They can be nasty, but what can you do? If you're administering Windows machines on a network, you can't really decide not to update them (at least not without a lot of trouble). Yes, I'd love to get rid of Windows entirely, but unfortunately it isn't my call.
I really think it should be illegal for them to change your license in an update anyhow. I mean, do the warranty conditions on your car suddenly change drastically when they replace parts in a recall? I'm sure some of you can come up with better analogies.
They are basically forcing their users to change the licensing deal well after the initial agreement and purchase. But aren't we paying for the license to use the software in the first place (as the EULAs themselves make clear). How can they change the terms of that license after we've already paid for it? I suppose that is in the EULA somewhere too though.
So basically we pay for a license giving us the right to use their software. And that license may change at any time at their discretion. Especially if the product is faulty and needs an update.
Considering the cost of the software, the relative functionality compared to alternatives, and these licensing terms, I have to wonder why is it so many people buy this stuff again?
Well, seems like they did exactly that. And that they do have a forum on their website. I wonder what their policy about posting fasttrack material to the forum will be?
Seems to me that the easy way out for KCEasy is to ship their client without the gift-fasttrack plugin. The users can then figure out how to install the plugin themselves. This way KCEasy doesn't supply FastTrack access, but users can still add this functionality.
I'm not sure how far they'd want to go in helping the users find documentation on gift-fasttrack though. Maybe if they had a forum on their website, they could let the users supply that information too.
Actually, most IM networks use a central server (run by AOL, MS, or Yahoo), yet gaim, Trillian, and Kopete have not been sued. These clients have managed to reverse engineer the protocol and connect to these servers, and for the most part, the IM companies have given up on stopping them from doing it.
In the case of Kazaa, there isn't even a central server there. The protocol was reversed engineered, and used to connect to other client machines. I'm not sure if Sharman Networks really has a say in who can connect to other user's machines. I doubt KCEasy really has anything to worry about technology-wise. They do have to worry that Sharman probably has a whole lot more money to throw at lawyers though. I imagine this has more to do with why KCEasy backed down than the actual merits of any lawsuit.
Nope, Kazaa is fully decentralized. They wouldn't want to run any services themselves, since that would line them up for a quick legal defeat, much like Napster. If they are running any services on their own machines, they certainly wouldn't admit it.
It is just finding a node to connect to that is hard to do without centralization, and as I recall, the client comes with a list of IPs to try first. If for some reason none of those IPs are running Kazaa, it starts scanning the 24.* domain (the cable internet providers) until it finds someone. There is no central server telling you where to find peers or super-nodes, and all routing of searches is done through super-nodes.
Win2k is the least obnoxious OS from the Windows family.
A lot of people are giving you flack for not putting WinXP in the reliable category. But I must agree that WinXP does belong in the "obnoxious" category, no matter what you think of its stability.
Any OS with Fisher Price colours that pops up warnings saying "you have unused icons on your desktop" when you are trying to work is obnoxious. I know that XP can be made to be less annoying (so basicaly more like 2K) with a little work, but the defaults bad.
ALL ALSA drivers have all the mixer channels muted by default. They explain why, too. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the de facto support was for ALSA drivers, instead of OSS drivers. If that was the case, then all the channels would show up in the mixer apps, and the user could see that the channels were muted.
Yes, but some distros still give you sound by default, even if you use an ALSA driver. You just need a smart installer and configuration tool. Having a fresh install with no volume makes no sense. Thankfully not all distros are mute, even if ALSA is the default.
Not Mandrake's fault. KDE's mixer, for example, supports only the minimal channels typical of OSS drivers. I agree that this is a big problem, and it's because the Linux community won't let go of open source sound system.
In the couple cases where I've had issues, it has been Mandrake's hardware detection that is at fault. It either doesn't find the device properly, or picks the wrong driver. I had a machine where it picked an OSS driver that produced brutal, choppy sound as being the "recommended driver", but when you force it to use ALSA (which it only lists as an option if you Show All), then the card worked fine. It is really my only beef with Mandrake's distro, as otherwise i've had much success with its hardware detection.
- Microsoft has enough clout to get every manufacturor to ship Windows sound drivers with their cards. Not really Linux's fault that they won't write drivers or open the specs.
Not really. I've had horrible luck with XP's default drivers. In almost every case, you're better off hunting down the manufacturer's support site and getting their updated drivers.
Yes, but you have the option of getting WinXP drivers at the manufacturors site or on the CD that comes with your hardware. This is often not the case for Linux.
By the way, I have had tons more problems with Windows XP doing stupid things with hardware than I ever have had with Linux, so this is by no means a post meant to stick up for MS. Lack of manufacturor drivers is not the fault of the Linux operating system, and WinXP doesn't always handle things any better with their built in drivers.
You wouldn't happen to be the person researching wi-fi for the CFL's Hamilton Tiger Cats would you?
Or perhaps Bob Young himself? That'd be real cool.
Unfortunately I have no advise on rugged PDAs for you, other than they'd probably be very expensive. With whatever you end up buying, you'll want to do some sort of limited trial first, where there are say only 100-500 available on a first-come first-server basis. Very soon you'll see how rugged they are, and how much demand there is,,without having too much invested in them.
What I can advise you on is to not listen to those who say there is no market for this. Many current sports fans may not take devices to the game, but the younger generation will bring thinks like handhelds, laptops, and phones. You'll want to provide connectivity for all of these devices (so you're looking at more than just WiFi if you want to get the phones - you might want to consider partnering with a local cellular provider for some sort of service, and maybe a team-branded phone as well).
There are lots of possibilties here. If you hire me as a consultant, I'll be glad to look into it a lot more for you. If you are with the Ticats, I'd actually be a good fit, since I am a network researcher and I'm a big CFL fan.
- Some distros have the mixer volume at 0 by default. - Some distros suck at configuring sound even when it is supported by Linux drivers (Mandrake's biggest weakness IMHO). - Microsoft has enough clout to get every manufacturor to ship Windows sound drivers with their cards. Not really Linux's fault that they won't write drivers or open the specs. - The author's tone would not help him get any support from the regular channels (forums, IRC, tech support, etc). If nobody was very helpful to him, it was likely his own fault.
So yeah, the article is both a Troll and very much an exaggeration of the real situation. And all this whining because one card doesn't work well under Linux (either not supported or takes some effort to get working). How much would a supported el-cheapo replacement cost I wonder?
Of course researching supported cards and spending a whole $20 bucks wouldn't make nearly as good of a story as installing 9 distros and ranting about how much Linux sucks.
There is also x2x if you're going between multiple X11 sessions, or x2vnc if you're going from X11 to VNC. I use the latter at work to have virtual monitor spanning between my main Linux box and Windows testing box.
As others have pointed out, Slashdot has over 500 errors on the current frontpage. However it does look good in any browser, unlike this site.
Still, Slashdot's HTML is pretty aweful. They are coding to the browsers instead of the standards just as much as MS is - they've just chosen more than one browser.
Since it is running on IIS they have to use.asp and probably some custom software. If it were any other company, they could've used an already existing php forum to do this, but I'm betting that wasn't an option for their web admins.
Regardless, this could actually be a useful site. I hope people don't flame it into submission after this slashdot posting.
I would LOVE to see someone make a similar two-page brochure, formatted exactly the same way, that would provide all the arguments for using OO.
I thought the exact same thing when I read the document. It'd be nice to have something that tells the other side of the story. In fact, I'm hoping to draft something up in the near future, and maybe even give it to OpenOffice.org (Although I guess OO.org or Sun would be more than capable of doing it themselves as well).
I'd agree to a point. Some releases have been extremely stable (I've had almost a year of uptime on a desktop with flakey hardware), some have been very poor. Seems the QA at Mandrake is a bit unpredictable at times.
But with the new movement towards a community release, followed by an "official" release 3 months later, I think we'll start to see some very stable "official" releases from Mandrake.
Of course Debian stable lives up to its name as well, if you really want stability. Or FreeBSD and NetBSD for that matter.
I think you're bang on. Novell is going to push C# and Mono as the next developer platform, hoping that compatibility with.NET helps them in the long run.
Meanwhile Sun is pushing Java as a programming platform for Linux with the Java Desktop System. Unfortunately for Sun, Java is not yet integrated into most distros besides their own, hence why IBM's wish to see it open sourced could really help Sun and Java.
A third option that doesn't get discussed much with Linux is Objective-C. The OS X Cocoa and GNUStep frameworks, if they had a big backer like MS/Sun/IBM/Novell on the Linux side, just might be able to contend with the above two choices.
Of course KDE (with a lot of help from QT) is doing a pretty good job at creating a nice C++ framework for developers. They do pretty good considering the language they are using is not as new or "pretty" as the other three.
KDE recently released some code that allows you to use the IOSlaves from any application. You can use the IOSlaves to mount to the file system, similar to how LUFS can use gnome-vfs to do the same (although they also have their own non-gnome-vfs implementations as well).
I actually got a few IBM towers with multiple drives (DVD and CD Burner). They shipped a cable that can connect both of those drives to 1 sound plug on the board. Of course I have seen some boards that have multiple inputs as well.
So likely it is very possible to have both devices on the sound card.
How many different interfaces to win32 are there right now? And how many tookits on the Mac? I seem to remember that there are many, but that there is some integration work there that keeps the system somewhat consistent.
There is no reason why you can't have a single Linux desktop with multiple methods to program for it. Those who like C and GTK can use that, those who like C++ and QT use it, and those who like Java can use Java (and Python already interfaces well with all of these languages and toolkits). The KDE desktop already has a fair bit of integration code in place that allows GTK developers to build native KDE applications. The GNOME people could do the same for KDE/QT, and Sun could create integration for both toolkits in their 3D desktop.
All we need is for it to be as seemless as ObjectiveC/Cocoa, C++/Carbon, and Java/Swing are on Mac OS X (although Java with Swing on the Mac JVM is just a fairly good skin, you do have the option to do Java/Cocoa too).
That thing doesn't exactly take a lot of land. In fact, they built it a few hundred feet away from where I was living in college.
They built it there because of the amount of scientific research that takes place at the U of S, and the fact we already had a particle accelerator on campus.
Thank god for U of S though, b/c this city (as nice as it is in the non-winter months) and province wouldn't be all that fun otherwise.
Actually the entire thing isn't flat and treeless, but unfortunately the Trans-Canada and other main highways all cut through the flattest and most treeless areas, so even people in the rest of Canada assume we're one big prairie.
That is not to say there isn't a lot of bloody flat prairie land around here (and a complete lack of large hills/mountains). But if you go North there are forests and lakes, and if you venture far enough away from Regina you'll find land that isn't entirely flat (even downright hilly in places).
That land south of Regina (where most pictures of Saskatchewan seem to be taken) is so amazingly flat it makes the rest of Saskatchewan seem mountainous. It takes like 5 inches of rain to flood a 50km^2 around there.
Replying to myself I know, but I actually read the entire article I linked and noticed this line:
maybe Canada could take the place of Saudi Arabia in the American universe.
My only thought is I HOPE NOT! Please don't let Canada become the next Saudi Arabia or Middle East to the Americans. Burn the tar sands before it is too late!!
The cost is a bit high, and right now they're only able to get about 10% of the oil extracted. I'm not sure if getting the rest is too expensive, or just beyond the capability of current extraction methods. Probably the former.
Google did find me this on production costs though, and I've heard the $9 a barrel figure elsewhere too.
Slashdot Mirror
They can be nasty, but what can you do? If you're administering Windows machines on a network, you can't really decide not to update them (at least not without a lot of trouble). Yes, I'd love to get rid of Windows entirely, but unfortunately it isn't my call.
I really think it should be illegal for them to change your license in an update anyhow. I mean, do the warranty conditions on your car suddenly change drastically when they replace parts in a recall? I'm sure some of you can come up with better analogies.
They are basically forcing their users to change the licensing deal well after the initial agreement and purchase. But aren't we paying for the license to use the software in the first place (as the EULAs themselves make clear). How can they change the terms of that license after we've already paid for it? I suppose that is in the EULA somewhere too though.
So basically we pay for a license giving us the right to use their software. And that license may change at any time at their discretion. Especially if the product is faulty and needs an update.
Considering the cost of the software, the relative functionality compared to alternatives, and these licensing terms, I have to wonder why is it so many people buy this stuff again?
You should just need to get the gift-fasttrack sources and build the plugin. Then change your gift configuration file to use the fasttrack plugin.
c k/
You can find gift-fasttrack here: http://developer.berlios.de/projects/gift-fasttra
Of course I don't use KCEasy, so I'm not sure if their setup would make this process any different or not.
Well, seems like they did exactly that. And that they do have a forum on their website. I wonder what their policy about posting fasttrack material to the forum will be?
Seems to me that the easy way out for KCEasy is to ship their client without the gift-fasttrack plugin. The users can then figure out how to install the plugin themselves. This way KCEasy doesn't supply FastTrack access, but users can still add this functionality.
I'm not sure how far they'd want to go in helping the users find documentation on gift-fasttrack though. Maybe if they had a forum on their website, they could let the users supply that information too.
Actually, most IM networks use a central server (run by AOL, MS, or Yahoo), yet gaim, Trillian, and Kopete have not been sued. These clients have managed to reverse engineer the protocol and connect to these servers, and for the most part, the IM companies have given up on stopping them from doing it.
In the case of Kazaa, there isn't even a central server there. The protocol was reversed engineered, and used to connect to other client machines. I'm not sure if Sharman Networks really has a say in who can connect to other user's machines. I doubt KCEasy really has anything to worry about technology-wise. They do have to worry that Sharman probably has a whole lot more money to throw at lawyers though. I imagine this has more to do with why KCEasy backed down than the actual merits of any lawsuit.
Nope, Kazaa is fully decentralized. They wouldn't want to run any services themselves, since that would line them up for a quick legal defeat, much like Napster. If they are running any services on their own machines, they certainly wouldn't admit it.
It is just finding a node to connect to that is hard to do without centralization, and as I recall, the client comes with a list of IPs to try first. If for some reason none of those IPs are running Kazaa, it starts scanning the 24.* domain (the cable internet providers) until it finds someone. There is no central server telling you where to find peers or super-nodes, and all routing of searches is done through super-nodes.
Win2k is the least obnoxious OS from the Windows family.
A lot of people are giving you flack for not putting WinXP in the reliable category. But I must agree that WinXP does belong in the "obnoxious" category, no matter what you think of its stability.
Any OS with Fisher Price colours that pops up warnings saying "you have unused icons on your desktop" when you are trying to work is obnoxious. I know that XP can be made to be less annoying (so basicaly more like 2K) with a little work, but the defaults bad.
All good points. Here's my reply:
ALL ALSA drivers have all the mixer channels muted by default. They explain why, too. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the de facto support was for ALSA drivers, instead of OSS drivers. If that was the case, then all the channels would show up in the mixer apps, and the user could see that the channels were muted.
Yes, but some distros still give you sound by default, even if you use an ALSA driver. You just need a smart installer and configuration tool. Having a fresh install with no volume makes no sense. Thankfully not all distros are mute, even if ALSA is the default.
Not Mandrake's fault. KDE's mixer, for example, supports only the minimal channels typical of OSS drivers. I agree that this is a big problem, and it's because the Linux community won't let go of open source sound system.
In the couple cases where I've had issues, it has been Mandrake's hardware detection that is at fault. It either doesn't find the device properly, or picks the wrong driver. I had a machine where it picked an OSS driver that produced brutal, choppy sound as being the "recommended driver", but when you force it to use ALSA (which it only lists as an option if you Show All), then the card worked fine. It is really my only beef with Mandrake's distro, as otherwise i've had much success with its hardware detection.
- Microsoft has enough clout to get every manufacturor to ship Windows sound drivers with their cards. Not really Linux's fault that they won't write drivers or open the specs.
Not really. I've had horrible luck with XP's default drivers. In almost every case, you're better off hunting down the manufacturer's support site and getting their updated drivers.
Yes, but you have the option of getting WinXP drivers at the manufacturors site or on the CD that comes with your hardware. This is often not the case for Linux.
By the way, I have had tons more problems with Windows XP doing stupid things with hardware than I ever have had with Linux, so this is by no means a post meant to stick up for MS. Lack of manufacturor drivers is not the fault of the Linux operating system, and WinXP doesn't always handle things any better with their built in drivers.
You wouldn't happen to be the person researching wi-fi for the CFL's Hamilton Tiger Cats would you?
,without having too much invested in them.
Or perhaps Bob Young himself? That'd be real cool.
Unfortunately I have no advise on rugged PDAs for you, other than they'd probably be very expensive. With whatever you end up buying, you'll want to do some sort of limited trial first, where there are say only 100-500 available on a first-come first-server basis. Very soon you'll see how rugged they are, and how much demand there is,
What I can advise you on is to not listen to those who say there is no market for this. Many current sports fans may not take devices to the game, but the younger generation will bring thinks like handhelds, laptops, and phones. You'll want to provide connectivity for all of these devices (so you're looking at more than just WiFi if you want to get the phones - you might want to consider partnering with a local cellular provider for some sort of service, and maybe a team-branded phone as well).
There are lots of possibilties here. If you hire me as a consultant, I'll be glad to look into it a lot more for you. If you are with the Ticats, I'd actually be a good fit, since I am a network researcher and I'm a big CFL fan.
Also:
- Some distros have the mixer volume at 0 by default.
- Some distros suck at configuring sound even when it is supported by Linux drivers (Mandrake's biggest weakness IMHO).
- Microsoft has enough clout to get every manufacturor to ship Windows sound drivers with their cards. Not really Linux's fault that they won't write drivers or open the specs.
- The author's tone would not help him get any support from the regular channels (forums, IRC, tech support, etc). If nobody was very helpful to him, it was likely his own fault.
So yeah, the article is both a Troll and very much an exaggeration of the real situation. And all this whining because one card doesn't work well under Linux (either not supported or takes some effort to get working). How much would a supported el-cheapo replacement cost I wonder?
Of course researching supported cards and spending a whole $20 bucks wouldn't make nearly as good of a story as installing 9 distros and ranting about how much Linux sucks.
There is also x2x if you're going between multiple X11 sessions, or x2vnc if you're going from X11 to VNC. I use the latter at work to have virtual monitor spanning between my main Linux box and Windows testing box.
As others have pointed out, Slashdot has over 500 errors on the current frontpage. However it does look good in any browser, unlike this site.
Still, Slashdot's HTML is pretty aweful. They are coding to the browsers instead of the standards just as much as MS is - they've just chosen more than one browser.
The slashdot frontpage has 510 when I ran it through there.
Of course slashdot doesn't look like ass when viewed in any major browser, whereas msdn looks pretty aweful in anything but IE.
Since it is running on IIS they have to use .asp and probably some custom software. If it were any other company, they could've used an already existing php forum to do this, but I'm betting that wasn't an option for their web admins.
Regardless, this could actually be a useful site. I hope people don't flame it into submission after this slashdot posting.
I would LOVE to see someone make a similar two-page brochure, formatted exactly the same way, that would provide all the arguments for using OO.
I thought the exact same thing when I read the document. It'd be nice to have something that tells the other side of the story. In fact, I'm hoping to draft something up in the near future, and maybe even give it to OpenOffice.org (Although I guess OO.org or Sun would be more than capable of doing it themselves as well).
I'd agree to a point. Some releases have been extremely stable (I've had almost a year of uptime on a desktop with flakey hardware), some have been very poor. Seems the QA at Mandrake is a bit unpredictable at times.
But with the new movement towards a community release, followed by an "official" release 3 months later, I think we'll start to see some very stable "official" releases from Mandrake.
Of course Debian stable lives up to its name as well, if you really want stability. Or FreeBSD and NetBSD for that matter.
I think you're bang on. Novell is going to push C# and Mono as the next developer platform, hoping that compatibility with .NET helps them in the long run.
Meanwhile Sun is pushing Java as a programming platform for Linux with the Java Desktop System. Unfortunately for Sun, Java is not yet integrated into most distros besides their own, hence why IBM's wish to see it open sourced could really help Sun and Java.
A third option that doesn't get discussed much with Linux is Objective-C. The OS X Cocoa and GNUStep frameworks, if they had a big backer like MS/Sun/IBM/Novell on the Linux side, just might be able to contend with the above two choices.
Of course KDE (with a lot of help from QT) is doing a pretty good job at creating a nice C++ framework for developers. They do pretty good considering the language they are using is not as new or "pretty" as the other three.
> Mandrake is not an option.
Just curious. Why not Mandrake?
KDE recently released some code that allows you to use the IOSlaves from any application. You can use the IOSlaves to mount to the file system, similar to how LUFS can use gnome-vfs to do the same (although they also have their own non-gnome-vfs implementations as well).
I actually got a few IBM towers with multiple drives (DVD and CD Burner). They shipped a cable that can connect both of those drives to 1 sound plug on the board. Of course I have seen some boards that have multiple inputs as well.
So likely it is very possible to have both devices on the sound card.
How many different interfaces to win32 are there right now? And how many tookits on the Mac? I seem to remember that there are many, but that there is some integration work there that keeps the system somewhat consistent.
There is no reason why you can't have a single Linux desktop with multiple methods to program for it. Those who like C and GTK can use that, those who like C++ and QT use it, and those who like Java can use Java (and Python already interfaces well with all of these languages and toolkits). The KDE desktop already has a fair bit of integration code in place that allows GTK developers to build native KDE applications. The GNOME people could do the same for KDE/QT, and Sun could create integration for both toolkits in their 3D desktop.
All we need is for it to be as seemless as ObjectiveC/Cocoa, C++/Carbon, and Java/Swing are on Mac OS X (although Java with Swing on the Mac JVM is just a fairly good skin, you do have the option to do Java/Cocoa too).
That thing doesn't exactly take a lot of land. In fact, they built it a few hundred feet away from where I was living in college.
They built it there because of the amount of scientific research that takes place at the U of S, and the fact we already had a particle accelerator on campus.
Thank god for U of S though, b/c this city (as nice as it is in the non-winter months) and province wouldn't be all that fun otherwise.
Actually the entire thing isn't flat and treeless, but unfortunately the Trans-Canada and other main highways all cut through the flattest and most treeless areas, so even people in the rest of Canada assume we're one big prairie.
That is not to say there isn't a lot of bloody flat prairie land around here (and a complete lack of large hills/mountains). But if you go North there are forests and lakes, and if you venture far enough away from Regina you'll find land that isn't entirely flat (even downright hilly in places).
That land south of Regina (where most pictures of Saskatchewan seem to be taken) is so amazingly flat it makes the rest of Saskatchewan seem mountainous. It takes like 5 inches of rain to flood a 50km^2 around there.
Replying to myself I know, but I actually read the entire article I linked and noticed this line:
maybe Canada could take the place of Saudi Arabia in the American universe.
My only thought is I HOPE NOT! Please don't let Canada become the next Saudi Arabia or Middle East to the Americans. Burn the tar sands before it is too late!!
Okay, maybe that is taking it a bit too far...
The cost is a bit high, and right now they're only able to get about 10% of the oil extracted. I'm not sure if getting the rest is too expensive, or just beyond the capability of current extraction methods. Probably the former.
Google did find me this on production costs though, and I've heard the $9 a barrel figure elsewhere too.