The line from the German National Anthem usually strikes awkuard feelings in a German because it was severly abused by the Nazis. After all, it means 'Germany, Germany over everything' which the Nazis interpreted quite literally - as we all know.
However, it initially was meant as an anthem to encourage the forming of a single German Reich as opposed to sticking with the 300+ little dwarf kingdoms and principalities the territory of Germany was made up back some 200 years ago. More as sort of an imperative like 'Put germany above your petty territoial interests.'.
It's actually a line from the first two verses of the anthem which are now officially banned from singing due to the Nazi history of abuse of the anthem. It actually is prohibited by law to sing the two first verses in Germany (iirc).
I don't see anything inflated here. Yes, there are quite a few Web 2.0 shops doing lots of Web 2.0 stuff (whatever that exactly may be), but compared to 2000 their price performance ratio is by orders of magnitude better. If I choose to build a Web 2.0 app (I'm actually considering that) it will cost me 200 hrs of my own time and a few thousand euros at most. Back then web companies where burning millions just to get the bandwidth and a halfway decent RDBMS up and running. Armies of keypunchers where building static webdocs and a CMS the likes of Typo3 or Joomla would've costed upwards of 500000$ and require a few million dollars worth of hardware. Today it takes a single 16 year old teenie 2 weeks of his autum vacation and a 30$ webhosting slot to build a viable flickr competitor.
Bottom line: There is no bubble the size and hype of 2000. There may be an inflated market of rich web shops and project, but not even a fraction of the burn rate or bound capital of back then. Nothing to see here, move along.... Dvorak is a blockhead. My essays & predictions on webstuff would be thrice the worth and value.
I don't get it. Mostly. I do get the one Font manager I'm seeing on one screenshot. Looks like it's using some *Step/*Maker/*Box WM toolkit. Anyone with more details on that? If this is their baby, then they desever big kudos for that alone. Font management still is underrepresented in the Linux world.
However the rest just looks like an inconsistent WMaker/*Step theme with an XFCE bar at the left. Or is there more to it than meets the eye? Some underlying feature laden super framework that will make this WM the new fluxbox? The last WM hype I remember wasfluxbox - it introduced some cool new features and effectively displayed that there is room for improvement in the WM space (and that WM project websites needn't look like a pile of shit). Thus Fluxbox is my prime choice for small-footprint WMs.
What's with this one that could make it the new fluxbox? Maybe someone with the project could provide some insight on it?
Academia generally often is - in my opinion - rotten to the core. The entire concept of ranking competence and authority by degree is totally twisted, as I'm sure most slashdotters will agree since we're moving around in an industry in which what is taught in the academic field often is outdated and allready sub-par by real-life standards. If this catches on, we will the academia showing it's true face a little more and that will lead to diversification in education *and* more chances for modern means of education and establishing recognition.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever asked your dad why he thinks some frequencies of EM radiation are harmful while others are safe?
Different ranges have different effects.
Microwaves have a higher frequency. The range generally called "microwave" starts at aprox. 1 GHz. The wavelength is short enough to cause DNA and cell membrane damage, cancer, nerve cell damage and brain damage. Nato Radar Mainainence was told during the cold war that Radar and all the emitions associated with it are by and large harmless. But having an engineers degree and being high enough in the food chain my father knew better. The MWs maintainence was exposed to when working on idle Radar equipment caused health damage.
Cancer ratio with retired Radar staff are measurably higher and it's only a few years ago that class action suits from retired german/european bundeswehr/nato radar staff where being held in the usual loop of endless cycles of studies and counter-studies.
Do and think whatever you want to. My bed is right next to all my personal IT gear and 40+ cords interconnecting them. I, for one, turn of the central power for it when I go to sleep. And I would consider it naive not to be weary of negative health effects a cellphone I'm using might have on my brain. Or the growing brain of my daughter, for that matter. After all, a big problem I see with low-watt, high frequency MWs (close-to-the-brain-when-emiting cellphones in particular) is that as soon as you notice it has an effect on your personal health, it might be to late.
I see a lot of wannabees rant about this study being run by oh-so scientific scientists and the wearyness about MW being pushed by unscientify crackpots. And that the sun and radio and tv is more radiation blah blah...
I've got news for you: Microwaves damage health. Period. The debate is only about at which intensity do they start doing that.
I generally turn my Wifi of if I'm not using it and have stopped carrying my cellphone close to my body, since it's on all day. I turn it off at night. I also hold it away from my head when I make a call until the cell handshake is over and the remote connect is there. My old Siemens M35 even had a beep to indicate when the connect is there. Smart people the Siemens engineers, aren't they? Handshake you ask? That's the high-power meep-meep-meep you hear in nearby active FM radios just before you make or recieve a call. It's what establishes the conection to the cell network for communication.
I know a woman who can sense the cellphone handshake (she has e-magnetic field sensetivity) from meters away and has the habbit of anouncing cellphone calls seconds before a phone rings. Fun to watch with unsuspecting others near by:-) . Her life isn't that fun though. When her neighbor above leaves his 20" CRT on she can't sleep. She's got other trouble with that aswell and people often don't believe her and think she's crazy. She's had her sensetivity tested in a university laboratry and senses alternating fields of CRT coils at different angles with different intensity. I personally presume that the origin for this sensitivity is acutally the inner ear which apparently gets affected by magnetic fields (just an amature theory of mine).
On it goes: My father was a high profile radar electronics engineer - with Military (Nato, Cruise Missile), Airbus, Nasa/Grumman Aircraft (Lunar Module, Skylab & early Space Shuttle) and some others. He forbid us to have a Microwave oven (they ALL leak Microwaves) and steared clear and went the other way whenever we got to close to a radar bubble when going hiking. There are people who've had terminal brain tumors due to intense cellphone usage and I work with doctors (medical IT) who keep all equipment far away and well cased according to TCO.
Don't think it's not unhealthy just because most people don't care or some Telco funded (sic!) study from the UK says the health issues are all bogus and the people claiming health issues are hysteric. It is scientifically proven that even lower wattrange microwaves predictably lower the threshold for internal blood clot (mw induced heat + blood protein == hardboiled) and influence plant groth. Switzerland (iirc, it was some european country) official acknowledges e-magnetic sensetivity and authorities even funds radio shielding paint and other countermeasures for people who are affected. Whatever you make of that, I, for one, would *not* want to live right in smack of the middle of a directional radio beam or the raycone of a cell transciever. Not with proper shielding anyway.
Bottom line: It's not about being hysteric or overly paranoid. But a little common sense and forsight is needed when handling technology. You don't get universal flawless wireless connectivity and mobile coverage without a tradeoff. Anyone who believes that is a crackpot himself.
We just need a tipping point for robots or something up ahead. Imagine vacuum bots becoming truely feasable. Or eBook readers becoming more feasable than books (not very far away anymore). The need for OCR scanners, Elisa-like telemarketer bots and whatnot. Boom! Moores law will be to slow for that.
Just as moores law just recently made JavaScipt driven browser based productivity software a feasable alternative. What would've you said if someone told you that 5 years ago? You'd've called him a nutcase and so would have I.
Bottom line: No folks. We're in for a full-blow Neal Stephenson SnowCrash / William Gibson 'Neuromancer' Cyberpunk ride with stuff up ahead and just around the corner we all haven't even dreamt of yet. No need to worry about Moores law losing its lure or not being applicable anymore.
He's disgruntled and I can understand. I also understand him bickering about the large gap between the kernel developers and users. He's got some points that seem valid. However the issues he mentions have little to do with the desktop performance of Linux overall. If Desktop Linux sucks to much due to bad kernel performance and scheduling a lot of people will notice (including Linus himself) and start fixing it. It's open source people. The real stuff is mostly problem, passion and technology driven and hardly marketing driven. If things get out of line to far OSS tends to fix them for itself. No need to be so fatalistic. Desktop Linux is doing perfect considering the recent improvements as seen on Ubuntu 7 and its (for instance) excellent hardware detection. When Firefox performance is our only issue left we'll actually be in a lucky position.
It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This website is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't posten it on slashdot, it wouldn't be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! Its off the twig! Its kicked the bucket,shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-WEBSITE!!
Flash is a monopoly. More or less. But it's a monopoly that doeshn't suck as much as IE. In fact, I'm sure, as soon as a product shows up that is better than Flash, Flash will use marketshare inmediately. Flash gained it's position because it really *is* the best solution at hand for the stuff it's used for. But as it's still the single most widespread plattform on the end-user internet available and the only MM plattform that runs on all major deskstop OSes it will remain at the top. And for good reasons too. No matter how much they screw around with the IDE. Java actually is the only true potential competitor to date. But Sun have never show any effort beyond 2 man projects to really make inroads in the rich client / rich media internet. I really whish they would, now that Java is GPLd, but I don't think it will happen, no matter how much they anounce yet another Java MM initiative. The new JavaFX looks like a revamped JMF and has a little more oomph to it than the last attempt, but let's just wait and see how long that lasts. I'm not holding my breath just yet.
Cake, Symfony -- stay the hell away from these crummy frameworks.
Care to elaborate? I'd like an educated opinion, why you think these aren't worth it. Do you have real experience with them or did you just dick around with each for 20 minutes? Or is it PHP that you don't like? I'm really interested. Propels XML is the only potential downside I can see. And that doesn't seen to much of a problem.
The Gnash (Gnu-Flash) team will take another 5 years to get their shit together, despite having declared a Flash 7 compliant Gnash player top priority. Whatever that means. Maybe they'll finish their website this year.
If only our OSS Microsoft Fanboy Midguel would galvanize his team to implement an entire pipeline of Flash tools, generators and Players. If MS doesn't kill this one off and a viable Kit of OSS tools & players for Silverlight comes to life I might even drop Flash RIA for it. But no way, for as long as I live, will I support an non-open RIA standard that MS has total control over. I'd rather mess with Adobes crappy Flash IDE for another 10 years.
Your wrong. Flash is an open standard and has been for many years. SWF is a documented standard and there even are quite a few OSS implementations of compilers, VMs and such. IIRC amf, the remoting protocoll of Flash is also an open standard.
This is no big problem. The MacBooks have multitouch pads and the iPhone will have multitouch. Modern mice have tiltweels (allthough mine from logitech sux big time). What I see lurking around the corner, also enforced by the ever growing amount of widescreens is that horizontal scrolling probably will become more common. Just as the mouseweel change vertical bannerisation of websites (and factually made the one-month per html doc blog as we know it possible) mutlitouch + widescreen + tiltweel might introduce horizontal scrolling or something like it to websites and documents. Sidescrolling with a MacBook multitouch pad is a breeze and could easyly turn it from a no-no to a standard. Look at the iPhone commercial scrolling around the New York Times and you get an impression that we might move away from the vertical blog to the pane blog. I'm actually thinking of building a site with 5 columns instead of the usual 3 because of all this. Designers will adapt and within a year adaption will be complete.
While I'm as annoyed about the Rails crowd running around yelling "RAILS! RAILS! RAILS!" just as much as the next guy and allways have a snappy remark ready for anybody who thinks Rails invented intelligent web programming... I have to say that you have to give the Rails team credit for introducing professional marketing strategies to OSS projects. Their site was the first OSS site that didn't look like shit from the get-go. They practically invented screencasts as a means of advertising their tool and actually did quite a good job with Rails too. It's mostly hype-driven and definitely not the best or most powerfull. There are countless other and often more mature frameworks out there. But they actually did a real neat job with convincing large slabs of the academic and java crowd that the 1995 way of doing things really is ancient and pointless by todays standards.
If I catch you including my GPL code in your closed source app I can't force you to open source the entire app or release/publish/whatever the source of it. I can, however, force you to stop distributing it. And I can sue you to chunky kibbles and into next wednesday for 10 bazillion dollars of damages for copyright infringement and some other illegal activities. And if you use my code and you don't opt to open source your app I probably would sue.
Hope that answers your question.
Don't get all worked up about open source. OSS is mostly a devmodel asked for by developers (because it has significant advantages over closed source). End customers just want the app to work. If you app is good and has a fair price no one will give a damn if it's GPLd or not.
But *you* *absolutely* want to make sure that you're not using some pure GPL source in your libs or something. Otherwise you will hopefully get caught and recieve a legal ass-chewing. Professional developers are fed up with people not giving a shit about copyright just because they are in OSS territory - and for good reasons too. Which, btw., has nothing to do with 'fanboyisim' or something. Do you call Bill Gates a fanboy when he comes to have your behind on a silver platter for you using MS.Net Studio or the likes for something it isn't licenced for? No? Thought so. Ask a question like this in the MS forums and you'll get some snailmail from the MS legal team the next day.
Bottom line: Be fair and square and don't cheat and OSS will be the best plattform and community to run your stuff on. Cheat and you'll get the bill someday. Good look with your business.
I upgraded my Debian Woody from a few years ago to kubuntu 7 two weeks ago. I've been working on OS X since 3,5 years and now I'm considering to go back to Linux as my main OS. Ubuntu 7 is that good. I've been programming since 21 years and never in my life have had an OS install go that smoothly. Even the Tiger upgrade on my Mac didn't go that easy. I haven't tried Ubuntu before, but in my book Ubuntu 7 is a milestone in Linux distro evolution.
*Sob*... *Sniff*... We have done them so unjust. Duh poor little media giants. So sad. I'm so sorry. Don't you guys feel really bad now too?
Ok, let's cut the crap.
Nobody doubt's that P2P filesharing is a grey-to-black area and could be solved (legally at least) by releasing a sane law that takes the internet and it's specialties into account. It would take me about 20 minutes to write one. So proactively placing a song into an anonymous, globally available P2P network is copyright infringement. Deal. If a teenie is caught doing it he should be punished (as in '40 hrs. social service' NOT as in '20 years on the electric chair'). Deal. NOBODY doubt's that copyright has it's purpose and that it should be defended legally.
But tell me: Why in hell haven't I ever downloaded a song of a P2P network since I've got a Mac and iTunes? Why don't I even give a flying f*ck about Apples Fairplay DRM? Because it's so easy. And because Fairplay has *never* gotten in my way. Hello people? I haven't reached the borders of Fairplay! I couldn't care less. You could LEAVE IT AWAY and I wouldn't even notice. Why isn't there a perfectly legal version of AllOfMP3 gaining revenue from adds? (not that I've ever used it). How about using radio waves to stream music to everybody who buys a reviever and gain revenue from ads and stuff... no, wait, that wouldn't work, would it? *Da-Dum-Crash*
As someone here on slashdot said: The media industry couldn't innovate their way out of a paper bag. They have to be held at gunpoint to get with the programm. It allways has been that way. Offer proper services and your problem will go away. Meanwhile keep putting grannies into jail for a bazillion years and magnatune.com will grow larger by the week because of it. The best way to lose your customers is to sue them. No, my friends, Steve Jobs got it just right. It will only take another 10 years for the rest to catch the drift.
The Corel Draw Suite is what you're looking for (X3 is the current). It does everything Adobe does (aside from Flash) but costs about a tenth. I've used it professionally for Web and Print and it's the best price/performance ratio available. It has everything from Pixelgrafics(PhotoPaint) over Vectorgrafics, Fontdesign right up to professional layouting. All in one package. In many ways I actually prefer it to the adobe suite, which is a bizar performance hog where it needn't be and is more difficult to use in multi-document workflows. It also has a few features Adobe doesn't offer (neat vectorizing for instance). I personally use the full official Corel Draw 9 Suite for Linux (not available anymore) but X3 for the Windows Family looks just as neat. And the education version for X3 only costs 99$ in some places. CD is actually one of the few apps I'd switch back to Windows 2000 for.
Slashdot Mirror
"Deutschland, Deutschland über alles"
The line from the German National Anthem usually strikes awkuard feelings in a German because it was severly abused by the Nazis. After all, it means 'Germany, Germany over everything' which the Nazis interpreted quite literally - as we all know.
However, it initially was meant as an anthem to encourage the forming of a single German Reich as opposed to sticking with the 300+ little dwarf kingdoms and principalities the territory of Germany was made up back some 200 years ago. More as sort of an imperative like 'Put germany above your petty territoial interests.'.
It's actually a line from the first two verses of the anthem which are now officially banned from singing due to the Nazi history of abuse of the anthem. It actually is prohibited by law to sing the two first verses in Germany (iirc).
I don't see anything inflated here. Yes, there are quite a few Web 2.0 shops doing lots of Web 2.0 stuff (whatever that exactly may be), but compared to 2000 their price performance ratio is by orders of magnitude better. If I choose to build a Web 2.0 app (I'm actually considering that) it will cost me 200 hrs of my own time and a few thousand euros at most. Back then web companies where burning millions just to get the bandwidth and a halfway decent RDBMS up and running. Armies of keypunchers where building static webdocs and a CMS the likes of Typo3 or Joomla would've costed upwards of 500000$ and require a few million dollars worth of hardware. Today it takes a single 16 year old teenie 2 weeks of his autum vacation and a 30$ webhosting slot to build a viable flickr competitor.
... Dvorak is a blockhead. My essays & predictions on webstuff would be thrice the worth and value.
Bottom line:
There is no bubble the size and hype of 2000. There may be an inflated market of rich web shops and project, but not even a fraction of the burn rate or bound capital of back then. Nothing to see here, move along.
Well said indeed.
(apart from the opening insults maybe - allthough they're understandable)
I don't get it. Mostly. I do get the one Font manager I'm seeing on one screenshot. Looks like it's using some *Step/*Maker/*Box WM toolkit. Anyone with more details on that? If this is their baby, then they desever big kudos for that alone. Font management still is underrepresented in the Linux world.
However the rest just looks like an inconsistent WMaker/*Step theme with an XFCE bar at the left. Or is there more to it than meets the eye? Some underlying feature laden super framework that will make this WM the new fluxbox? The last WM hype I remember was fluxbox - it introduced some cool new features and effectively displayed that there is room for improvement in the WM space (and that WM project websites needn't look like a pile of shit). Thus Fluxbox is my prime choice for small-footprint WMs.
What's with this one that could make it the new fluxbox? Maybe someone with the project could provide some insight on it?
Academia generally often is - in my opinion - rotten to the core. The entire concept of ranking competence and authority by degree is totally twisted, as I'm sure most slashdotters will agree since we're moving around in an industry in which what is taught in the academic field often is outdated and allready sub-par by real-life standards.
If this catches on, we will the academia showing it's true face a little more and that will lead to diversification in education *and* more chances for modern means of education and establishing recognition.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever asked your dad why he thinks some frequencies of EM radiation are harmful while others are safe?
Different ranges have different effects.
Microwaves have a higher frequency. The range generally called "microwave" starts at aprox. 1 GHz. The wavelength is short enough to cause DNA and cell membrane damage, cancer, nerve cell damage and brain damage. Nato Radar Mainainence was told during the cold war that Radar and all the emitions associated with it are by and large harmless. But having an engineers degree and being high enough in the food chain my father knew better. The MWs maintainence was exposed to when working on idle Radar equipment caused health damage.
Cancer ratio with retired Radar staff are measurably higher and it's only a few years ago that class action suits from retired german/european bundeswehr/nato radar staff where being held in the usual loop of endless cycles of studies and counter-studies.
Do and think whatever you want to. My bed is right next to all my personal IT gear and 40+ cords interconnecting them. I, for one, turn of the central power for it when I go to sleep. And I would consider it naive not to be weary of negative health effects a cellphone I'm using might have on my brain. Or the growing brain of my daughter, for that matter. After all, a big problem I see with low-watt, high frequency MWs (close-to-the-brain-when-emiting cellphones in particular) is that as soon as you notice it has an effect on your personal health, it might be to late.
I see a lot of wannabees rant about this study being run by oh-so scientific scientists and the wearyness about MW being pushed by unscientify crackpots. And that the sun and radio and tv is more radiation blah blah ...
:-) . Her life isn't that fun though. When her neighbor above leaves his 20" CRT on she can't sleep. She's got other trouble with that aswell and people often don't believe her and think she's crazy. She's had her sensetivity tested in a university laboratry and senses alternating fields of CRT coils at different angles with different intensity. I personally presume that the origin for this sensitivity is acutally the inner ear which apparently gets affected by magnetic fields (just an amature theory of mine).
I've got news for you: Microwaves damage health. Period.
The debate is only about at which intensity do they start doing that.
I generally turn my Wifi of if I'm not using it and have stopped carrying my cellphone close to my body, since it's on all day. I turn it off at night. I also hold it away from my head when I make a call until the cell handshake is over and the remote connect is there. My old Siemens M35 even had a beep to indicate when the connect is there. Smart people the Siemens engineers, aren't they?
Handshake you ask? That's the high-power meep-meep-meep you hear in nearby active FM radios just before you make or recieve a call. It's what establishes the conection to the cell network for communication.
I know a woman who can sense the cellphone handshake (she has e-magnetic field sensetivity) from meters away and has the habbit of anouncing cellphone calls seconds before a phone rings. Fun to watch with unsuspecting others near by
On it goes:
My father was a high profile radar electronics engineer - with Military (Nato, Cruise Missile), Airbus, Nasa/Grumman Aircraft (Lunar Module, Skylab & early Space Shuttle) and some others. He forbid us to have a Microwave oven (they ALL leak Microwaves) and steared clear and went the other way whenever we got to close to a radar bubble when going hiking.
There are people who've had terminal brain tumors due to intense cellphone usage and I work with doctors (medical IT) who keep all equipment far away and well cased according to TCO.
Don't think it's not unhealthy just because most people don't care or some Telco funded (sic!) study from the UK says the health issues are all bogus and the people claiming health issues are hysteric. It is scientifically proven that even lower wattrange microwaves predictably lower the threshold for internal blood clot (mw induced heat + blood protein == hardboiled) and influence plant groth. Switzerland (iirc, it was some european country) official acknowledges e-magnetic sensetivity and authorities even funds radio shielding paint and other countermeasures for people who are affected. Whatever you make of that, I, for one, would *not* want to live right in smack of the middle of a directional radio beam or the raycone of a cell transciever. Not with proper shielding anyway.
Bottom line:
It's not about being hysteric or overly paranoid. But a little common sense and forsight is needed when handling technology. You don't get universal flawless wireless connectivity and mobile coverage without a tradeoff. Anyone who believes that is a crackpot himself.
It's a scam. Editors, please extend the story accordingly.
We just need a tipping point for robots or something up ahead. Imagine vacuum bots becoming truely feasable. Or eBook readers becoming more feasable than books (not very far away anymore). The need for OCR scanners, Elisa-like telemarketer bots and whatnot. Boom! Moores law will be to slow for that.
Just as moores law just recently made JavaScipt driven browser based productivity software a feasable alternative. What would've you said if someone told you that 5 years ago? You'd've called him a nutcase and so would have I.
Bottom line:
No folks. We're in for a full-blow Neal Stephenson SnowCrash / William Gibson 'Neuromancer' Cyberpunk ride with stuff up ahead and just around the corner we all haven't even dreamt of yet. No need to worry about Moores law losing its lure or not being applicable anymore.
He's disgruntled and I can understand. I also understand him bickering about the large gap between the kernel developers and users. He's got some points that seem valid. However the issues he mentions have little to do with the desktop performance of Linux overall. If Desktop Linux sucks to much due to bad kernel performance and scheduling a lot of people will notice (including Linus himself) and start fixing it. It's open source people. The real stuff is mostly problem, passion and technology driven and hardly marketing driven. If things get out of line to far OSS tends to fix them for itself. No need to be so fatalistic. Desktop Linux is doing perfect considering the recent improvements as seen on Ubuntu 7 and its (for instance) excellent hardware detection. When Firefox performance is our only issue left we'll actually be in a lucky position.
"You kill stuff. The End." :-)
Truely unique. And all the story I need for an FPS.
( http://cubeengine.com/ )
It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This website is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't posten it on slashdot, it wouldn't be pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are now 'istory! Its off the twig! Its kicked the bucket,shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-WEBSITE!!
Flash is a monopoly. More or less. But it's a monopoly that doeshn't suck as much as IE. In fact, I'm sure, as soon as a product shows up that is better than Flash, Flash will use marketshare inmediately. Flash gained it's position because it really *is* the best solution at hand for the stuff it's used for.
But as it's still the single most widespread plattform on the end-user internet available and the only MM plattform that runs on all major deskstop OSes it will remain at the top. And for good reasons too. No matter how much they screw around with the IDE.
Java actually is the only true potential competitor to date. But Sun have never show any effort beyond 2 man projects to really make inroads in the rich client / rich media internet. I really whish they would, now that Java is GPLd, but I don't think it will happen, no matter how much they anounce yet another Java MM initiative. The new JavaFX looks like a revamped JMF and has a little more oomph to it than the last attempt, but let's just wait and see how long that lasts. I'm not holding my breath just yet.
Cake, Symfony -- stay the hell away from these crummy frameworks.
Care to elaborate? I'd like an educated opinion, why you think these aren't worth it. Do you have real experience with them or did you just dick around with each for 20 minutes? Or is it PHP that you don't like? I'm really interested. Propels XML is the only potential downside I can see. And that doesn't seen to much of a problem.
Zope. - What Rails wants to be when it grows up.
Also be sure to check out Plone, Symfony, Django, CakePHP, Prado and Turbogears before you blindly join the overhyped Rails bandwagon.
Could we please drop the phrase 'printer-ink piracy' and the concept of whatever the f*ck it's supposed to mean right now! Thank you.
Parent is a (realitvely well executed) Troll. Please mod accordingly.
The Gnash (Gnu-Flash) team will take another 5 years to get their shit together, despite having declared a Flash 7 compliant Gnash player top priority. Whatever that means. Maybe they'll finish their website this year.
If only our OSS Microsoft Fanboy Midguel would galvanize his team to implement an entire pipeline of Flash tools, generators and Players. If MS doesn't kill this one off and a viable Kit of OSS tools & players for Silverlight comes to life I might even drop Flash RIA for it.
But no way, for as long as I live, will I support an non-open RIA standard that MS has total control over. I'd rather mess with Adobes crappy Flash IDE for another 10 years.
Your wrong. Flash is an open standard and has been for many years. SWF is a documented standard and there even are quite a few OSS implementations of compilers, VMs and such. IIRC amf, the remoting protocoll of Flash is also an open standard.
This is no big problem. The MacBooks have multitouch pads and the iPhone will have multitouch. Modern mice have tiltweels (allthough mine from logitech sux big time). What I see lurking around the corner, also enforced by the ever growing amount of widescreens is that horizontal scrolling probably will become more common. Just as the mouseweel change vertical bannerisation of websites (and factually made the one-month per html doc blog as we know it possible) mutlitouch + widescreen + tiltweel might introduce horizontal scrolling or something like it to websites and documents. Sidescrolling with a MacBook multitouch pad is a breeze and could easyly turn it from a no-no to a standard. Look at the iPhone commercial scrolling around the New York Times and you get an impression that we might move away from the vertical blog to the pane blog.
I'm actually thinking of building a site with 5 columns instead of the usual 3 because of all this. Designers will adapt and within a year adaption will be complete.
While I'm as annoyed about the Rails crowd running around yelling "RAILS! RAILS! RAILS!" just as much as the next guy and allways have a snappy remark ready for anybody who thinks Rails invented intelligent web programming ... I have to say that you have to give the Rails team credit for introducing professional marketing strategies to OSS projects. Their site was the first OSS site that didn't look like shit from the get-go. They practically invented screencasts as a means of advertising their tool and actually did quite a good job with Rails too. It's mostly hype-driven and definitely not the best or most powerfull. There are countless other and often more mature frameworks out there. But they actually did a real neat job with convincing large slabs of the academic and java crowd that the 1995 way of doing things really is ancient and pointless by todays standards.
If I catch you including my GPL code in your closed source app I can't force you to open source the entire app or release/publish/whatever the source of it. I can, however, force you to stop distributing it. And I can sue you to chunky kibbles and into next wednesday for 10 bazillion dollars of damages for copyright infringement and some other illegal activities. And if you use my code and you don't opt to open source your app I probably would sue.
.Net Studio or the likes for something it isn't licenced for? No? Thought so. Ask a question like this in the MS forums and you'll get some snailmail from the MS legal team the next day.
Hope that answers your question.
Don't get all worked up about open source. OSS is mostly a devmodel asked for by developers (because it has significant advantages over closed source). End customers just want the app to work. If you app is good and has a fair price no one will give a damn if it's GPLd or not.
But *you* *absolutely* want to make sure that you're not using some pure GPL source in your libs or something. Otherwise you will hopefully get caught and recieve a legal ass-chewing. Professional developers are fed up with people not giving a shit about copyright just because they are in OSS territory - and for good reasons too. Which, btw., has nothing to do with 'fanboyisim' or something. Do you call Bill Gates a fanboy when he comes to have your behind on a silver platter for you using MS
Bottom line: Be fair and square and don't cheat and OSS will be the best plattform and community to run your stuff on. Cheat and you'll get the bill someday. Good look with your business.
I upgraded my Debian Woody from a few years ago to kubuntu 7 two weeks ago. I've been working on OS X since 3,5 years and now I'm considering to go back to Linux as my main OS. Ubuntu 7 is that good. I've been programming since 21 years and never in my life have had an OS install go that smoothly. Even the Tiger upgrade on my Mac didn't go that easy.
I haven't tried Ubuntu before, but in my book Ubuntu 7 is a milestone in Linux distro evolution.
*Sob* ... *Sniff* ... We have done them so unjust. Duh poor little media giants. So sad. I'm so sorry. Don't you guys feel really bad now too?
... no, wait, that wouldn't work, would it? *Da-Dum-Crash*
Ok, let's cut the crap.
Nobody doubt's that P2P filesharing is a grey-to-black area and could be solved (legally at least) by releasing a sane law that takes the internet and it's specialties into account. It would take me about 20 minutes to write one. So proactively placing a song into an anonymous, globally available P2P network is copyright infringement. Deal. If a teenie is caught doing it he should be punished (as in '40 hrs. social service' NOT as in '20 years on the electric chair'). Deal. NOBODY doubt's that copyright has it's purpose and that it should be defended legally.
But tell me: Why in hell haven't I ever downloaded a song of a P2P network since I've got a Mac and iTunes? Why don't I even give a flying f*ck about Apples Fairplay DRM? Because it's so easy. And because Fairplay has *never* gotten in my way. Hello people? I haven't reached the borders of Fairplay! I couldn't care less. You could LEAVE IT AWAY and I wouldn't even notice. Why isn't there a perfectly legal version of AllOfMP3 gaining revenue from adds? (not that I've ever used it). How about using radio waves to stream music to everybody who buys a reviever and gain revenue from ads and stuff
As someone here on slashdot said: The media industry couldn't innovate their way out of a paper bag. They have to be held at gunpoint to get with the programm. It allways has been that way. Offer proper services and your problem will go away. Meanwhile keep putting grannies into jail for a bazillion years and magnatune.com will grow larger by the week because of it. The best way to lose your customers is to sue them. No, my friends, Steve Jobs got it just right. It will only take another 10 years for the rest to catch the drift.
The Corel Draw Suite is what you're looking for (X3 is the current). It does everything Adobe does (aside from Flash) but costs about a tenth. I've used it professionally for Web and Print and it's the best price/performance ratio available. It has everything from Pixelgrafics(PhotoPaint) over Vectorgrafics, Fontdesign right up to professional layouting. All in one package.
In many ways I actually prefer it to the adobe suite, which is a bizar performance hog where it needn't be and is more difficult to use in multi-document workflows. It also has a few features Adobe doesn't offer (neat vectorizing for instance). I personally use the full official Corel Draw 9 Suite for Linux (not available anymore) but X3 for the Windows Family looks just as neat. And the education version for X3 only costs 99$ in some places. CD is actually one of the few apps I'd switch back to Windows 2000 for.