I have to admit that I admire anyone with the cojones to step up and refute Mr. Stephenson, a well-respected author, popular guy, and arguably competent user. To do so is to risk death by a thousand emails, and to risk having your web server fall over under a crush of curious rubberneckers.
On the other hand, I don't feel that there was anything in "Beginning" that called for refutation. It was a collection of Stephenson's musings on a whole slew of issues, and outlined the structure of those thoughts. It was not gospel truth (although found myself nodding in agreement throughout the entire read) nor was it intended to be.
Unfortunately, I can't get to whats-is-name's article, since it actually *has* fallen down under the crush of slashdotters, but I hope his rant is in the same spirit as Stephenson's...
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
Hey, gcc builds netscape, why aren't you writing optimizations for it?
And the most common target for gcc is x86. Maybe he should design an optimized x86 implementation to go with it!
*sigh*
I, too, am tired of hearing "boy, isn't it a shame nobody stepped up to the plate" about Mozilla. Here's this partially-formed, highly monolithic slab of nearly incomprehensible code ostensibly written by some of the better talent in the commercial world, and golly, it's a shame Joe Sixpack hasn't contributed a single line towards it!
Hey, gcc builds netscape, why aren't you writing optimizations for it?
And the most common target for gcc is x86. Maybe he should design an optimized x86 implementation to go with it!
*sigh*
I, too, am tired of hearing "boy, isn't it a shame nobody stepped up to the plate" about Mozilla. Here's this partially-formed, highly monolithic slab of nearly incomprehensible code ostensibly written by some of the better talent in the commercial world, and golly, it's a shame Joe Sixpack hasn't contributed a single line towards it!
Also if it wasn't for compaq paving the way with sub 1000 dollar pcs, those AMD & Cyrix chips alot of you like probably wouldn't have gotten the attention they deserve.
Funny, I seem to recall being a K6 owner for about 8 or 10 months before Compaq took an interest in any of AMD's CPUs; and if I remember correctly, the chip I purchased was in such hot demand that I had to scour the city to find one.
I wouldn't be quite so generous with equating Compaq with positive press. Compaq has done good things sometimes, but certainly bringing AMD to the forefront of the consumer processor market isn't something that could be credited to them.
Unfortunately most of the good codecs (such as Sorensen) are distributed under license -- so Apple can't just make them available.
My understanding was that Sorenson was restricted by their QT distribution contract with Apple from porting their codec to additional platforms. Maybe I have it wrong, but if that's the case, then it isn't exactly as though Apple is beholden to Sorenson's whim on the matter, and it would fit in with Apple's general gameplan of miserable support for their quasi-standards on non-Apple platforms.
Some things that seem to be missing...
on
Mozilla M4 is Out
·
· Score: 1
...from the release notes (pertaining to Win32, the only version of this build I've tried yet):
The preferences dialog is almost completely nonfunctional. One would seem to be expected to muss about with the prefs50.js file to do typical things like set proxies, cache size, and so forth (*sigh*... I run that squid for a reason!) Seems like a lot of that interface was there in the last build I tried... But that was pre-gecko.
Unlike as documented, the prefs file, cache, and other stuff that should be in...\Netscape\users\username\ are actually created in the current directory. Scripting or shortcut foolishness must be resorted to. Worse than the last time I tried a mozilla build.
No, it's only pretending to hang. Blur and focus the window and it will wake up. This is an improvement.
Shrinking a chromebar with its handle has somewhere between little and no effect. This behavior also seems more broken than the last mozilla I tried.
Some things I noticed but aren't really brokenness:
There's some kind of ugly spinning barbershop thing at the bottom of the window. Its purpose seems roughly equivalent to the load animation, except it's even uglier and more distracting.
cellpadding is taken very (way too?) literally. Check out/. under mozilla and marvel at the slashboxes.
The chrome feels really sluggish. In fact, the whole app feels sluggish except for the blazing rendering. This lends it a kind of IE feel, where pages render fast, but the app feels unresponsive.
URLs aren't "corrected" in the location box. This is good in one way (it doesn't seem to want to take the focus away from me to do things to the widget -- an IE behavior I abhor) and in other ways bad (there can be bare hostnames in there with no protocol specified).
It's more functional than your average Amiga browser, but less functional than anything I would want to use on a regular basis. I ought to contribute something because it really feels like mozilla is making jack squat progress in terms of delivering a usable app, but I'm in no position to be picking up enormous projects, or parts of them. It's all I can do right now to keep up with my rinky-dink stuff!
I guess it's back into the peanut gallery for me...
I've had the same problem for ages. Some days it doesn't bite, some days it does.
Most often, I get the "dangly bit" error: most of Netscape works except linktext, and then all windows have to be closed and the dangly bit process killed off.
It seemed mostly like a fluff piece. But I agree with the premise that the *BSD folks haven't done too well in terms of evangelism, and that the rabid Linux advocacy movement is primarily driven by younger folks now.
BSD people rave about the quality and cleanliness of theor chosen flavor. Linux people rave more often about its social aspects.
I wonder just how much of the usage gap is publicity-driven, and just how much of it really is free choice... It's an question for which I can't even begin to posit an answer.
Last time I called Platinum for IIS support (because it was soaking 100% CPU and answering requests only for static pages, not ASP), the first thing they said was "Install SP4 or hit the road."
Can anyone tell me of a time a off the shelf product for Windows didn't work on Windows?
Let us make a list, then, from personal experience:
Windows itself; it usually takes 4 or 5 tries to install, not to mention the hours necessary for debugging the driver situation.
Microsoft Office 97 Service Release 2. Maybe a third of installations result in measurable brokenness.
Microsoft Internet Explorer. 65% of installs fail. Half of successful installs break the machine. Nuff said.
Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 and Active Server Pages. If it installs, which it doesn't often do properly, there is inevitably something or other wrong, often the scripting engines. Want to see a sample broken site? Microsoft has one.
Microsoft Java Virtual Machine. Can anyone get this to work?
Games. They have about a 50% failure rate on average because of varying driver requirements.
Drivers of all kinds, especially video drivers. In fact, the drivers that ship with Windows are usually broken!
That's quite a few just off the top of my head. With effort I'm sure I could find more applications that don't work out of the box. I think nearly everyone has a story about them!
For example, Muth made the statement about any shrink wrapped software running on any computer running Windows, and that it is due to a central hold on the Windows source tree.
Note that a majority of my list is comprised of Microsoft products? Given that they have central hold of the OS source, wouldn't you expect that they could do better?
But I can tell any of you countless stories of how a rpm package may or may not run on any Linux installation.
I can think of maybe three or four times I've installed the wrong RPM. rpmfind has a way of coming up with TurboLinux or SuSE packages that don't work well with Red Hat, but they're easy enough to back out. In every case, I simply located the RPM for the distribution I was using (in these cases, Red Hat) and had no trouble at all using them.
Compare and contrast with two weeks of wrestling with Microsoft Option Pack 4.0 to get IIS installed on an NT server. Nothing shy of a reinstallation of NT would convince OP4 to install, since it seemed to fail to correctly register its DLLs during installation.
I don't know enough about Debian packaging to speak with any authority towards it, but I can't imagine it is much worse than RPM, and I've had nearly no problems at all with RPM, and certainly none that compare to the troubles I have when building and configuring Windows boxes (except for how badly rpm segfaults when you build it under pgcc. Maybe it's time to upgrade the compiler on the buildbox, eh?)
If you're referring to APIs, here's a quick scoop:
3DFX users have: Glide, Direct3D (mostly), and OpenGL (partially) NVIDIA users have: Direct3D, OpenGL (mostly) and Glide (with a wrapper) Rendition users get: Direct3D, OpenGL, and RRedline. (There's also an old broken Glide->RRedline wrapper) ATI hardware runs: Direct3D. Number Nine: Direct3D (somewhat)
Everything else in the consumer space is pretty much beneath radar.
I don't know what all the fuss is about, and I don't own a 3dfx card...
That's actually the whole point. For those who don't own 3DFX hardware, a wrapper allows them to run software targeted to the 3DFX-only Glide API.
This is a handy little capability, since there are lots of people who don't want to buy their hardware for either political or performance reasons, yet would like access to the fairly substantial library of titles which sport only Glide as their 3D hardware interface.
...do not violate the Linux kernel license in any way, so long as they require no changes to the kernel itself. It's perfectly reasonable to distribute a binary-only SCSI module, for example.
It's only when your changes involve the kernel itself that GPL virulence comes into play.
The strength of the Linux kernel, which includes its device support, is its freed, opensource nature. Binary-only modules hurt that.
That's also its weakness. I was forced to install completely different SCSI hardware because Western Digital no longer supports the 719x and refuses to distribute chipset-level information on it, claiming that their SCSI product line was sold to Adaptec (who disavow anything to do with the 719x, calling it "obsolete." Why buy products just to discontinue them?)
I'm perfectly aware of the undergroundish project to write drivers for the WD719x, but they are:
Based on "stolen" code, and
Usable only with 2.0 kernels (and the hackery to make them use the new PCI interface is above my head -- I tried, and the driver itself is such a mess it's impossible to learn the PCI interface and the driver simultaneously for someone of my limited intellect.)
Here's where I'd take a binary-only driver over no driver at all.
I should also add that support for SCO is our bottom zero priority.
Is your bottom priority. People who run SCO UNIX might think differently. Although I think they all went away in the 80s, didn't they? People don't seriously run SCO any more, do they? No, really?
Slashdot Mirror
vi /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/Makefile
I have to admit that I admire anyone with the cojones to step up and refute Mr. Stephenson, a well-respected author, popular guy, and arguably competent user. To do so is to risk death by a thousand emails, and to risk having your web server fall over under a crush of curious rubberneckers.
On the other hand, I don't feel that there was anything in "Beginning" that called for refutation. It was a collection of Stephenson's musings on a whole slew of issues, and outlined the structure of those thoughts. It was not gospel truth (although found myself nodding in agreement throughout the entire read) nor was it intended to be.
Unfortunately, I can't get to whats-is-name's article, since it actually *has* fallen down under the crush of slashdotters, but I hope his rant is in the same spirit as Stephenson's...
Sorry, folks. Got a little trigger-happy there. My bad.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
And the best people can do is 'Duh, AVI is faster on Windows 95, Quicktime sux!'? Sheeeeeeesh. Can we say apples and oranges people?
There is a huge body of QuickTime content. People just wish it were either playable, in the case of *nixes, or playable without such a degree of decrepitude, in the case of Windows.
I see that nobody _minds_ the lack of current Indeo codecs on PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS yada yada...
There's very little Indeo content out there, and what there is of it, there's usually QT as well, since often that's what the Indeo content is generated from.
but for my own stuff I can't see not using Quicktime.
Wouldn't it be nice if more people could see the content you're creating? Since it's a platform of choice for you as a content creator, shouldn't the availability of end-user tools be of near and dear importance to you?
I'm sorry, but I'm incredibly tired of this content-weenie stance that Apple can do no wrong. You may like the tools and technology you have to produce the pretty things you do, but if the consumers of your art have limited or no access to userland tools, all your efforts are in vain.
Hey, gcc builds netscape, why aren't you writing optimizations for it?
And the most common target for gcc is x86. Maybe he should design an optimized x86 implementation to go with it!
*sigh*
I, too, am tired of hearing "boy, isn't it a shame nobody stepped up to the plate" about Mozilla. Here's this partially-formed, highly monolithic slab of nearly incomprehensible code ostensibly written by some of the better talent in the commercial world, and golly, it's a shame Joe Sixpack hasn't contributed a single line towards it!
Hey, gcc builds netscape, why aren't you writing optimizations for it?
And the most common target for gcc is x86. Maybe he should design an optimized x86 implementation to go with it!
*sigh*
I, too, am tired of hearing "boy, isn't it a shame nobody stepped up to the plate" about Mozilla. Here's this partially-formed, highly monolithic slab of nearly incomprehensible code ostensibly written by some of the better talent in the commercial world, and golly, it's a shame Joe Sixpack hasn't contributed a single line towards it!
Also if it wasn't for compaq paving the way with sub 1000 dollar pcs, those AMD & Cyrix chips alot of you like probably wouldn't have gotten the attention they deserve.
Funny, I seem to recall being a K6 owner for about 8 or 10 months before Compaq took an interest in any of AMD's CPUs; and if I remember correctly, the chip I purchased was in such hot demand that I had to scour the city to find one.
I wouldn't be quite so generous with equating Compaq with positive press. Compaq has done good things sometimes, but certainly bringing AMD to the forefront of the consumer processor market isn't something that could be credited to them.
Unfortunately most of the good codecs (such as Sorensen) are distributed under license -- so Apple can't just make them available.
My understanding was that Sorenson was restricted by their QT distribution contract with Apple from porting their codec to additional platforms. Maybe I have it wrong, but if that's the case, then it isn't exactly as though Apple is beholden to Sorenson's whim on the matter, and it would fit in with Apple's general gameplan of miserable support for their quasi-standards on non-Apple platforms.
- The preferences dialog is almost completely nonfunctional. One would seem to be expected to muss about with the prefs50.js file to do typical things like set proxies, cache size, and so forth (*sigh*... I run that squid for a reason!) Seems like a lot of that interface was there in the last build I tried... But that was pre-gecko.
- Unlike as documented, the prefs file, cache, and other stuff that should be in
...\Netscape\users\username\ are actually created in the current directory. Scripting or shortcut foolishness must be resorted to. Worse than the last time I tried a mozilla build. - No, it's only pretending to hang. Blur and focus the window and it will wake up. This is an improvement.
- Shrinking a chromebar with its handle has somewhere between little and no effect. This behavior also seems more broken than the last mozilla I tried.
Some things I noticed but aren't really brokenness:- There's some kind of ugly spinning barbershop thing at the bottom of the window. Its purpose seems roughly equivalent to the load animation, except it's even uglier and more distracting.
- cellpadding is taken very (way too?) literally. Check out
/. under mozilla and marvel at the slashboxes. - The chrome feels really sluggish. In fact, the whole app feels sluggish except for the blazing rendering. This lends it a kind of IE feel, where pages render fast, but the app feels unresponsive.
- URLs aren't "corrected" in the location box. This is good in one way (it doesn't seem to want to take the focus away from me to do things to the widget -- an IE behavior I abhor) and in other ways bad (there can be bare hostnames in there with no protocol specified).
It's more functional than your average Amiga browser, but less functional than anything I would want to use on a regular basis. I ought to contribute something because it really feels like mozilla is making jack squat progress in terms of delivering a usable app, but I'm in no position to be picking up enormous projects, or parts of them. It's all I can do right now to keep up with my rinky-dink stuff!I guess it's back into the peanut gallery for me...
I've had the same problem for ages. Some days it doesn't bite, some days it does.
Most often, I get the "dangly bit" error: most of Netscape works except linktext, and then all windows have to be closed and the dangly bit process killed off.
Three times today, even.
Free software will have won when the newbies no longer choose between Windows and Mac, but choose between Linux and FreeBSD.
I beg to differ: Free software will have won when the newbies can choose between all of the above, and do choose from among the free.
It seemed mostly like a fluff piece. But I agree with the premise that the *BSD folks haven't done too well in terms of evangelism, and that the rabid Linux advocacy movement is primarily driven by younger folks now.
BSD people rave about the quality and cleanliness of theor chosen flavor. Linux people rave more often about its social aspects.
I wonder just how much of the usage gap is publicity-driven, and just how much of it really is free choice... It's an question for which I can't even begin to posit an answer.
Try installing the latest service pack. It works WONDERS.
Yep, wonders like: breaking RAS, breaking IIS, breaking DAO...
Last time I called Platinum for IIS support (because it was soaking 100% CPU and answering requests only for static pages, not ASP), the first thing they said was "Install SP4 or hit the road."
SP4 wouldn't install.
Let us make a list, then, from personal experience:
- Windows itself; it usually takes 4 or 5 tries to install, not to mention the hours necessary for debugging the driver situation.
- Microsoft Office 97 Service Release 2. Maybe a third of installations result in measurable brokenness.
- Microsoft Internet Explorer. 65% of installs fail. Half of successful installs break the machine. Nuff said.
- Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 and Active Server Pages. If it installs, which it doesn't often do properly, there is inevitably something or other wrong, often the scripting engines. Want to see a sample broken site? Microsoft has one.
- Microsoft Java Virtual Machine. Can anyone get this to work?
- Games. They have about a 50% failure rate on average because of varying driver requirements.
- Drivers of all kinds, especially video drivers. In fact, the drivers that ship with Windows are usually broken!
That's quite a few just off the top of my head. With effort I'm sure I could find more applications that don't work out of the box. I think nearly everyone has a story about them!For example, Muth made the statement about any shrink wrapped software running on any computer running Windows, and that it is due to a central hold on the Windows source tree.
Note that a majority of my list is comprised of Microsoft products? Given that they have central hold of the OS source, wouldn't you expect that they could do better?
But I can tell any of you countless stories of how a rpm package may or may not run on any Linux installation.
I can think of maybe three or four times I've installed the wrong RPM. rpmfind has a way of coming up with TurboLinux or SuSE packages that don't work well with Red Hat, but they're easy enough to back out. In every case, I simply located the RPM for the distribution I was using (in these cases, Red Hat) and had no trouble at all using them.
Compare and contrast with two weeks of wrestling with Microsoft Option Pack 4.0 to get IIS installed on an NT server. Nothing shy of a reinstallation of NT would convince OP4 to install, since it seemed to fail to correctly register its DLLs during installation.
I don't know enough about Debian packaging to speak with any authority towards it, but I can't imagine it is much worse than RPM, and I've had nearly no problems at all with RPM, and certainly none that compare to the troubles I have when building and configuring Windows boxes (except for how badly rpm segfaults when you build it under pgcc. Maybe it's time to upgrade the compiler on the buildbox, eh?)
If you're referring to APIs, here's a quick scoop:
3DFX users have: Glide, Direct3D (mostly), and OpenGL (partially)
NVIDIA users have: Direct3D, OpenGL (mostly) and Glide (with a wrapper)
Rendition users get: Direct3D, OpenGL, and RRedline. (There's also an old broken Glide->RRedline wrapper)
ATI hardware runs: Direct3D.
Number Nine: Direct3D (somewhat)
Everything else in the consumer space is pretty much beneath radar.
I don't know what all the fuss is about, and I don't own a 3dfx card...
That's actually the whole point. For those who don't own 3DFX hardware, a wrapper allows them to run software targeted to the 3DFX-only Glide API.
This is a handy little capability, since there are lots of people who don't want to buy their hardware for either political or performance reasons, yet would like access to the fairly substantial library of titles which sport only Glide as their 3D hardware interface.
It's only when your changes involve the kernel itself that GPL virulence comes into play.
The strength of the Linux kernel, which includes its device support, is its freed, opensource nature. Binary-only modules hurt that.
That's also its weakness. I was forced to install completely different SCSI hardware because Western Digital no longer supports the 719x and refuses to distribute chipset-level information on it, claiming that their SCSI product line was sold to Adaptec (who disavow anything to do with the 719x, calling it "obsolete." Why buy products just to discontinue them?)
I'm perfectly aware of the undergroundish project to write drivers for the WD719x, but they are:
Here's where I'd take a binary-only driver over no driver at all.
I should also add that support for SCO is our bottom zero priority.
Is your bottom priority. People who run SCO UNIX might think differently. Although I think they all went away in the 80s, didn't they? People don't seriously run SCO any more, do they? No, really?