Dunno about you, but I've had some pretty bad experiences with such GUI tools attempting to modify my config files. In general, they don't seem very robust.
Like linuxconf. Am I the only one that doesn't trust linuxconf as far as I can throw it?
I was a beta tester for WPOffice/Linux, and I was just plain depressed when the first CD arrived, and I saw what they had done. Talk about a mess. At least StarOffice went to the trouble of porting their monolithic bloatware to a native Unix toolkit. I am holding out hope that the GPL'd and split apart future of StarOffice (OpenOffice, which is buzzword compliant) can improve things. But it'll probably be vaporware for at least a year, sorta like Mozilla.
You're right of course, the apps I listed aren't ready to provide alternatives to the proprietary features of MSOffice. Even if they were intended to, MS would just break compatibility with their next revision anyway.:)
Alright, you've said your peace, and I think you're a fool, so I will now say mine.
Office Suites: If WordPerfect Office 2000 is better in Windows than in Linux, why use Linux?
Because there's more to life than shrink-wrapped hundred dollar office suites. AbiWord, Gnumeric, KOffice, are all coming. Additionally, StarOffice is being drastically reworked into something that doesn't suck.:)
Games: Even QuakeIII get's boring eventually.
Meet the tip of the iceberg. What, did you expect Linux games to multiply overnight? These things take time. Frankly, I'm surprised Linux gaming has advanced as far as it has. My predictions that I made in 1998 didn't expect games to be commonly available for another year, but I can buy everything listed at lokigames.com at my local big computer store (Fry's)
2) Linux has no asthetics. Asthetics goes beyond pretty GUIs into the system itself. There is only so much KDE and GNOME do for you. Once you get into the system itself, its ugly. Initscripts are ugly (except in Slackware). Adding hardware is ugly. The config files are ugly. (My thinking is that the whole mess in/etc could be ondensed into a dozen well planned files.)
Once you get into the system itself, you're doing more than 80% of the Windows userbase will ever do. Let's draw some parallels. If/etc is essentially very similar to the Windows registry and.ini files, how many end users will ever touch their registry, or even realize a file called win.ini exists on their system?
If you believe/etc can be condensed into a dozen files and retain all their information and ease of access (An all-encompasing GUI is not easier to access than opening a text file.) then you either aren't familiar with the Unix way of thinking, or you aren't interested in retaining the configurability and flexibility that Unix offers. Of course, if Linux is to be this grand desktop OS that people want to be, I fear it may lose that anyway. And that would indeed be nothing less than a tragic loss. (Which is why I don't think Linux in its current state should be a desktop OS. At least, not the way you seem to think a desktop OS works)
3)
I'm going to be as brief as possible. First, have you ever even read about how Debian works as opposed to RedHat? There are distros besides RedHat, you know. Second, comparing BeOS to Linux doesn't work. BeOS is the project of a single development group lead by a single program management group. How can you seriously expect Linux to have the same goals? Now, if you want to compare a distro to BeOS, that's fine. Third, personal telnet server? Are you completely disconnected from reality? SSH, my friend. Telnet has no place in the hands of end users that don't know anything about security, nor should they be expected to. Fourth, your suggestion that Linux and Windows should be held to the same standard is a repeat of your faulty reasoning behind comparing it to BeOS. See above.
4) Linux isn't an OS.
Interesting, you've been judging and condemning it like one. And throughout this paragraph you expect it to be one. "Consistancy is a good thing for an OS" is irrelevant if Linux isn't an OS. "managerial problems an OS has" is meaningless, since Linux isn't an OS.
Now, to point out why none of this matters. Linux isn't a product. It's a kernel. Linux distributions are products, and I'm sick of people comparing this mythical thing that is Linux to operating systems. If you want to bitch about RedHat, call it RedHat Linux. Don't give the other distros crap for the product of one company. Further. Don't expect the contents of any distro to be perfect, flowing, and totally consistent until a company shows up that writes every single application in-house. Then, and only then, does it fit into your world of what an OS is. Then, and only then, may you compare it to Windows and BeOS.
I've used RedHat and Debian side by side since RedHat 4.x and Debian 1.1, and I would have to say that I am a bit disappointed with the direction RedHat has been heading.
For me at least, each release of Debian is an exciting leap forward. This is partially due to the time span between releases, and partially due to the strong and very open community effort that Debian is. Each release has done a solid job improving what Debian is, and setting the path for what the next release will do.
In contrast, RedHat releases rarely incite excitement. Partially because the distro as a whole has changed relatively little (This can and will be argued to be a good thing), and partially because it is developed by a company, completely in-house, and as such doesn't 'feel' like the community effort that Debian is (Again, this will be argued to be a strength, primarilly by the suits)
RedHat, since somewhere between 5.1 and 6.0, set a clear goal of being the distro for the average users. It has always been a good desktop distro. Indeed, I wouldn't have called Debian a really good desktop distro option until potato, maybe (-maybe-) slink. But certainly not before then. To this day I use RedHat 6.1 on my primary workstation and my laptop. Debian runs my servers, and one other workstation.
So where are we now? I didn't give the release of RedHat 6.2 any attention. I simply didn't see anything there that warrented upgrading, so I stuck with 6.1, and I will continue to stick with it. When the time comes to upgrade my RedHat desktops, maybe in a year or so, I'll move them to Debian.
I have a feeling the fee-based subscription service will prove extremely unpopular (Gee, that's a really hard call:P ) with the community, but corporate execs will eat it up. Hey, cool! Now we can pay for a TechNet subscription and a RedHat subscription! Right, okay. They feel secure when they pay for stuff. That's fine with me, it's not my money.
I'm sure the distro will continue to be a perfectly good desktop distro, so it's hardly time for everybody to jump ship from RedHat. It's not suddenly becoming unusuable, nor is it suddenly becoming a sugar coated distro like Corel. But to me, it has taken a turn for the worse over the years.
If they include RPM4, that alone is beyond the scope of a simple upgrade release like 6.2 was. As for the kernel and X, well, distros are usually lousy about waiting for those two to do releases. Debian has notoriously bad luck timing its releases with kernel releases, for example:)
Aside from that, their self-balyhooed fee-based software updating service connotates new features (Editorial comments being withheld) that add to the reasoning for this to be more than a simple upgrade release. 7.0 was, for all intents and purposes, the right number for this release.
RedHat's already been providing software update functionality since 6.1 (Maybe 6.0, I don't remember), for free. The app strikingly resembles Windows Update (Which is to say both RH's updater and Windows Update suck, and are pathetic, kludgy interfaces)
While it's great to think about getting a big house to fill with geeks, issues of paying bills have to enter into it. How do you split mortage payments between several unrealted people? Do you rent, and just split the rental bill? Does one of the people assume the position of 'landlord', with all the tax implications and whatever regulations/permits that entails?
One option I've pondered is having a sole person assume the task of paying for the residence, and the other people do their part by covering costs of net access, cable, utilities, yadda. Naturally this would only work if the costs managed to balance themselves out. Even so, there are probably issues with this approach.
For example, is one person 'owning' the house a good idea? How do you handle people breaking off from the group? What if the 'owning' person wants to jump ship, does he kick everyone else out? That could get seriously messy.
So Clinton has taken the same stance on Napster that he seeems to have on guns.
Premise: Guns kill people.
Action: Make guns illegal.
Result: Guns can't kill people anymore!
Premise: Napster copies files illegally.
Action: Make Napster ilegal.
Result: People can't copy files illegally anymore!
Anybody see flaws in this logic? Napster doesn't break the law anymore than a handgun does. Stopping/slowing the legal sale of guns is about as effective as making Napster illegal.
Gun Workaround: Buy your guns on the black market.
Napster Workaround: Go back to 1998, using ftp sites for your mp3's.
It can work, but my running assumption is that it will come back to bite me in the ass. Now, be assured I have every intention of getting a degree. But there's something to be said for working a good coding job for a few years so you can go into (And come out of) college without being broke.
Myself, I'm doing alright. But it can go a lot better. One of my coworkers barely graduated HS, became the "Best CF Coder in the State" (A dubious honor in my book, but it got him a spiffy certificate) and now makes something like $70k, he's maybe 22. Co-owner of his own business, lining up big deals with various industry leaders, yadda, yadda. He'll never need a degree, but I know I will. Now, it can go a lot worse too. A HS buddy of mine has been going the same route as me, but he didn't find that high paying IT job, so paying for school when that day comes won't be as easy.
Sure, you can land a high paying job in a startup, but if that company goes under in five years, my friends, you're screwed. They say it's never too late to go back to school, well, who knows. Maybe in 5-10 years we'll see a rash of early-thirties guys going back and getting degrees..:)
I can see it now. A word macro virus that uploads the contents of everybody's c:\mydocu~1 to a central web server, and archives and indexes it all, so that a casual web surfer can wander through the personal documents of tens of thousands of hapless MSOffice users.
In my office, I have to reboot to Windows for exactly one reason: Outlook/Exchange. I have to check the message from employees too lazy to send e-mail to my actual mailbox, so they send it to Outlook. The rest of my tasks are done in Linux, of course. Why should my productivity suffer just because our IT department can't figure out Unix?
If you're after the 'More' unstable code, just find the right apt sources. There are a lot of third party apt sources that package nightly builds of various projects. ljlane's nightly CVS builds of Enlightenment-related packages, rkrusty's (nightly?) CVS builds of KDE-related packages, etc. It's out there.:)
I work for a.Com in Portland, OR, and we make our home in a 90 year old, 12 story building downtown. I've done the cubical/flourescent light thing before, and this is much nicer. We have space on four floors of the building, and each one is a little different. The top floor is all offices suited for one person, or two people that don't mind sharing the space (Which is what happens for most of them). We stick execs, HR, accounting, and IT up there. It's generally the stuffy floor.:)
Now, the floor that holds the developers and designers is by far the coolest (No bias here, nah:) ) There are five office rooms and an open area. Two of the offices are smaller, but hold two people each comfortably. The other three are much larger, and I've never figured out what their intended purpose was, back in 1911. But, we put two developers and two designers in each. Everybody has a real live desk, and I assure you they're all pretty cluttered, and all have several books on them. Then we have the QA people and project managers in the open space. Now here's the kicker. We're up high enough on the 11th floor (The surrounding buildings aren't much taller, maybe 5-10 stories taller) that we don't need to turn the godawful flourescent lights on. Natural light is more than sufficient, any time of the day, and it's the best environment I've ever worked in. I'm not sure I could go back to working under the blue glow of the tubes again.
Then on the other two floors are marketing (Open space with cubicials) and currently unoccupied space (Smaller offices that we have't expanded into yet). But I won't shed a tear for the marketing people in the cubicals under the blue glow of the bulbs.:)
So in summary. Natural light is a Very Good Thing. Large enough desks so that you can sit at least 20 inches from your monitor is also important. And no architect should ever have the power to enforce how much junk a developer or designer has on his or her desk.:)
Given that Microsoft will eventually start porting apps, the question becomes: does this really benefit the *x community?
Not particularly. The apps will be large and unwieldy, and X doesn't fare well running large and unwieldy applications. See: Netscape 4.x
Sure, Linux users will be able to open up Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Which means the situation will remain the same. See: StarOffice, Gnumeric, KOffice, AbiWord(?)
Sure, Solaris users will be able to use Windows Media Player.
This is probably the only major impact, in terms of what isn't already available for Unix. Lots of websites are using Windows Media exclusively for their streaming, which is unfortunate for anybody that doesn't have Win9x. So getting more exposure for the player would be good. Maybe it'll be better than RealPlayer. Eh.
But The OS is where the money is.
Not even slightly. Have you gone out to a software store recently and compared the price of Win98 to the price of the various distros of MS Office? MSOffice has, for the last several years, been the single most profitable application for MS as far as end-users is concerned.
Why would Microsoft port enough applications for Linux to become viable as a end-user desktop?
This will happen with or without them, and they should be smart enough to realize that by now. Maybe they decided to give in and get their foot in the door before Linux becomes a viable end-user desktop without them.
I reason that they wouldn't. Hell, they might even keep the releases on *x one step (in features and bug fixes) behind the Windows releases.
They'll probably do that anyway. Most commercial vendors that maintain Linux ports do. See: Corel WordPerfect, Borland whatever-that-program-was, etc.
There are a number of issues involved in porting Windows apps to any sort of Unix platform of course, but I'm particularly curious about two, for now.
First, the registry. Obviously there's no registry in the sense that Windows has a registry. There are all sorts of options, gconf springs to mind. Naturally MS won't use any of them, or any other pre-existing utilities or libraries for Unix. MS's porting to Unix will be as self-contained as physically possible, much like StarOffice. So my assumption is there will be a central MS registry that all the ported apps can access. The interesting thing is, this means (Unless they move to a binary or encoded registry) that non-MS apps will also have access to it, which could make for some very interesting hacking.
The other issue that springs to mind is the fact that the vast majority of MS's development history hasn't involved actual multi-user OS's such as Unix. So will they bother taking advantage of that power, possibly implementing user-specific registries, will it only function for the user that installs it (Like StarOffice), or will it be global and blind to which user runs it? I don't really know what to predict here, but my instinct is that they will follow StarOffice's lead, and tailor their apps to function specifically for the user that installs the app. This will fall into line with Corel's blasphemous one-user Linux distro nicely, I imagine, but again, I'm not sure what to think.
This is flamebait. Move along, children, nothing to see here.
I love seeing stuff like Galeon and MozGlade using the Gecko renderer, and apparently Nautalis will be using it too (Whatever happened to GtkHTML, then?) but my concern is that embedding Gecko in an app incurs a massive memory hit. Have you folks actually looked at your memory allocation when galeon is running?
That's fine, I agree IE is a good product. (Although, allowing sloppy html is not a good thing) Hell, until Mozilla and Konqueror clue in on what DHTML is, IE and Netscape 4 are your only options for using sites that involve DHTML and extensive JavaScript.
IE may have a majority in browsers, but that's irrelevant. Windows has a majority in desktop installations, and the two are directly related So?:) Life goes on, without MS, and that's all that I need to know.:)
Is it just me, or did C-Net build this story around a quote and an inference from a single Tivo representative (Rebecca Baer)?
I'm glad Mr. Hill has no problem with people hacking Tivos, but he isn't a Tivo rep.
So.. Is there a better source on Tivo's perspective on the matter? After all, recent C-Net stories haven't exactly been fountains of indisputable and reliable information...:)
I dunno, I'm pretty fond of the IE bug that makes the contents of all IE's cookies public information. Imagine.. If I log into my online bank with IE, and go to a website with a banner ad that has a little handy JavaScript, doubleclick.net knows my account number.
It's this reporter's opinion that Bill Clinton is one of the worst presidents in America's history. Archival records clearly show that Bill Clinton has been shown coughing on video or television more than any other American president.
Slashdot Mirror
You left out a link.
Does anyone else know more about this, or is this just an individual council going overboard?
Dunno about you, but I've had some pretty bad experiences with such GUI tools attempting to modify my config files. In general, they don't seem very robust.
Like linuxconf. Am I the only one that doesn't trust linuxconf as far as I can throw it?
I was a beta tester for WPOffice/Linux, and I was just plain depressed when the first CD arrived, and I saw what they had done. Talk about a mess. At least StarOffice went to the trouble of porting their monolithic bloatware to a native Unix toolkit. I am holding out hope that the GPL'd and split apart future of StarOffice (OpenOffice, which is buzzword compliant) can improve things. But it'll probably be vaporware for at least a year, sorta like Mozilla.
:)
You're right of course, the apps I listed aren't ready to provide alternatives to the proprietary features of MSOffice. Even if they were intended to, MS would just break compatibility with their next revision anyway.
Alright, you've said your peace, and I think you're a fool, so I will now say mine.
:)
/etc could be ondensed into a dozen well planned files.)
/etc is essentially very similar to the Windows registry and .ini files, how many end users will ever touch their registry, or even realize a file called win.ini exists on their system?
/etc can be condensed into a dozen files and retain all their information and ease of access (An all-encompasing GUI is not easier to access than opening a text file.) then you either aren't familiar with the Unix way of thinking, or you aren't interested in retaining the configurability and flexibility that Unix offers. Of course, if Linux is to be this grand desktop OS that people want to be, I fear it may lose that anyway. And that would indeed be nothing less than a tragic loss. (Which is why I don't think Linux in its current state should be a desktop OS. At least, not the way you seem to think a desktop OS works)
Office Suites: If WordPerfect Office 2000 is better in Windows than in Linux, why use Linux?
Because there's more to life than shrink-wrapped hundred dollar office suites. AbiWord, Gnumeric, KOffice, are all coming. Additionally, StarOffice is being drastically reworked into something that doesn't suck.
Games: Even QuakeIII get's boring eventually.
Meet the tip of the iceberg. What, did you expect Linux games to multiply overnight? These things take time. Frankly, I'm surprised Linux gaming has advanced as far as it has. My predictions that I made in 1998 didn't expect games to be commonly available for another year, but I can buy everything listed at lokigames.com at my local big computer store (Fry's)
2) Linux has no asthetics. Asthetics goes beyond pretty GUIs into the system itself. There is only so much KDE and GNOME do for you. Once you get into the system itself, its ugly. Initscripts are ugly (except in Slackware). Adding hardware is ugly. The config files are ugly. (My thinking is that the whole mess in
Once you get into the system itself, you're doing more than 80% of the Windows userbase will ever do. Let's draw some parallels. If
If you believe
3)
I'm going to be as brief as possible. First, have you ever even read about how Debian works as opposed to RedHat? There are distros besides RedHat, you know. Second, comparing BeOS to Linux doesn't work. BeOS is the project of a single development group lead by a single program management group. How can you seriously expect Linux to have the same goals? Now, if you want to compare a distro to BeOS, that's fine. Third, personal telnet server? Are you completely disconnected from reality? SSH, my friend. Telnet has no place in the hands of end users that don't know anything about security, nor should they be expected to. Fourth, your suggestion that Linux and Windows should be held to the same standard is a repeat of your faulty reasoning behind comparing it to BeOS. See above.
4) Linux isn't an OS.
Interesting, you've been judging and condemning it like one. And throughout this paragraph you expect it to be one. "Consistancy is a good thing for an OS" is irrelevant if Linux isn't an OS. "managerial problems an OS has" is meaningless, since Linux isn't an OS.
Now, to point out why none of this matters. Linux isn't a product. It's a kernel. Linux distributions are products, and I'm sick of people comparing this mythical thing that is Linux to operating systems. If you want to bitch about RedHat, call it RedHat Linux. Don't give the other distros crap for the product of one company. Further. Don't expect the contents of any distro to be perfect, flowing, and totally consistent until a company shows up that writes every single application in-house. Then, and only then, does it fit into your world of what an OS is. Then, and only then, may you compare it to Windows and BeOS.
I've used RedHat and Debian side by side since RedHat 4.x and Debian 1.1, and I would have to say that I am a bit disappointed with the direction RedHat has been heading.
:P ) with the community, but corporate execs will eat it up. Hey, cool! Now we can pay for a TechNet subscription and a RedHat subscription! Right, okay. They feel secure when they pay for stuff. That's fine with me, it's not my money.
For me at least, each release of Debian is an exciting leap forward. This is partially due to the time span between releases, and partially due to the strong and very open community effort that Debian is. Each release has done a solid job improving what Debian is, and setting the path for what the next release will do.
In contrast, RedHat releases rarely incite excitement. Partially because the distro as a whole has changed relatively little (This can and will be argued to be a good thing), and partially because it is developed by a company, completely in-house, and as such doesn't 'feel' like the community effort that Debian is (Again, this will be argued to be a strength, primarilly by the suits)
RedHat, since somewhere between 5.1 and 6.0, set a clear goal of being the distro for the average users. It has always been a good desktop distro. Indeed, I wouldn't have called Debian a really good desktop distro option until potato, maybe (-maybe-) slink. But certainly not before then. To this day I use RedHat 6.1 on my primary workstation and my laptop. Debian runs my servers, and one other workstation.
So where are we now? I didn't give the release of RedHat 6.2 any attention. I simply didn't see anything there that warrented upgrading, so I stuck with 6.1, and I will continue to stick with it. When the time comes to upgrade my RedHat desktops, maybe in a year or so, I'll move them to Debian.
I have a feeling the fee-based subscription service will prove extremely unpopular (Gee, that's a really hard call
I'm sure the distro will continue to be a perfectly good desktop distro, so it's hardly time for everybody to jump ship from RedHat. It's not suddenly becoming unusuable, nor is it suddenly becoming a sugar coated distro like Corel. But to me, it has taken a turn for the worse over the years.
If they include RPM4, that alone is beyond the scope of a simple upgrade release like 6.2 was. As for the kernel and X, well, distros are usually lousy about waiting for those two to do releases. Debian has notoriously bad luck timing its releases with kernel releases, for example :)
Aside from that, their self-balyhooed fee-based software updating service connotates new features (Editorial comments being withheld) that add to the reasoning for this to be more than a simple upgrade release. 7.0 was, for all intents and purposes, the right number for this release.
RedHat's already been providing software update functionality since 6.1 (Maybe 6.0, I don't remember), for free. The app strikingly resembles Windows Update (Which is to say both RH's updater and Windows Update suck, and are pathetic, kludgy interfaces)
Up2date, despite being a piece of crap, has provided free update functionality too.
RedHat is taking the opportunity to exploit it's newfound customer base. Even ZDNet realizes this, so it must be pretty obvious.
While it's great to think about getting a big house to fill with geeks, issues of paying bills have to enter into it. How do you split mortage payments between several unrealted people? Do you rent, and just split the rental bill? Does one of the people assume the position of 'landlord', with all the tax implications and whatever regulations/permits that entails?
One option I've pondered is having a sole person assume the task of paying for the residence, and the other people do their part by covering costs of net access, cable, utilities, yadda. Naturally this would only work if the costs managed to balance themselves out. Even so, there are probably issues with this approach.
For example, is one person 'owning' the house a good idea? How do you handle people breaking off from the group? What if the 'owning' person wants to jump ship, does he kick everyone else out? That could get seriously messy.
Even if 10 million legal aged Napster users are pissed off, as discussed not too long ago, most of the people that can vote probably won't.
So Clinton has taken the same stance on Napster that he seeems to have on guns.
Premise: Guns kill people.
Action: Make guns illegal.
Result: Guns can't kill people anymore!
Premise: Napster copies files illegally.
Action: Make Napster ilegal.
Result: People can't copy files illegally anymore!
Anybody see flaws in this logic? Napster doesn't break the law anymore than a handgun does. Stopping/slowing the legal sale of guns is about as effective as making Napster illegal.
Gun Workaround: Buy your guns on the black market.
Napster Workaround: Go back to 1998, using ftp sites for your mp3's.
It can work, but my running assumption is that it will come back to bite me in the ass. Now, be assured I have every intention of getting a degree. But there's something to be said for working a good coding job for a few years so you can go into (And come out of) college without being broke.
:)
Myself, I'm doing alright. But it can go a lot better. One of my coworkers barely graduated HS, became the "Best CF Coder in the State" (A dubious honor in my book, but it got him a spiffy certificate) and now makes something like $70k, he's maybe 22. Co-owner of his own business, lining up big deals with various industry leaders, yadda, yadda. He'll never need a degree, but I know I will. Now, it can go a lot worse too. A HS buddy of mine has been going the same route as me, but he didn't find that high paying IT job, so paying for school when that day comes won't be as easy.
Sure, you can land a high paying job in a startup, but if that company goes under in five years, my friends, you're screwed. They say it's never too late to go back to school, well, who knows. Maybe in 5-10 years we'll see a rash of early-thirties guys going back and getting degrees..
I can see it now. A word macro virus that uploads the contents of everybody's c:\mydocu~1 to a central web server, and archives and indexes it all, so that a casual web surfer can wander through the personal documents of tens of thousands of hapless MSOffice users.
In my office, I have to reboot to Windows for exactly one reason: Outlook/Exchange. I have to check the message from employees too lazy to send e-mail to my actual mailbox, so they send it to Outlook. The rest of my tasks are done in Linux, of course. Why should my productivity suffer just because our IT department can't figure out Unix?
If you're after the 'More' unstable code, just find the right apt sources. There are a lot of third party apt sources that package nightly builds of various projects. ljlane's nightly CVS builds of Enlightenment-related packages, rkrusty's (nightly?) CVS builds of KDE-related packages, etc. It's out there. :)
I work for a .Com in Portland, OR, and we make our home in a 90 year old, 12 story building downtown. I've done the cubical/flourescent light thing before, and this is much nicer. We have space on four floors of the building, and each one is a little different. The top floor is all offices suited for one person, or two people that don't mind sharing the space (Which is what happens for most of them). We stick execs, HR, accounting, and IT up there. It's generally the stuffy floor. :)
:) ) There are five office rooms and an open area. Two of the offices are smaller, but hold two people each comfortably. The other three are much larger, and I've never figured out what their intended purpose was, back in 1911. But, we put two developers and two designers in each. Everybody has a real live desk, and I assure you they're all pretty cluttered, and all have several books on them. Then we have the QA people and project managers in the open space. Now here's the kicker. We're up high enough on the 11th floor (The surrounding buildings aren't much taller, maybe 5-10 stories taller) that we don't need to turn the godawful flourescent lights on. Natural light is more than sufficient, any time of the day, and it's the best environment I've ever worked in. I'm not sure I could go back to working under the blue glow of the tubes again.
:)
:)
Now, the floor that holds the developers and designers is by far the coolest (No bias here, nah
Then on the other two floors are marketing (Open space with cubicials) and currently unoccupied space (Smaller offices that we have't expanded into yet). But I won't shed a tear for the marketing people in the cubicals under the blue glow of the bulbs.
So in summary. Natural light is a Very Good Thing. Large enough desks so that you can sit at least 20 inches from your monitor is also important. And no architect should ever have the power to enforce how much junk a developer or designer has on his or her desk.
Given that Microsoft will eventually start porting apps, the question becomes: does this really benefit the *x community?
Not particularly. The apps will be large and unwieldy, and X doesn't fare well running large and unwieldy applications. See: Netscape 4.x
Sure, Linux users will be able to open up Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
Which means the situation will remain the same. See: StarOffice, Gnumeric, KOffice, AbiWord(?)
Sure, Solaris users will be able to use Windows Media Player.
This is probably the only major impact, in terms of what isn't already available for Unix. Lots of websites are using Windows Media exclusively for their streaming, which is unfortunate for anybody that doesn't have Win9x. So getting more exposure for the player would be good. Maybe it'll be better than RealPlayer. Eh.
But The OS is where the money is.
Not even slightly. Have you gone out to a software store recently and compared the price of Win98 to the price of the various distros of MS Office? MSOffice has, for the last several years, been the single most profitable application for MS as far as end-users is concerned.
Why would Microsoft port enough applications for Linux to become viable as a end-user desktop?
This will happen with or without them, and they should be smart enough to realize that by now. Maybe they decided to give in and get their foot in the door before Linux becomes a viable end-user desktop without them.
I reason that they wouldn't. Hell, they might even keep the releases on *x one step (in features and bug fixes) behind the Windows releases.
They'll probably do that anyway. Most commercial vendors that maintain Linux ports do. See: Corel WordPerfect, Borland whatever-that-program-was, etc.
There are a number of issues involved in porting Windows apps to any sort of Unix platform of course, but I'm particularly curious about two, for now.
First, the registry. Obviously there's no registry in the sense that Windows has a registry. There are all sorts of options, gconf springs to mind. Naturally MS won't use any of them, or any other pre-existing utilities or libraries for Unix. MS's porting to Unix will be as self-contained as physically possible, much like StarOffice. So my assumption is there will be a central MS registry that all the ported apps can access. The interesting thing is, this means (Unless they move to a binary or encoded registry) that non-MS apps will also have access to it, which could make for some very interesting hacking.
The other issue that springs to mind is the fact that the vast majority of MS's development history hasn't involved actual multi-user OS's such as Unix. So will they bother taking advantage of that power, possibly implementing user-specific registries, will it only function for the user that installs it (Like StarOffice), or will it be global and blind to which user runs it? I don't really know what to predict here, but my instinct is that they will follow StarOffice's lead, and tailor their apps to function specifically for the user that installs the app. This will fall into line with Corel's blasphemous one-user Linux distro nicely, I imagine, but again, I'm not sure what to think.
This is flamebait. Move along, children, nothing to see here.
I love seeing stuff like Galeon and MozGlade using the Gecko renderer, and apparently Nautalis will be using it too (Whatever happened to GtkHTML, then?) but my concern is that embedding Gecko in an app incurs a massive memory hit. Have you folks actually looked at your memory allocation when galeon is running?
That's fine, I agree IE is a good product. (Although, allowing sloppy html is not a good thing) Hell, until Mozilla and Konqueror clue in on what DHTML is, IE and Netscape 4 are your only options for using sites that involve DHTML and extensive JavaScript.
:) Life goes on, without MS, and that's all that I need to know. :)
IE may have a majority in browsers, but that's irrelevant. Windows has a majority in desktop installations, and the two are directly related So?
Who, I'm sure, did something similar once upon a time.
Well, with the exception that the Tivo isn't an internet appliance and the WebTV isn't a digital video recorder. :)
Is it just me, or did C-Net build this story around a quote and an inference from a single Tivo representative (Rebecca Baer)?
:)
I'm glad Mr. Hill has no problem with people hacking Tivos, but he isn't a Tivo rep.
So.. Is there a better source on Tivo's perspective on the matter? After all, recent C-Net stories haven't exactly been fountains of indisputable and reliable information...
I dunno, I'm pretty fond of the IE bug that makes the contents of all IE's cookies public information. Imagine.. If I log into my online bank with IE, and go to a website with a banner ad that has a little handy JavaScript, doubleclick.net knows my account number.
It's this reporter's opinion that Bill Clinton is one of the worst presidents in America's history. Archival records clearly show that Bill Clinton has been shown coughing on video or television more than any other American president.