Now part of ConnectCom, and marketed under the
"AdvanSys by Initio" brand. Not only is the
advansys driver in the kernel written and
actively maintained by the company, but it's
superb quality, as well. By far the best SCSI
controller I've used under Linux, and I can't
recommend them highly enough.
This includes the Libretto L3, a 10" LCD, 600mhz-Crusue version of your own notebook. It's slightly bigger, but I think there are some other subnotes on this site that approach the size of the original Toshibas.
If anyone knows of any, I've love to know what
they are. I've got a couple of Libretto 50CTs,
and while they're great little machines, they're
starting to show their age. I'd love one of the last
of the classic Librettos (the ff1100v, for
example), but they were never available outside
of Japan, and the importer I was planning to get
one from went bust. Sadly the new Librettos are
just too big to be useful. The whole point of
the old models was that they were small enough
to fit in a pocket. The new one doesn't meet
that criterion, and hence for my purposes, it's
essentially useless.
Are there any plans to increase the amount of
documentation on GNOME internals? While GNOME
seems to have plenty of trivial documentation
(such as the
GNOME User's Guide, there's virtually
nothing that explains what's going on underneath.
Are there any plans for a "GNOME Administrator's
Guide"? I'm thinking of something that documents
usage of files in $HOME/.gnome, what session
management is and how it works, what controls
the contents of the GNOME menu, and so on.
For example, when GNOME fails to correctly save
session information, I'd like to be able to
check the documentation to see what should be
being written to.gnome/session. At the moment,
I just have to guess. Some of it is reasonably
obvious from context, but it's the sort of thing
that really needs formally documenting.
Miguel has stated that he believes the GNOME
project should stop putting its effort into
gnumeric, and instead concentrate of openoffice.
Can we take it that this is an official Ximian
position? I believe it's the wrong one, and
while the code will remain available for anyone
to pick and and modify thanks to the GPL, it's
hard to see a long term future for gnumeric if
its lead developers are advocating switching to
something else...
Living in the UK, I've never seen it, and so
can't comment directly. However, I used to work
for News Corporation (who own Fox), and I can
assure you that not a single word of their
combined media output is unbiased...
one of the most clueless half-witted tech articles ever written.
Of course, the most clueless tech article
ever written was David Hewson's "Linux is digital scurf"
piece in the April 20th 1997 edition of The Sunday
Times. Although I wonder how much of it was clueless,
and how much was a deliberate hatchet job.
I was working for News International (publishers
of The Sunday Times) at the time, and I tried to
have a rational argument with Mr. Hewson to get
him to back up his claims, but he just wasn't
interested.
Re:If it wasn't preinstalled years ago it's out.
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
·
· Score: 1
You so don't have a clue how consulting works.
Actually, I do. It's just that there are very few
consultants that are as enlightened as you. Most
have the attitudes I described, and given that so
closely matches those of the managers that are
hiring them, non-IE compatibility remains a low
priority. I'm currently trying to explain that
using a cross-platform design would automatically
give us support for IE4 and NS4, but it's an
uphill battle...
The fact remains however that they want support for IE 4.0, not IE 6.0.
Really? We want it because we're getting support
calls from customers telling us IE4 doesn't work. But IE6 users
are generating nearly 25% of our hits, compared
to 2.3% for IE4.
SVG is the most fantastic vector based graphics format ever created.
SVG is a good vector format for the arena it was
designed to serve (primarily, the web). For
other uses, the text based markup is a tad
bloated, and the fact that it's easily scriptable
isn't a factor. It's not
perfect, but the web needs a good, open vector
graphics format, and SVG is a well designed
option, in most ways. I just wish they'd
get the fonts right. Of course, Flash has
been providing web based vector graphics for
ages. It's just
that it was always aimed at presentation, and
didn't take into account accessibility, searching,
consistency of navigation and all the other
things that we should expect a vector format
to provide. In that respect, SVG is a significant
step forward, and I hope it starts to gain
widespread acceptance soon. But with even Mozilla
not supporting it in many of the standard builds,
it has a way to go before that stage.
Re:If it wasn't preinstalled years ago it's out.
on
JPEG2000 Coming Soon
·
· Score: 2
The rest will worry about losing 5% of potential customers and decide against it.
You so don't have a clue about
how the net works. If companies took the above
attitude, then I'd be a happy man. For a start,
more web pages would work in my browser of choice.
Sadly, the mentality goes something like "87% of
our hits come from people using IE, so that's what
we'll support. The effort needed to make the
site work properly for the rest isn't worth the
development time, which could be better used
elsewhere". Hell, a lot of compaies aren't even
aware that non-IE browsers even exist (no, I'm
not joking). I'm having to fight this attitude
even within my own company at the moment. I've
raised change requests to get the site fixed,
and they've been assigned low priority. Even
after pointing out that they're losing customers,
it's still deemed less important than other
things.
Miguel de Icaza too has said that time is better spent on improving OpenOffice rather than working on say Gnumeric
Which is yet another indication that Miguel has
lost the plot. Gnumeric is a stunning app that
could seriously rival Excel. OpenOffice isn't
close to rivalling either Word or Excel any time
soon. But Miguel has long ago forgotten the Unix
concept of small specialized tools, and is heading
towards MS bloat at an alarming pace. OpenOffice
is significantly better than it used to be (and
light years ahead of StarOffice 5), but it's
starting out on the wrong foot, by trying to be
an "office suite", rather than a set of apps that
work well together with a consistent look and feel. The sad thing is that I remember Miguel from
when he was working on the SPARC and MIPS ports
of Linux. How the mighty have fallen...
It's about 4 times harder to copy and replace, for example to change the header at the top of each of ten open files.
But you wouldn't want to do that. It's 10 times
easier (and faster) to use a suitable search and replace in your editor to do that,
than cutting and pasting using the windowing system. Use the right tool for the job.
That's one of the main problems with Windows.
It's convinced people that there is only one tool
and one way of doing things. Besides, if you
really want this behaviour, then just use your
window manager to map a key sequence of your choosing to copy the primary
selection to the clipboard.
Which makes it quite difficult to "port an application to linux", since some users won't be able to alt+click, some won't have use of ctrl+arrow key shortcuts, etc.
Nope, can't see how that's a problem. Keyboard and
mouse events can be handled within your app
however you want them to be. If you're talking about telling users how to manipulate windows,
then don't -- just tell them how to use the app.
This sort of thing really pisses me off. The
title is "Harry Potter and the philospher's stone".
But studio execs decided that the American public
couldn't cope with the word "philosopher", so they
changed it to "sorcerer". Would it really have hurt
to leave it alone, and run the risk of actually
educating those who didn't know the word (do such
people really exist?). This dumbing down
of everything to the lowest common denominator
is a worrying trend...
I understand that this is directly from the FHS, and not some evil concoction from the mind of the author, but dammit, I think it's wrong.
Actually, no. It is from the diseased mind of the
author of the article. He first cites the FHS, and
explains how good it is to have a standard like
that, and then proceeds to ignore everything it
says./usr/local is explicitly reserved for local
use and therefore no package should *ever* install
itself there (my/usr/local, for example was NFS
mounted, and RPMs that tried to install there
would fail because root didn't have write access
to it). So far, so good, and we're in agreement
with the article. But then he goes on to say that/opt should never be used. What? According to the
FHS,/opt is exactly where IBM should be
installing stuff. Quite how he's decided that
the two directories are obsolete is beyond me.
Both have well defined and useful purposes, both
in common usage, and
in the latest FHS spec (see
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/).
I'm afriad IBM have just lots a lot of
respect from me for this...
You could play nethack for 100 hours+ and still not "master" it.
Indeed. In fact, I first played it when it was still
just called "hack". Don't know what it is about it,
though, but something just failed to grab my
interest. I like virtually every other roguelike
game on the planet, but hack/nethack never did it
for me. Angband (and before it, Moria), on the
other hand, I'd probably rank as the greatest game
ever written. 100+ hours, though? I've been playing it for 13 years
now and it's still as playable as it ever was.
And no, I haven't yet completed it. To me,
that's the mark of a good game. Most modern games
are dumbed down to the point where they're just
way too easy to complete. Even Larn (probably the
easiest of the roguelike games) still took a
fair while to complete.
Re:FAQ from the SerialATA.org website
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 1
I doubt we'll still be using harddrives in 10 years. I suspect SerialATA will kill SCSI and trying to get info off of old hard drives will be like trying to get information off of old 5 1/2" floppies.
Possible. But SerialATA isn't just aimed at hard
drives. It's also designed to encompass tapes, CDs,
DVDs and other high capacity storage devices (both
fixed and removable). I think the chances of me
still wanting to be able to access my CDs and
DVDs in 10
years time is extremely high.
Re:FAQ from the SerialATA.org website
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Serial ATA is an evolutionary replacement for the Parallel ATA physical storage
interface. Serial ATA is scalable and will allow future enhancements to the computing
platform.
Questions not answered by the FAQ:
Why the arbitrary distinction between internally
and externally connected devices. Why target one and
not the other? SCSI works fine for both, why not
design SerialATA to do the same?
Will I still be able to use a serial ATA device 10 years from now?
I can (and do) use 10 year old SCSI devices.
Will the SerialATA consortium guarantee backward
compatibility, or is this yet another lock in to
a perpetual upgrade cycle?
But commercial products, by definition, aren't "born" until they're offered for sale and a meaningful number of people actually buy the product.
I'd question that they need to be bought in quantity
before they're considered "born". But like I said,
MIT first sold X in 1984 at version 6. They later
decided against a commercial policy, and offered
X under the free terms that exist today. Various
vendors then took that and sold it as part of a
commercial OS, but it was MIT that first offered
it as a commercial product. As for X12, I'm not
convinced that current extensions require
sufficient bandwidth to justify a new wire
protocol, but I freely admit that I'm not enough
of an X expert to say that with any authority...
But it's that first commercial release which is always used as the "birthdate,"
By that criteria, then, X was born in late 1984,
when MIT licensed version 6 to outside
organisations. Widespread use didn't start until
version 9 was released in September 1985
(superseded by version 10 shortly afterwards), and
X finally came of age when version 11
(effectively a major redesign from scratch)
was released in 1987.
It's a testament to the strength of the design
that 15 years later, there has been no need to
bump up the version number (which is only done
when the X protocol becomes incompatible with
the previous version). Virtually all of the
people that complain about X are actually complaining about implementation problems.
X itself is an amazing design, and vastly
underappreciated.
Actually, there are 5 approved names, as listed
in X(7):
X
X Window System
X Version 11
X Window System, Version 11
X11
And no, it apparently doesn't predate MS Windows either.
X was born in May 1984, although W (on which it
was based) dates from summer 1983. The article
claims that MS has been using Windows since 1983.
Can that be right? I thought Windows 1.0 came much
later than that. The Mac didn't even appear until
1984 (although the Lisa had been out since 1983,
IIRC), and I find it hard to believe that MS had
even thought of windowing systems before that.
Anyone have any data to back up the claim?
Finally, you need a good bug tracking system. You might try Bugzilla.
You might try it, but you'd probably find it lacking. Bugzilla
is far from a good bug tracking system. Actually,
let me clarify that -- it's a great bug tracking
system, if you're tracking bugs in Mozilla.
It's horrible for anything else. Data is hardcoded
in source files, and if you want to configure it
for non-mozilla bug tracking, then you have to edit
the source directly. Red Hat and GNOME have obviously
put the time in to do so, and have got good results, but for a small business like ours,
we couldn't justify the manpower needed to get the
system up and running, so we were forced to go
with an alternate solution (one I hacked together
in PHP one evening -- it may not be pretty, but
it works, and gives us 90% of what we need).
No, it's too slow to be usable, and it doesn't
render half the pages I try and view correctly.
Hell, even Mozilla starts up faster than Konqueror.
Opera's the fastest of the lot, but I can't stand
the interface, so I stick with Mozilla. Tabbed
browsing and decent CSS support really make it
a stunning browser these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Now part of ConnectCom, and marketed under the "AdvanSys by Initio" brand. Not only is the advansys driver in the kernel written and actively maintained by the company, but it's superb quality, as well. By far the best SCSI controller I've used under Linux, and I can't recommend them highly enough.
If anyone knows of any, I've love to know what they are. I've got a couple of Libretto 50CTs, and while they're great little machines, they're starting to show their age. I'd love one of the last of the classic Librettos (the ff1100v, for example), but they were never available outside of Japan, and the importer I was planning to get one from went bust. Sadly the new Librettos are just too big to be useful. The whole point of the old models was that they were small enough to fit in a pocket. The new one doesn't meet that criterion, and hence for my purposes, it's essentially useless.
Yeah, but sadly, Entourage is about as buggy as Outlook. Its MIME handling, in particular, sucks.
Are there any plans to increase the amount of documentation on GNOME internals? While GNOME seems to have plenty of trivial documentation (such as the GNOME User's Guide, there's virtually nothing that explains what's going on underneath. Are there any plans for a "GNOME Administrator's Guide"? I'm thinking of something that documents usage of files in $HOME/.gnome, what session management is and how it works, what controls the contents of the GNOME menu, and so on. For example, when GNOME fails to correctly save session information, I'd like to be able to check the documentation to see what should be being written to .gnome/session. At the moment,
I just have to guess. Some of it is reasonably
obvious from context, but it's the sort of thing
that really needs formally documenting.
Miguel has stated that he believes the GNOME project should stop putting its effort into gnumeric, and instead concentrate of openoffice. Can we take it that this is an official Ximian position? I believe it's the wrong one, and while the code will remain available for anyone to pick and and modify thanks to the GPL, it's hard to see a long term future for gnumeric if its lead developers are advocating switching to something else...
From personal observation, I'd say that the reverse is true.
Living in the UK, I've never seen it, and so can't comment directly. However, I used to work for News Corporation (who own Fox), and I can assure you that not a single word of their combined media output is unbiased...
Of course, the most clueless tech article ever written was David Hewson's "Linux is digital scurf" piece in the April 20th 1997 edition of The Sunday Times. Although I wonder how much of it was clueless, and how much was a deliberate hatchet job. I was working for News International (publishers of The Sunday Times) at the time, and I tried to have a rational argument with Mr. Hewson to get him to back up his claims, but he just wasn't interested.
Actually, I do. It's just that there are very few consultants that are as enlightened as you. Most have the attitudes I described, and given that so closely matches those of the managers that are hiring them, non-IE compatibility remains a low priority. I'm currently trying to explain that using a cross-platform design would automatically give us support for IE4 and NS4, but it's an uphill battle...
The fact remains however that they want support for IE 4.0, not IE 6.0.
Really? We want it because we're getting support calls from customers telling us IE4 doesn't work. But IE6 users are generating nearly 25% of our hits, compared to 2.3% for IE4.
SVG is a good vector format for the arena it was designed to serve (primarily, the web). For other uses, the text based markup is a tad bloated, and the fact that it's easily scriptable isn't a factor. It's not perfect, but the web needs a good, open vector graphics format, and SVG is a well designed option, in most ways. I just wish they'd get the fonts right. Of course, Flash has been providing web based vector graphics for ages. It's just that it was always aimed at presentation, and didn't take into account accessibility, searching, consistency of navigation and all the other things that we should expect a vector format to provide. In that respect, SVG is a significant step forward, and I hope it starts to gain widespread acceptance soon. But with even Mozilla not supporting it in many of the standard builds, it has a way to go before that stage.
You so don't have a clue about how the net works. If companies took the above attitude, then I'd be a happy man. For a start, more web pages would work in my browser of choice. Sadly, the mentality goes something like "87% of our hits come from people using IE, so that's what we'll support. The effort needed to make the site work properly for the rest isn't worth the development time, which could be better used elsewhere". Hell, a lot of compaies aren't even aware that non-IE browsers even exist (no, I'm not joking). I'm having to fight this attitude even within my own company at the moment. I've raised change requests to get the site fixed, and they've been assigned low priority. Even after pointing out that they're losing customers, it's still deemed less important than other things.
Nope. That was invented by IBM. MS can't even innovate that...
Which is yet another indication that Miguel has lost the plot. Gnumeric is a stunning app that could seriously rival Excel. OpenOffice isn't close to rivalling either Word or Excel any time soon. But Miguel has long ago forgotten the Unix concept of small specialized tools, and is heading towards MS bloat at an alarming pace. OpenOffice is significantly better than it used to be (and light years ahead of StarOffice 5), but it's starting out on the wrong foot, by trying to be an "office suite", rather than a set of apps that work well together with a consistent look and feel. The sad thing is that I remember Miguel from when he was working on the SPARC and MIPS ports of Linux. How the mighty have fallen...
I do this quite frequently in vi...
But you wouldn't want to do that. It's 10 times easier (and faster) to use a suitable search and replace in your editor to do that, than cutting and pasting using the windowing system. Use the right tool for the job. That's one of the main problems with Windows. It's convinced people that there is only one tool and one way of doing things. Besides, if you really want this behaviour, then just use your window manager to map a key sequence of your choosing to copy the primary selection to the clipboard.
Which makes it quite difficult to "port an application to linux", since some users won't be able to alt+click, some won't have use of ctrl+arrow key shortcuts, etc.
Nope, can't see how that's a problem. Keyboard and mouse events can be handled within your app however you want them to be. If you're talking about telling users how to manipulate windows, then don't -- just tell them how to use the app.
This sort of thing really pisses me off. The title is "Harry Potter and the philospher's stone". But studio execs decided that the American public couldn't cope with the word "philosopher", so they changed it to "sorcerer". Would it really have hurt to leave it alone, and run the risk of actually educating those who didn't know the word (do such people really exist?). This dumbing down of everything to the lowest common denominator is a worrying trend...
Actually, no. It is from the diseased mind of the author of the article. He first cites the FHS, and explains how good it is to have a standard like that, and then proceeds to ignore everything it says. /usr/local is explicitly reserved for local
use and therefore no package should *ever* install
itself there (my /usr/local, for example was NFS
mounted, and RPMs that tried to install there
would fail because root didn't have write access
to it). So far, so good, and we're in agreement
with the article. But then he goes on to say that /opt should never be used. What? According to the
FHS, /opt is exactly where IBM should be
installing stuff. Quite how he's decided that
the two directories are obsolete is beyond me.
Both have well defined and useful purposes, both
in common usage, and
in the latest FHS spec (see
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/).
I'm afriad IBM have just lots a lot of
respect from me for this...
Indeed. In fact, I first played it when it was still just called "hack". Don't know what it is about it, though, but something just failed to grab my interest. I like virtually every other roguelike game on the planet, but hack/nethack never did it for me. Angband (and before it, Moria), on the other hand, I'd probably rank as the greatest game ever written. 100+ hours, though? I've been playing it for 13 years now and it's still as playable as it ever was. And no, I haven't yet completed it. To me, that's the mark of a good game. Most modern games are dumbed down to the point where they're just way too easy to complete. Even Larn (probably the easiest of the roguelike games) still took a fair while to complete.
Possible. But SerialATA isn't just aimed at hard drives. It's also designed to encompass tapes, CDs, DVDs and other high capacity storage devices (both fixed and removable). I think the chances of me still wanting to be able to access my CDs and DVDs in 10 years time is extremely high.
Questions not answered by the FAQ:
I'd question that they need to be bought in quantity before they're considered "born". But like I said, MIT first sold X in 1984 at version 6. They later decided against a commercial policy, and offered X under the free terms that exist today. Various vendors then took that and sold it as part of a commercial OS, but it was MIT that first offered it as a commercial product. As for X12, I'm not convinced that current extensions require sufficient bandwidth to justify a new wire protocol, but I freely admit that I'm not enough of an X expert to say that with any authority...
By that criteria, then, X was born in late 1984, when MIT licensed version 6 to outside organisations. Widespread use didn't start until version 9 was released in September 1985 (superseded by version 10 shortly afterwards), and X finally came of age when version 11 (effectively a major redesign from scratch) was released in 1987. It's a testament to the strength of the design that 15 years later, there has been no need to bump up the version number (which is only done when the X protocol becomes incompatible with the previous version). Virtually all of the people that complain about X are actually complaining about implementation problems. X itself is an amazing design, and vastly underappreciated.
Actually, there are 5 approved names, as listed in X(7):
And no, it apparently doesn't predate MS Windows either. X was born in May 1984, although W (on which it was based) dates from summer 1983. The article claims that MS has been using Windows since 1983. Can that be right? I thought Windows 1.0 came much later than that. The Mac didn't even appear until 1984 (although the Lisa had been out since 1983, IIRC), and I find it hard to believe that MS had even thought of windowing systems before that. Anyone have any data to back up the claim?
You might try it, but you'd probably find it lacking. Bugzilla is far from a good bug tracking system. Actually, let me clarify that -- it's a great bug tracking system, if you're tracking bugs in Mozilla. It's horrible for anything else. Data is hardcoded in source files, and if you want to configure it for non-mozilla bug tracking, then you have to edit the source directly. Red Hat and GNOME have obviously put the time in to do so, and have got good results, but for a small business like ours, we couldn't justify the manpower needed to get the system up and running, so we were forced to go with an alternate solution (one I hacked together in PHP one evening -- it may not be pretty, but it works, and gives us 90% of what we need).
No, it's too slow to be usable, and it doesn't render half the pages I try and view correctly. Hell, even Mozilla starts up faster than Konqueror. Opera's the fastest of the lot, but I can't stand the interface, so I stick with Mozilla. Tabbed browsing and decent CSS support really make it a stunning browser these days.