-While things like MD4 are okay for hashing, they're kind of CPU-intensive. Consider something like "second and third letter of username" that takes less CPU time.
Just from having setup my own mail server -- with all of 2 accounts! -- I'm loosely following this discussion. The main thing I'm not getting here is how to get the "frontline" SMTP servers to send mail to the "backend" POP/IMAP servers in some load balancing manner. There was the suggestion of "hashing" in the grandparent post, then yours about basing it on the users' names, but how does one go about configuring the MTA to actually do this? Since you're a "Postfix man" yourself, as am I, could you please tell us how you would go about doing that specifically with Postfix?
You may want to read a little on the Masons. I think most people who know anything about their organization would have to conclude that they have a distinct Judeo-Christian flavor.
It's just the next logical step to prepare us to build the FLOATING CITIES that will be required to survive when our planet becomes like the movie WATERWORLD because of GLOBAL WARMING!
I have to concur here. I've been using it at my church for about 8 months now. We only have about 5 or 6 full-time users, but the shared calendar it has was just what we needed. Parent poster is correct. There's a commercial Outlook plugin, which we also use. (In fact, I sprang for the $350 in order to keep us one step ahead of spending $2,300 it would take to get started with Exchange.)
Note that it doesn't wind up working just like an Exchange shared calendar. Shoot, it doesn't even wind up working like an OpenGroupware shared calendar, but it's functional. If you could convince and train your user-base to stick with the very powerful web frontend of OGo, you could do a lot more with the system than the plugin allows. However, this just wasn't an option with my users.
I run the thing on SuSE 9.2, and it's been solid. The binary packages they produce have gone in like butta'. (I suppose I'm impressed because I started playing with the system when -- I found out later -- it was still really only alpha quality, and there was A LOT of work involved. If you had the same experience, I heartily advise another look.) But the best part of OGo is the email lists. The main man behind the project is extremely active there, and very responsive.
Some of the code they have in the system is very advanced, and will allow you to do all sorts of cool stuff. There's an optional module that allows you to do PalmPilot synchronization. I've had limited success with it, but I wasn't trying very hard. Unfortunately, the main user of the shared calendars (the pastor's wife) has a Pocket PC device. I was able to find the discontinued LookOut product to cheat a little, and get a one-way transfer of the calendar to the Pocket PC device. It's not really pretty, but the next time she thinks about upgrading, I may revisit the whole mess.
To top it off the system can produce.ics files out of the calendars for pulling into a web site. Though I haven't done this for production yet, wget'ing these and using phpicalendar works pretty slick.
In short, I think OGo works great now, and there's a lot more interoperability that can be developed (e.g. an Evolution plugin).
If Mr. McKinnon saw a memo referring to non-terrestrial officers, we can only guess at what that term may mean. My guess is that it refers to aerial or naval forces, but it really could be anything.
Look through any of the several forums dedicated to this game, and you will see many messages about the bugs. I can't play for any longer than about 30-45 minutes without a crash. That may seem short, but this has been after HOURS of trying all sorts of "fixes" that have extended this from 30-60 seconds. In fact, I *just* got finished trying the latest beta (77.76) of the nVidia drivers before seeing this article. The only things that have really helped have been "dumbing down" the video and audio settings. So much so, I MIGHT AS WELL BE PLAYING A CONSOLE!
Just for reference: MSI-based dual Athlon 2800+ MP, 1 GB buffered DDR RAM, GeForce 6600 GT, Sound Blaster Live! (note that this game does NOT support "hardware" audio for this card), and a 3ware SATA RAID card with striped 75 GB Raptors. It ain't the best these days, but it doesn't have much problem playing any of the other dozen A-list titles that I have loaded on it right now, and with a fair amount of eye candy.
I really want to play this game. In fact, my friends and I are thinking about a LAN party this weekend solely using this game. (At this point, I'm sort of resigned to just crashing every half hour or so.) The problem I see with a LAN party based on this game is that we don't have the bandwidth (either cable or DSL) for 6 of us to go outside a single residence to play on a server, but 6 isn't enough to make a LAN-only game interesting. This would be fine if there were bots in the dedicated server, but there aren't. At least, if there are, *I* can't find how to turn them on.
"Secured right" my foot. The whole premise of our government from the start was based upon "inalienable rights" and basic, inherent freedoms. The ownership of property -- free from the whims of the ruling class -- was one of the biggies, and came directly from the history of abuses of the feudal system in England. The Constitution was supposed to LIMIT GOVERNMENT, NOT BESTOW FREEDOMS. The Supreme Court has got it exactly backwards. What sucks most about the highest court in the land getting it backwards is that THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE EXACT PEOPLE to keep us true to the document in the first place.
Or you could be like me, who wrote a custom web app to do high-end CAD/CAM/FEA license monitoring at the same time that a guy in another group did. I used LAMP; he used Windows. I just shut off my server. We went with his Windows-based solution, even though my app did the job better, faster, and more completely (even by the Windows programmer's admission) because that's the way the company thinks. Windows is best for the long haul. My boss also made me shut down my Nagios/Cacti solution in favor of a commercial solution that cost $1000/server. In fact, it would seem that he considers it a personal quest to rid the company of any and all non-Microsoft or non-Sun platforms in the company, which have been put into place by myself and another like-minded coworker. It's been sort of depressing. I don't guess I have a point, except to illustrate that even the better solutions get kicked to the curb by short-sighted managers. Mind you that, while I think this sort of attitude is prevalent in large American companies, I think Linux will flourish in the smaller and the non-American markets, and then it will come back around as "the thing" to use. Maybe my boss is getting kickbacks. Maybe he owns Microsoft stock...
And I'm not ashamed to admit it. If for nothing else, I like this development because it's simply a great business idea. I've been a fan of Alienware for a long time. I've never had the money to buy one of their rigs, but if I did, I would. My home-brew Frankenstein's-monster dual Athlon has given me no end of problems over the past two years. After 3 power supplies, 4 hard drives, a new RAID card, two new video cards, 3 keyboards, 3 KVM's, and, finally 2 replacement mobo's, I think it's finally settling down. (I think some bad power screwed up a lot of stuff.) It would be nice to hand over some cash for a tested "god box," to use the Ars Technica term, with a warranty. And getting one pre-pimped with some pretty lights appeals to me. My problem is that, if I got started modding my box, I wouldn't know where to stop. I'd *really* like to get an LCD monitor on it somewhere, but, with my case, that means cutting metal, and I get nervous thinking about that. Getting one already setup with some lights would be... nice. I'm getting to an age in my life where I'm tired of doing everything myself. I need to spend more time with my wife and kids, not with my junky hardware. And tying all of this in with Star Wars? Well, that's one way to do it, and not a bad way, to my eye. It's too bad Ep. 1 & 2 stunk, but I still like the thought of the story as a whole enough to think this is a neat idea.
And, NO!, I'm NOT a shill. I have no ties to Alienware in any way. I've just admired them from a distance. And, NO!, I DON'T mind this being posted to Slashdot; how does this NOT fall under "News for Nerds?" So sue me.
That's kind of the point. As others on the thread are saying, what we want is a RH10, along the lines of where 6.2->7.3->10 was going, skipping all the nonsense in between. I personally found that in SuSE's offerings, so I really don't care what RH does any more. What I want is a stable desktop environment that I can actually *use* to get my work done. And, even though SuSE 9.2 is as good a distro as I've seen (and, like most, I've seen LOTS) for this reason, there are still annoyances with things. What I'm saying is that I want an annoyance-free distro. Certainly, Rawhide (or any other bleeding-edge distro including -- but not limited to -- Debian unstable and Gentoo) does not fit this bill. "Oh crap. This thing is broken. I guess I'll do an update to get the fixes. Running... Oh crap. Now *this* thing's broken!" I have a Gentoo fan tells me that it never happens, but either he's fan-boying or he's lying. I've not tried Fedora for awhile now, but I still hear a lot of problems with day-to-day operations on it. Meh. Whatever. I think a lot of us here are in the same boat: we liked what Red Hat had going before, and, when they changed their game, we found it -- or something close enough -- in another distro. As I've said, I'm a SuSE fan. I hope that the moves they've made since RH's brain-dead move have made people more appreciative of Novell's approach, so that they switch to SuSE, have a good experience, and never go back to Red Hat. YMMV.
It was clearly obvious that this sort of thing was going on in the debate over software patents in the EU. I'm just glad some of it -- any of it -- has come to light. Don't get overly excited about this news. It's also clear that any big company in the business of proprietary software is in there, pulling out every dirty trick they think they can get away with so as to get software patents passed. I would encourage the EU-based Slashdot readership (*both* of you, according to how many comments I read about how biased Slashdot is towards America...) to get involved in digging up more of these stories for submission. Microsoft fears what I hope: that blockage of software patents in the EU will culminate in the reversal of allowing them in the USA.
Oh yeah. I forgot about that part in the Constitution that says the government should be involved in recycling PRINTING PRESSES. So, you know, it stands to reason that this should be extended to COMPUTERS. Congress ought to be disbanded for about 10 or 20 years. We have all the laws we could possibly use right now, thank you very much.
The gap is already being filled in the private sector, as is always the case. In my small town, there's a United Way agency that takes outdated computers from local businesses (with two Fortune 250 companies, they get some "decent" stuff), refurbishes them, and gives them away to grade-school children. The school system picks up the tab, and they've even partnered with a local ISP for internet access. I've personally given a lot of stuff to the program, and, of course, it's all tax deductable. Everybody wins in this scenario, and there's no need for the government to be involved.
I was born in '69. When I was 10, everyone was getting Atari 2600's. My dad steadfastly refused to get our family one. He wanted to get a more expensive computer, which would do more than just play games. We finally got a Vic20 (as many others on this subject are talking about), and, yes, we played a lot of games on it.
I learned a little about programming the thing, thanks to a local computer club and Byte magazine, but it wasn't until I wanted to write my own program for my own purposes that I really took an interest. Of course, at the time, I was getting into D&D. So, naturally, my first program was going to be a character generator.
I wrote the core of the program using the "roll 3d6 3 times and take the best score for each trait" method. I think I had just over 50 lines of code for the actual dice rolling part. I showed the code to my dad, and he said that he thought he could do it in 6 lines. *That* got my attention. So we worked on it, he introduced me to nested loops, and it worked out to be 5 lines. I was hooked. Programming has been a way of life ever since.
Later, I begged Dad for a C64. He told me that I had to run the Vic20 out of memory. It took me another year of work. The character generator took 20 minutes to load from cassette tape drive. But I finally got it over 4.5 KB in size, and Dad was good to his word. He got me a C64, a 1541, and one of the dot-matrix printers. (I never got the monitor, though.) I'm going to sell the whole kit on Ebay soon.
There are a couple of points in the story that I think are essential.
1) You *MUST* have your own motivation for learning how to program. A personal interest in the outcome and a definitive vision for how you want it to work are critical. Nothing else will motivate you to put up with the hassle of using computers.
2) Like the old saying "writers write," which means that people who will be good at journalism will already be writing, in diaries or short stories or such, "programmers program." There are people who program as their job, and there are programmers: people who want to do something specific with a computer, evaluate the options, and, if nothing satisfies them, write their own solution, no matter how small or big that winds up being.
I've spent about $60, on and off, on WineX over the years, and I just tried it again tonight. So far, out of the half-dozen or so games I've tried, I've gotten 1 to work: Grim Fandango, and I had to tweak the config a bunch to do so. My most recent failures were Freedom Force (which won't run on XP SP2) and Serious Sam 2. The latter even has a 4/5 rating. I don't get it. I've never had any real luck with the stuff.
I've used Crossover to great effect to run Office 2000. As long as you stick with what they say runs well, you'll be fine. However, when someone from their company says that in a short while, they'll be running 95% of all Windows programs, I have to laugh. They can't even run Office 2003 yet.
Frankly, I wish wine would just go away, and let what tiny, little volume of air there is in this space be breathed by another Loki-type effort. Loki died because of bad management, not because of technology.
That said, do I really care that it doesn't support the $35 AC97 based sound card I have in a box somewhere in my storage closet?
No... and neither do the vast majority of Solaris users.
Ah, but if Sun cared about this, then the "majority of Solaris users" wouldn't be as small of a fraction of the total "computer users" in general, now would they?
After the first couple times the stuttering happened to me, I started thinking... I've seen this somewhere else... Another game did this to me... What was it... Oh yeah! Half-Life 1.
That is the genius of Access; simple DB applications are easy, while amazingly complex ones are still possible, given patience and time. And that is how many of the more complex Access apps are developed; more functionality is added over time, as needs change and applications a tested against daily experience. This is easily done, because - Access is easy.
And this is the problem. It's easy to get something going with Access, but then you have people setting up databases who have ZERO concept of how
Software development works
Code ought to be commented
How software scales
What networks do to database traffic
What file contention of a single.mdb means
What a good user interface actually looks like
In short, its ease of use creates nightmares for those of us who have to come in behind some knows-just-enough-to-be-dangerous hack who now has gotten 18 months of the shop's time and attendance information locked up in some screwy schema which will only be straightened out with a complete rewrite. Preferably in a proper web application.
I think it's pretty telling that the #3 issue on *nix is about how to make good passwords. That's a completely meat-space issue, not code. In fact, a solid half of the *nix list is just good administration practices.
Of course, SuSE has the similar problems in putting proprietary programs into its distribution.
<Sigh>
Here we go again.
It seems that every time someone mentions SuSE on Slashdot, we hear the same 2 reasons why it's a Bad Distro (TM). The first is that it's not totally *free*. And, while I'm at this, I'll just head off the second: that there's no downloadable ISO image.
As to the first, Novell released YaST under the GPL almost as soon as they bought SuSE. You can read about that here. As to the second, you can download the personal edition here.
Slashdot Mirror
Just from having setup my own mail server -- with all of 2 accounts! -- I'm loosely following this discussion. The main thing I'm not getting here is how to get the "frontline" SMTP servers to send mail to the "backend" POP/IMAP servers in some load balancing manner. There was the suggestion of "hashing" in the grandparent post, then yours about basing it on the users' names, but how does one go about configuring the MTA to actually do this? Since you're a "Postfix man" yourself, as am I, could you please tell us how you would go about doing that specifically with Postfix?
Where's the +1 "Ate up" mod when you need it? (Sorry, southern Indiana dialect here. "That's just ate up" means it's bizarre, but in a funny way.)
You may want to read a little on the Masons. I think most people who know anything about their organization would have to conclude that they have a distinct Judeo-Christian flavor.
It's just the next logical step to prepare us to build the FLOATING CITIES that will be required to survive when our planet becomes like the movie WATERWORLD because of GLOBAL WARMING!
I have to concur here. I've been using it at my church for about 8 months now. We only have about 5 or 6 full-time users, but the shared calendar it has was just what we needed. Parent poster is correct. There's a commercial Outlook plugin, which we also use. (In fact, I sprang for the $350 in order to keep us one step ahead of spending $2,300 it would take to get started with Exchange.)
.ics files out of the calendars for pulling into a web site. Though I haven't done this for production yet, wget'ing these and using phpicalendar works pretty slick.
Note that it doesn't wind up working just like an Exchange shared calendar. Shoot, it doesn't even wind up working like an OpenGroupware shared calendar, but it's functional. If you could convince and train your user-base to stick with the very powerful web frontend of OGo, you could do a lot more with the system than the plugin allows. However, this just wasn't an option with my users.
I run the thing on SuSE 9.2, and it's been solid. The binary packages they produce have gone in like butta'. (I suppose I'm impressed because I started playing with the system when -- I found out later -- it was still really only alpha quality, and there was A LOT of work involved. If you had the same experience, I heartily advise another look.) But the best part of OGo is the email lists. The main man behind the project is extremely active there, and very responsive.
Some of the code they have in the system is very advanced, and will allow you to do all sorts of cool stuff. There's an optional module that allows you to do PalmPilot synchronization. I've had limited success with it, but I wasn't trying very hard. Unfortunately, the main user of the shared calendars (the pastor's wife) has a Pocket PC device. I was able to find the discontinued LookOut product to cheat a little, and get a one-way transfer of the calendar to the Pocket PC device. It's not really pretty, but the next time she thinks about upgrading, I may revisit the whole mess.
To top it off the system can produce
In short, I think OGo works great now, and there's a lot more interoperability that can be developed (e.g. an Evolution plugin).
And you're just part of The Man's coverup!!!
Yeah, why not use some of that new-fangled alien technology to secure the network?
Look through any of the several forums dedicated to this game, and you will see many messages about the bugs. I can't play for any longer than about 30-45 minutes without a crash. That may seem short, but this has been after HOURS of trying all sorts of "fixes" that have extended this from 30-60 seconds. In fact, I *just* got finished trying the latest beta (77.76) of the nVidia drivers before seeing this article. The only things that have really helped have been "dumbing down" the video and audio settings. So much so, I MIGHT AS WELL BE PLAYING A CONSOLE!
Just for reference: MSI-based dual Athlon 2800+ MP, 1 GB buffered DDR RAM, GeForce 6600 GT, Sound Blaster Live! (note that this game does NOT support "hardware" audio for this card), and a 3ware SATA RAID card with striped 75 GB Raptors. It ain't the best these days, but it doesn't have much problem playing any of the other dozen A-list titles that I have loaded on it right now, and with a fair amount of eye candy.
I really want to play this game. In fact, my friends and I are thinking about a LAN party this weekend solely using this game. (At this point, I'm sort of resigned to just crashing every half hour or so.) The problem I see with a LAN party based on this game is that we don't have the bandwidth (either cable or DSL) for 6 of us to go outside a single residence to play on a server, but 6 isn't enough to make a LAN-only game interesting. This would be fine if there were bots in the dedicated server , but there aren't. At least, if there are, *I* can't find how to turn them on.
Of course Yahoo News is running an article on how something Google made got hacked.
"Secured right" my foot. The whole premise of our government from the start was based upon "inalienable rights" and basic, inherent freedoms. The ownership of property -- free from the whims of the ruling class -- was one of the biggies, and came directly from the history of abuses of the feudal system in England. The Constitution was supposed to LIMIT GOVERNMENT, NOT BESTOW FREEDOMS. The Supreme Court has got it exactly backwards. What sucks most about the highest court in the land getting it backwards is that THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO BE THE EXACT PEOPLE to keep us true to the document in the first place.
Since when did the Penthouse Forums start cross-posting to Slashdot?!
Or you could be like me, who wrote a custom web app to do high-end CAD/CAM/FEA license monitoring at the same time that a guy in another group did. I used LAMP; he used Windows. I just shut off my server. We went with his Windows-based solution, even though my app did the job better, faster, and more completely (even by the Windows programmer's admission) because that's the way the company thinks. Windows is best for the long haul. My boss also made me shut down my Nagios/Cacti solution in favor of a commercial solution that cost $1000/server. In fact, it would seem that he considers it a personal quest to rid the company of any and all non-Microsoft or non-Sun platforms in the company, which have been put into place by myself and another like-minded coworker. It's been sort of depressing. I don't guess I have a point, except to illustrate that even the better solutions get kicked to the curb by short-sighted managers. Mind you that, while I think this sort of attitude is prevalent in large American companies, I think Linux will flourish in the smaller and the non-American markets, and then it will come back around as "the thing" to use. Maybe my boss is getting kickbacks. Maybe he owns Microsoft stock...
And I'm not ashamed to admit it. If for nothing else, I like this development because it's simply a great business idea. I've been a fan of Alienware for a long time. I've never had the money to buy one of their rigs, but if I did, I would. My home-brew Frankenstein's-monster dual Athlon has given me no end of problems over the past two years. After 3 power supplies, 4 hard drives, a new RAID card, two new video cards, 3 keyboards, 3 KVM's, and, finally 2 replacement mobo's, I think it's finally settling down. (I think some bad power screwed up a lot of stuff.) It would be nice to hand over some cash for a tested "god box," to use the Ars Technica term, with a warranty. And getting one pre-pimped with some pretty lights appeals to me. My problem is that, if I got started modding my box, I wouldn't know where to stop. I'd *really* like to get an LCD monitor on it somewhere, but, with my case, that means cutting metal, and I get nervous thinking about that. Getting one already setup with some lights would be... nice. I'm getting to an age in my life where I'm tired of doing everything myself. I need to spend more time with my wife and kids, not with my junky hardware. And tying all of this in with Star Wars? Well, that's one way to do it, and not a bad way, to my eye. It's too bad Ep. 1 & 2 stunk, but I still like the thought of the story as a whole enough to think this is a neat idea.
And, NO!, I'm NOT a shill. I have no ties to Alienware in any way. I've just admired them from a distance. And, NO!, I DON'T mind this being posted to Slashdot; how does this NOT fall under "News for Nerds?" So sue me.
Now charge us a lot less money accordingly. Thanks in advance!
Ah... Leave it to an id under 10,000 to put a fine point(s) on it. Loved it!
That's kind of the point. As others on the thread are saying, what we want is a RH10, along the lines of where 6.2->7.3->10 was going, skipping all the nonsense in between. I personally found that in SuSE's offerings, so I really don't care what RH does any more. What I want is a stable desktop environment that I can actually *use* to get my work done. And, even though SuSE 9.2 is as good a distro as I've seen (and, like most, I've seen LOTS) for this reason, there are still annoyances with things. What I'm saying is that I want an annoyance-free distro. Certainly, Rawhide (or any other bleeding-edge distro including -- but not limited to -- Debian unstable and Gentoo) does not fit this bill. "Oh crap. This thing is broken. I guess I'll do an update to get the fixes. Running... Oh crap. Now *this* thing's broken!" I have a Gentoo fan tells me that it never happens, but either he's fan-boying or he's lying. I've not tried Fedora for awhile now, but I still hear a lot of problems with day-to-day operations on it. Meh. Whatever. I think a lot of us here are in the same boat: we liked what Red Hat had going before, and, when they changed their game, we found it -- or something close enough -- in another distro. As I've said, I'm a SuSE fan. I hope that the moves they've made since RH's brain-dead move have made people more appreciative of Novell's approach, so that they switch to SuSE, have a good experience, and never go back to Red Hat. YMMV.
It was clearly obvious that this sort of thing was going on in the debate over software patents in the EU. I'm just glad some of it -- any of it -- has come to light. Don't get overly excited about this news. It's also clear that any big company in the business of proprietary software is in there, pulling out every dirty trick they think they can get away with so as to get software patents passed. I would encourage the EU-based Slashdot readership (*both* of you, according to how many comments I read about how biased Slashdot is towards America...) to get involved in digging up more of these stories for submission. Microsoft fears what I hope: that blockage of software patents in the EU will culminate in the reversal of allowing them in the USA.
Oh yeah. I forgot about that part in the Constitution that says the government should be involved in recycling PRINTING PRESSES. So, you know, it stands to reason that this should be extended to COMPUTERS. Congress ought to be disbanded for about 10 or 20 years. We have all the laws we could possibly use right now, thank you very much.
The gap is already being filled in the private sector, as is always the case. In my small town, there's a United Way agency that takes outdated computers from local businesses (with two Fortune 250 companies, they get some "decent" stuff), refurbishes them, and gives them away to grade-school children. The school system picks up the tab, and they've even partnered with a local ISP for internet access. I've personally given a lot of stuff to the program, and, of course, it's all tax deductable. Everybody wins in this scenario, and there's no need for the government to be involved.
I just relayed this story to someone else. Odd.
I was born in '69. When I was 10, everyone was getting Atari 2600's. My dad steadfastly refused to get our family one. He wanted to get a more expensive computer, which would do more than just play games. We finally got a Vic20 (as many others on this subject are talking about), and, yes, we played a lot of games on it.
I learned a little about programming the thing, thanks to a local computer club and Byte magazine, but it wasn't until I wanted to write my own program for my own purposes that I really took an interest. Of course, at the time, I was getting into D&D. So, naturally, my first program was going to be a character generator.
I wrote the core of the program using the "roll 3d6 3 times and take the best score for each trait" method. I think I had just over 50 lines of code for the actual dice rolling part. I showed the code to my dad, and he said that he thought he could do it in 6 lines. *That* got my attention. So we worked on it, he introduced me to nested loops, and it worked out to be 5 lines. I was hooked. Programming has been a way of life ever since.
Later, I begged Dad for a C64. He told me that I had to run the Vic20 out of memory. It took me another year of work. The character generator took 20 minutes to load from cassette tape drive. But I finally got it over 4.5 KB in size, and Dad was good to his word. He got me a C64, a 1541, and one of the dot-matrix printers. (I never got the monitor, though.) I'm going to sell the whole kit on Ebay soon.
There are a couple of points in the story that I think are essential.
1) You *MUST* have your own motivation for learning how to program. A personal interest in the outcome and a definitive vision for how you want it to work are critical. Nothing else will motivate you to put up with the hassle of using computers.
2) Like the old saying "writers write," which means that people who will be good at journalism will already be writing, in diaries or short stories or such, "programmers program." There are people who program as their job, and there are programmers: people who want to do something specific with a computer, evaluate the options, and, if nothing satisfies them, write their own solution, no matter how small or big that winds up being.
I've spent about $60, on and off, on WineX over the years, and I just tried it again tonight. So far, out of the half-dozen or so games I've tried, I've gotten 1 to work: Grim Fandango, and I had to tweak the config a bunch to do so. My most recent failures were Freedom Force (which won't run on XP SP2) and Serious Sam 2. The latter even has a 4/5 rating. I don't get it. I've never had any real luck with the stuff.
I've used Crossover to great effect to run Office 2000. As long as you stick with what they say runs well, you'll be fine. However, when someone from their company says that in a short while, they'll be running 95% of all Windows programs, I have to laugh. They can't even run Office 2003 yet.
Frankly, I wish wine would just go away, and let what tiny, little volume of air there is in this space be breathed by another Loki-type effort. Loki died because of bad management, not because of technology.
Ah, but if Sun cared about this, then the "majority of Solaris users" wouldn't be as small of a fraction of the total "computer users" in general, now would they?
After the first couple times the stuttering happened to me, I started thinking... I've seen this somewhere else... Another game did this to me... What was it... Oh yeah! Half-Life 1.
And this is the problem. It's easy to get something going with Access, but then you have people setting up databases who have ZERO concept of how
In short, its ease of use creates nightmares for those of us who have to come in behind some knows-just-enough-to-be-dangerous hack who now has gotten 18 months of the shop's time and attendance information locked up in some screwy schema which will only be straightened out with a complete rewrite. Preferably in a proper web application.
Gah!
I think it's pretty telling that the #3 issue on *nix is about how to make good passwords. That's a completely meat-space issue, not code. In fact, a solid half of the *nix list is just good administration practices.
<Sigh>
Here we go again.
It seems that every time someone mentions SuSE on Slashdot, we hear the same 2 reasons why it's a Bad Distro (TM). The first is that it's not totally *free*. And, while I'm at this, I'll just head off the second: that there's no downloadable ISO image.
As to the first, Novell released YaST under the GPL almost as soon as they bought SuSE. You can read about that here. As to the second, you can download the personal edition here.