(Oh yes, I also got in a debate over whether the halfling female or gnomish female (As depicted in the 3rd ed. phb) would be better to have sex with. I, of course, chose the gnome. And stand by (above?) my decision. So take my opinion on women with 1cp worth of salt.)
You should take time to thank all the Gen Con volunteers.
Why?
Because we packed your bags of Star Wars shit for the stupid passport game (350 of them, 6 hours straight. "Knife goes in, Darth Maul figurine comes out...").
Because we put the pretzels out on the table at the Bootlegger's Ball (Do you know how annoying drunk gamers are?!).
Because we made sure your stuff didn't get lost at the art show (at least I didn't).
Made sure your events were open (or tell you "I'm sorry, that was yesterday").
Made sure the 500 players handbooks were in place and on display Thursday.
The huge thing this year was D&D 3rd Edition, as it should be. There were some computer booths, but in both events and the exhibit hall, pen and paper still reigned supreme.
CCGs weren't dead, luckily, but they're not longer "fad" material. The 100 person line waiting for PHBs blocked the Pokemon display for quite a while:)
grdb does everything but qt apps (for the reasons I explained above, and KDE themes prior to KDE 2.0 were gratuitous hacks), and "native X apps", because there is no such thing.
It's a little program called grdb. If you're using the latest Helix GNOME, the GNOME Control Center has it under Legacy Applications, otherwise just get it from Freshmeat. It only works well with certain themes (pixmap ones just translate horribly, since other toolkits can't do it).
KDE supports a limited subset of GTK themes - the plain engine, and the pixmap engine. That's a HUGE subset, but it's still only a subset. They don't support j. random engine theme. All KDE's themes are engine themes. While there's advantages to this, it makes it really hard for GTK (or anything else) to use KDE themes.
grdb sets up theming for Motif applications, among others. All my athena and motif applications, and emacs, use my GTK theme.
GNOME has no equivilant to the taskbar. That's not exactly my cup of tea, but I guess other people like it.
Like I said, I got the VA letter. I didn't get the Red Hat letter. I meet _none_ of those, I write a bunch of small utilities and manage some web sites.
I'm not particularly caring whether I get the letter or not; I'd rather not, because if I don't get it, someone who has done more than me probably does. I'm just surprised everyone assumes that two companies doing it means every company will.
First of all, Andover had a much closer tie to Open Source, and didn't do a letter. If anyone would abuse buzzwordability, they would. Out of all the companies to IPO recently, and with ties to free software, only Red Hat and VA have done it.
Secondly, right now, the market is quite leery of Transmeta. They're heading into the second hardest market to penetrate (Intel chips), right after operating systems. (Don't try to tell me they're not marketing Intel chips. That's all they have for the forseeable future; right now they have nothing). It's not easy to get in, it's harder to do well, especially with a) No other products, and b) Gimmicks (like "code morphing" [Without compiler!] and low wattage), instead of real advantages, like speed or cost.
Call me cynical, but I don't see a future for Transmeta, in the market or out.
First of all, letter getters seem to some degree arbitrary. For example, I got the VA letter, and not the Red Hat letter (I didn't deserve either, especially when I later learned the teTeX guys got _nothing_). Other people got Red Hat but not VA. It seems pretty arbitrary.
However, there is a constant - the companies giving "the letter" have been companies based around free software. Transmeta is not. They are a company based around hiring a big name kernel developer (_the_ big name kernel developer), and making a x86 clone that's rather useless, then releasing no information about it. They are not open in any way. I will be very surprised if they send a letter at all.
OK, I think your first question was answered in the other comments, just use sudo and the like.
The second one is something i had trouble with for a while. My first solution was to include a crapload of redundancy in the UI to load terminals - I have two hotkeys, an icon on the panel, an icon on a menu in the panel, a place to launch it from GKrellM, a minicommander (1 line command line that sits in the GNOME panel), and a cvoicecontrol command to load a terminal:) Since then, I've never been at a real loss.
I'm not sure what "DOS Prompt Here" is, but I know what start is, and I wanted it to. So here it is, rewritten in Perl. The major downside is that you need to manually write a config file, but there's some rather complete examples included.
The licensing was only one major issues. The biggest one was the fact the Mozilla source is 21MB compressed.
As for whether or not this will make Mozilla development go significantly faster/better, I don't think it will. It's going fast and well right now, despite what Suck might say. Netscape has made a lot of bad choices, but Mozilla itself is doing very well.
I don't think it'll be an egg in the face of anyone.
Hooray, someone else gets it. 10 years from now when everyone's using something new, you'll hear whining "Why can't they port it from Linux to FooOS? I don't care if only 8% of the market uses it, I want it!" On the other hand, with a source release, you'll have most of the work of a port done (assuming the product and FooOS follow standards) before FooOS is even released.
Yeah, what he believes in - money. Napster, Inc. is no better than the RIAA. Probably worse, since artists get no kickbacks for Napster (whereas they get almsot no kickbacks for CD sales). No one in the higher-ups at Napster's corporate structure wants free information, they want the information to be _theirs_. If they could make cash, Napster would sell out to the RIAA in a second if they offered enough (in fact, they've said they want to work with the RIAA to ensure copyrights are protected).
Well, let's throw my opinions in the mix. Reading the other comments, I have to agree - Bluefish, while "nice", doesn't give me nearly the kind of things I want from an HTML editor.
For a lot of things, I use SCREEM (http://screem.org). I haven't used HomeSite extensively, but all the features I did use were cloned pretty well in SCREEM. It has site management via the sitecopy tool (HTTP, FTP, and WebDav), syntax highlighting for HTML, PHP, and I think Perl in the latest releases. Previewing can be done in an external browser or via the lightweight GtkHTML widget.
My only real complaint is that it's still a little buggy and sometimes crashes unexpectedly. That, and (like most any HTML editor), it becomes somewhat useless when dealing with lots of SHTML.
> I've seen it with Apple, Darwin and OS X first-hand. Apple releases a BSD-license OS and immediately, Slashdot shouts "They should Open Source the Mac OS so we can take X and Y!"
Well, Apple took BSD and Mach from the free software community. If you want sharing, why shouldn't we get something back?
> Why can't you improve StarOffice itself?
In my mind, taking the StarOffice filters or abilities, putting them in a small, GTK-based word processor like AbiWord, and using that, is improving StarOffice. It takes out the bad parts and uses the good parts. It's also helping AbiWord, it's taking out the bad parts and using the good parts.
> Of course, the OS community thrives on sharing code, and I'm not criticizing that aspect. I am criticizing its tendency to follow, not lead: How many projects announced on Freshmeat or hosted on SourceForge exist as 'Free' alternatives to already existing proprietary software?
Hopefully, a lot. Every piece of proprietary software without a free version is an idea for a new piece of free software. Why _shouldn't_ there be clones of them?
> Does the OS community all act like buzzards, picking the good meat from commercial open source ventures and leaving the bones when they finish?
You suddenly jumped from taking ideas from proprietary software to taking ideas from commercial open source software. Big difference.
Remember, it works both ways. If the free software community so rabidly "takes" from StarOffice, why can't StarOffice "take" from the free software community?
> The majority of you, however, think only in terms of raiding and pillaging, out of some staunch anticommercialism, even when the company supports your cause.
I don't see anyone "raiding and pillaging" Red Hat or VA. I don't see anyone "raiding and pillaging" Apple, either - at least, not anymore than Apple did to BSD.
If Apple truly supported free software, we'd see all the code for MacOS. As it is, they're using free software as a base to build their main product off of, returning parts, but not all. That's more raiding and pillaging than taking parts of StarOffice, keeping them free, but putting them somewhere else.
There is one, called Zen. Unfortunately, it's very immature at this point, and only supports minimal HTML (Around the 3.2 level). But it works, and it does fine at rendering/. (which is what I usse to test all browsers at first).
OK, Corel is using WINE to port their Windows applications to Linux, and Free Software projects could easily do the same. On some level, that's good; easy porting between the two platforms.
But why do it that way? If I was going to do the kind of work that needed lots of translation from one OS to another, I would use Cygwin or some similar thing. It's much more mature, and uses the much more sane UNIX interfaces, then translates them to Win32, not the other way around. Do we really want to do it the Corel way, as some people suggest? WINE might be good and all for binary emulation, but if you care so much about porting, it seems to me that you should write UNIX first, then Windows.
> This in only the SDK, these little demos only show how flexable the interface really is. BTW windows can be in any shape, for example Bill showed us a window in the shape of a clock! So you aren`t limited to today`s boxy windows.
You aren't really in X, either, E has a bunch of odd shapes you can deal with. In Windows, look at the Sonique MP3 player. Square windows are old news.
> The impressive part is that Amiga`s OS is platform independent that means all those little demonstrations can be done on top of windows, Linux, QNX, BeOS or fully native. And that all code identical!!!!!
Ah, like Java! Or maybe more like the recently announced Inferno. Of course, you could also just distribute portable source.
Amiga has nothing new here. Amiga was good because it was the hacker's dream system. Now it's a pathetic little company trying to market a pseudo-OS that has nothing new.
Part of that is caching - X will cache what it can. For example, on my computer with 256MB RAM, it eats between 20 and 30MB storing stuff that I'm not actually seeing, but I'll want to see soon. On my laptop, it doesn't cache much at all, maybe 1 or 2MB. It scales to whatever memory have have available, just like Linux's disk and memory caches.
My point is that in the article, Townshend says it's OK to do whatever with his music, but the people he hires to make his web page won't even let you store local copies.
On a side note, the page enirely Flash, and it's a piece of shit. But whoever he hired to make eelpie.com (his "proefssional" site) did a nice job.
> Teachers certainly didn't like it when we shared our class assignments with other students.
Indeed, and I've taken issue with this with my teachers. However, consider the fact that by sharing music, more people listen (the point of music), but distributing classwork creates less learning (the point of school). The consideration that must be taken is a) What is the purpose of the information, and from that, b) What is the best way to accentuate that purpose?
> Teachers also taught us to share things we owned, but certainly not to take things from other people.
I write software. You "pirate" the software. I have software. You have software. You haven't taken anything _from_ me, rather, I have given something to you, with no loss to myself. If you're implying the thing taken is money, not the information itself, that's on the periphery, and not considered in your analogy.
> And justifying "piracy" by saying it only hurts "big fat businessmen" is just salve for your guilty conscience.
No, it's probably an attempt to appeal to the anti-business, anti-commercial attitude most of Slashdot (and most of the moderators) have. But that doesn't invalidate the rest of his points.
Slashdot Mirror
(Oh yes, I also got in a debate over whether the halfling female or gnomish female (As depicted in the 3rd ed. phb) would be better to have sex with. I, of course, chose the gnome. And stand by (above?) my decision. So take my opinion on women with 1cp worth of salt.)
Why?
-
Because we packed your bags of Star Wars shit for the stupid passport game (350 of them, 6 hours straight. "Knife goes in, Darth Maul figurine comes out...").
-
Because we put the pretzels out on the table at the Bootlegger's Ball (Do you know how annoying drunk gamers are?!).
-
Because we made sure your stuff didn't get lost at the art show (at least I didn't).
-
Made sure your events were open (or tell you "I'm sorry, that was yesterday").
-
Made sure the 500 players handbooks were in place and on display Thursday.
And that's just what my 8 friends and I did.The huge thing this year was D&D 3rd Edition, as it should be. There were some computer booths, but in both events and the exhibit hall, pen and paper still reigned supreme. CCGs weren't dead, luckily, but they're not longer "fad" material. The 100 person line waiting for PHBs blocked the Pokemon display for quite a while :)
I worked there. She wasn't too bad looking.
In the circles I travel in, it's even worse, since PHB also expands to Player's Handbook. And since the D&D3 PHB came out, it's been a PITA.
grdb does everything but qt apps (for the reasons I explained above, and KDE themes prior to KDE 2.0 were gratuitous hacks), and "native X apps", because there is no such thing.
Pay attention to the parent comment. KDE has a taskbar applet that displays the loading progress of applications; that's what I was referring to.
It's a little program called grdb. If you're using the latest Helix GNOME, the GNOME Control Center has it under Legacy Applications, otherwise just get it from Freshmeat. It only works well with certain themes (pixmap ones just translate horribly, since other toolkits can't do it).
KDE supports a limited subset of GTK themes - the plain engine, and the pixmap engine. That's a HUGE subset, but it's still only a subset. They don't support j. random engine theme. All KDE's themes are engine themes. While there's advantages to this, it makes it really hard for GTK (or anything else) to use KDE themes. grdb sets up theming for Motif applications, among others. All my athena and motif applications, and emacs, use my GTK theme. GNOME has no equivilant to the taskbar. That's not exactly my cup of tea, but I guess other people like it.
Like I said, I got the VA letter. I didn't get the Red Hat letter. I meet _none_ of those, I write a bunch of small utilities and manage some web sites.
I'm not particularly caring whether I get the letter or not; I'd rather not, because if I don't get it, someone who has done more than me probably does. I'm just surprised everyone assumes that two companies doing it means every company will.
First of all, Andover had a much closer tie to Open Source, and didn't do a letter. If anyone would abuse buzzwordability, they would. Out of all the companies to IPO recently, and with ties to free software, only Red Hat and VA have done it. Secondly, right now, the market is quite leery of Transmeta. They're heading into the second hardest market to penetrate (Intel chips), right after operating systems. (Don't try to tell me they're not marketing Intel chips. That's all they have for the forseeable future; right now they have nothing). It's not easy to get in, it's harder to do well, especially with a) No other products, and b) Gimmicks (like "code morphing" [Without compiler!] and low wattage), instead of real advantages, like speed or cost. Call me cynical, but I don't see a future for Transmeta, in the market or out.
First of all, letter getters seem to some degree arbitrary. For example, I got the VA letter, and not the Red Hat letter (I didn't deserve either, especially when I later learned the teTeX guys got _nothing_). Other people got Red Hat but not VA. It seems pretty arbitrary.
However, there is a constant - the companies giving "the letter" have been companies based around free software. Transmeta is not. They are a company based around hiring a big name kernel developer (_the_ big name kernel developer), and making a x86 clone that's rather useless, then releasing no information about it. They are not open in any way. I will be very surprised if they send a letter at all.
OK, I think your first question was answered in the other comments, just use sudo and the like.
:) Since then, I've never been at a real loss.
The second one is something i had trouble with for a while. My first solution was to include a crapload of redundancy in the UI to load terminals - I have two hotkeys, an icon on the panel, an icon on a menu in the panel, a place to launch it from GKrellM, a minicommander (1 line command line that sits in the GNOME panel), and a cvoicecontrol command to load a terminal
I'm not sure what "DOS Prompt Here" is, but I know what start is, and I wanted it to. So here it is, rewritten in Perl. The major downside is that you need to manually write a config file, but there's some rather complete examples included.
The licensing was only one major issues. The biggest one was the fact the Mozilla source is 21MB compressed.
As for whether or not this will make Mozilla development go significantly faster/better, I don't think it will. It's going fast and well right now, despite what Suck might say. Netscape has made a lot of bad choices, but Mozilla itself is doing very well.
I don't think it'll be an egg in the face of anyone.
Hooray, someone else gets it. 10 years from now when everyone's using something new, you'll hear whining "Why can't they port it from Linux to FooOS? I don't care if only 8% of the market uses it, I want it!" On the other hand, with a source release, you'll have most of the work of a port done (assuming the product and FooOS follow standards) before FooOS is even released.
Bravo. Best I've seen in a long time.
Yeah, what he believes in - money. Napster, Inc. is no better than the RIAA. Probably worse, since artists get no kickbacks for Napster (whereas they get almsot no kickbacks for CD sales). No one in the higher-ups at Napster's corporate structure wants free information, they want the information to be _theirs_. If they could make cash, Napster would sell out to the RIAA in a second if they offered enough (in fact, they've said they want to work with the RIAA to ensure copyrights are protected).
For a lot of things, I use SCREEM (http://screem.org). I haven't used HomeSite extensively, but all the features I did use were cloned pretty well in SCREEM. It has site management via the sitecopy tool (HTTP, FTP, and WebDav), syntax highlighting for HTML, PHP, and I think Perl in the latest releases. Previewing can be done in an external browser or via the lightweight GtkHTML widget.
My only real complaint is that it's still a little buggy and sometimes crashes unexpectedly. That, and (like most any HTML editor), it becomes somewhat useless when dealing with lots of SHTML.
> I've seen it with Apple, Darwin and OS X first-hand. Apple releases a BSD-license OS and immediately, Slashdot shouts "They should Open Source the Mac OS so we can take X and Y!"
Well, Apple took BSD and Mach from the free software community. If you want sharing, why shouldn't we get something back?
> Why can't you improve StarOffice itself?
In my mind, taking the StarOffice filters or abilities, putting them in a small, GTK-based word processor like AbiWord, and using that, is improving StarOffice. It takes out the bad parts and uses the good parts. It's also helping AbiWord, it's taking out the bad parts and using the good parts.
> Of course, the OS community thrives on sharing code, and I'm not criticizing that aspect. I am criticizing its tendency to follow, not lead: How many projects announced on Freshmeat or hosted on SourceForge exist as 'Free' alternatives to already existing proprietary software?
Hopefully, a lot. Every piece of proprietary software without a free version is an idea for a new piece of free software. Why _shouldn't_ there be clones of them?
> Does the OS community all act like buzzards, picking the good meat from commercial open source ventures and leaving the bones when they finish?
You suddenly jumped from taking ideas from proprietary software to taking ideas from commercial open source software. Big difference.
Remember, it works both ways. If the free software community so rabidly "takes" from StarOffice, why can't StarOffice "take" from the free software community?
> The majority of you, however, think only in terms of raiding and pillaging, out of some staunch anticommercialism, even when the company supports your cause.
I don't see anyone "raiding and pillaging" Red Hat or VA. I don't see anyone "raiding and pillaging" Apple, either - at least, not anymore than Apple did to BSD.
If Apple truly supported free software, we'd see all the code for MacOS. As it is, they're using free software as a base to build their main product off of, returning parts, but not all. That's more raiding and pillaging than taking parts of StarOffice, keeping them free, but putting them somewhere else.
There is one, called Zen. Unfortunately, it's very immature at this point, and only supports minimal HTML (Around the 3.2 level). But it works, and it does fine at rendering /. (which is what I usse to test all browsers at first).
OK, Corel is using WINE to port their Windows applications to Linux, and Free Software projects could easily do the same. On some level, that's good; easy porting between the two platforms.
But why do it that way? If I was going to do the kind of work that needed lots of translation from one OS to another, I would use Cygwin or some similar thing. It's much more mature, and uses the much more sane UNIX interfaces, then translates them to Win32, not the other way around. Do we really want to do it the Corel way, as some people suggest? WINE might be good and all for binary emulation, but if you care so much about porting, it seems to me that you should write UNIX first, then Windows.
> This in only the SDK, these little demos only show how flexable the interface really is. BTW windows can be in any shape, for example Bill showed us a window in the shape of a clock! So you aren`t limited to today`s boxy windows.
You aren't really in X, either, E has a bunch of odd shapes you can deal with. In Windows, look at the Sonique MP3 player. Square windows are old news.
> The impressive part is that Amiga`s OS is platform independent that means all those little demonstrations can be done on top of windows, Linux, QNX, BeOS or fully native. And that all code identical!!!!!
Ah, like Java! Or maybe more like the recently announced Inferno. Of course, you could also just distribute portable source.
Amiga has nothing new here. Amiga was good because it was the hacker's dream system. Now it's a pathetic little company trying to market a pseudo-OS that has nothing new.
Part of that is caching - X will cache what it can. For example, on my computer with 256MB RAM, it eats between 20 and 30MB storing stuff that I'm not actually seeing, but I'll want to see soon. On my laptop, it doesn't cache much at all, maybe 1 or 2MB. It scales to whatever memory have have available, just like Linux's disk and memory caches.
My point is that in the article, Townshend says it's OK to do whatever with his music, but the people he hires to make his web page won't even let you store local copies.
On a side note, the page enirely Flash, and it's a piece of shit. But whoever he hired to make eelpie.com (his "proefssional" site) did a nice job.
> Teachers certainly didn't like it when we shared our class assignments with other students.
Indeed, and I've taken issue with this with my teachers. However, consider the fact that by sharing music, more people listen (the point of music), but distributing classwork creates less learning (the point of school). The consideration that must be taken is a) What is the purpose of the information, and from that, b) What is the best way to accentuate that purpose?
> Teachers also taught us to share things we owned, but certainly not to take things from other people.
I write software. You "pirate" the software. I have software. You have software. You haven't taken anything _from_ me, rather, I have given something to you, with no loss to myself. If you're implying the thing taken is money, not the information itself, that's on the periphery, and not considered in your analogy.
> And justifying "piracy" by saying it only hurts "big fat businessmen" is just salve for your guilty conscience.
No, it's probably an attempt to appeal to the anti-business, anti-commercial attitude most of Slashdot (and most of the moderators) have. But that doesn't invalidate the rest of his points.