a policy or precedent that would damage the company.
Think before you type.
Most minorites aren't looking for a handout, all we want is a fair chance.
I applaud your idealism, and I will fight to the death for your right to what you claim you want. However, it has been my unfortunate experience that most of the people who advocate affirmative action don't want equality, they want superiority.
I've had this argument with many people of many backgrounds. I try very hard not to be racist. But when it comes down to it, I refuse to accept responsibility for the actions of people who lived three or eight or twenty generations before me -- of any race. We learn from the mistakes they make, and we move on. A lot of minority advocates of affirmative-racism seem to want nothing more than revenge, and that I cannot condone.
As to your assertion that America(?) would waste a lot of potential talent if it excluded minorities, I would like to say that some might accuse you of being racist for refusing to realize that the same principle applies to all nations, and all races. I know that it was merely a figure of speech, and I'm not accusing you of anything, but the point stands.
In direct response to that assertion, I would like to say that a lot of companies that I have personal experience with are forced to turn down a lot of talent because of affirmative action policies, too. In Ontario, Canada, corporations are virtually forced to hire specific ratios of certain races, religions and genders. This means that if my company has a position that only three people in the province are qualified for, and two are male caucasians and one is a female Aboriginal, I may be forced to hire an unqualified person of {pick a minority} because of these policies. Thus, not only does affirmative action harm white-supremacist capitalist dogs, but it also harms minority citizens who have worked their asses off to get their fair chance.
Now, just so that I can say that this post is slightly on-topic, I'd like to refer back to my previous point -- we should learn from pst mistakes, but that does not condone revenge. Are we going to destroy a corporation that employs thousands of Americans and foreign nationals alike, and pours billions of dollars into the North American economies, simply because of poor (read: over-aggressive, psycotically paranoid) management? Personally, I feel there are better ways.
Just my opinion.
Sorry, but if I see a kid wearing a backpack called 'Browser' or 'Download', I'm gonna have this irresitible compulsion ot kick his sorry butt.
I don't wanna be trendy! Remember when being a 'hacker' meant something about knowledge, too?