>Whatever combination of distro and package code that enables PC gaming on Linux will BE the standard.
One of the... many... many reasons there are no virtually no games on Linux is because *there are no standards* so software written a few years ago doesn't work a few years later if it's distributed in binary form.
Windows has games because not just because it has a large audience, but also because you can ship a game for windows and the exact same binary will still run years later.
Even on the transition to vista, most software actually worked if you turned compatibility mode on, and UAC off. You can still run *starcraft* on vista. Starcraft from *1995*.
Seriously, reread that post. If you think he's serious about "4 years will be more than enough to have an actually usable professional Video Editor for Linux" is serious, then you must be new to software, and open source software especially.
>And I think that these 4 years will give Krita and GIMP the time they need to become full-featured and more user-friendly, respectively. Yeah, GIMP, which was started in *1995*, just needs another 4 years to be not such a piece of shit.
Is that 3% marketshare just on the desktop would be larger than Linux's total installed base right now.
Try guessing again, but try shifting all of your numbers right a digit.
Linux didn't grow that much over the last 3 years, or very much at all for that matter, and there's no reason to think it's going to grow more in the next 3 years.
Where linux will be in 2014, hell, actually, I'm pretty sure I know what Linux's future will be in 2020 for that matter.
In 2020: 1. Slashdot will announce that 2020 will be the year of the Linux desktop, and they will be wrong for the 24th year in a row.
2. X will still be broken, and the community will still be too disorganized to fix it.
3. Wine will still be broken, and in fact, may have actually gotten worse, if that's possible.
3. Linux applications written in 2008, or even in 2015 will no longer run, because no one writing open source even knows what the fuck ABI stands for.
4. For the same reason, very few commercial developers will write software for Linux.
5. People will still post tired arguments about why all of Linux's flaws are its strengths on slashdot's, but to an ever smaller crowd.
6. Some company that is actually organized and knows what it is doing will write a free operating system, and Linux's user base will dry up overnight. After all, it's not like you can have vendor lock in on a system where even the software written for the system doesn't work on the system.
needs to learn that there is a difference between being a revolutionary and just being really annoying.
One changes the world, the other just makes people hate you. They seem to be in the camp of people that think that as long as people hate you, you must be doing something right.
>It's just that everything about Apple's approach >to marketing their products creeps me out and >causes me to experience an anxious nausea whenever >I come into contact with their products or with >dedicated users of their products.
Yes, your first contact with good looking people that actually bathe and exercise may leave you disoriented.
has supported open source software for quite a while in various forms. Everyone likes to talk about Microsoft as if it were trying to destroy Linux and open source... but I've never heard someone who worked there say that, and I know plenty, and had even interned there in the past.
The idea that Microsoft is the enemy of open source has more to do with the fact that some well known members of the open source community have used scary stories about the evils of Microsoft to rally people around them. Microsoft is the "other," that which is meant to inspire fear so that people will give up their critical reasoning and blindly follow a leader *cough* Richard Stallman *cough*. It's a pretty common trick. You might have seen is practiced in politics before.
Micrisoft does compete with Linux to some degree, as they compete with many products on many fronts, but Microsoft's main competitor is not Linux. The story of the epic battle between Linux and Windows, Open Source and Enslaved Software, Freedom Loving Nerds and Corporate Goons, is just a story. Software is a business, not a political ideology. 95% of the people in the industry read the evangelistic crap on Slashdot and roll their eyes.
>The two biggest computing-providers of today, Amazon as well as Google, are building their concurrent offerings on top of really concurrent programming languages and systems
Google is largely a C++ company, a language that doesn't include explicit support for concurrency (although the next version, C++0x, will).
They mention erlang only being used in a relatively small project that most of google's own software doesn't support yet.
Note, that google gears is used in the excellent google reader software (although not much else).
Re:Summary of Stallman Interview
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 1
>Well, considering that Larry Lessig (EFF/Creative Commons/Change Congress) and the FSF have been advising Sen. Obama,
What do you mean by advising? Are you saying that Lessig is a paid part of his campaign team (I don't think so) or are you saying that he lobbied Obama, and so probably has had a conversation or two with him at some point (sounds much more likely)?
Futhermore, open source issues are only part of what the EFF deals with. Their RIAA court cases are actually much more high profile.
For most of society, software licensing issues are way below the radar. Most people have no idea what the difference between freeware, free software, and open source software is. It's all just software downloaded off the internet to them. There are only a million or so coders in the united states, and they are the only ones who really have any reason to care if the source is available.
Summary of Stallman Interview
on
A Year of GPLv3
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Ernest Park:... Do you have any comments on the GPLv3 site and the progress that we've been maintaining?
Richard Stallman: In general, I'm rather unhappy with Palamida, both for terminology (it generally uses the term "open source", which stands for values I disagree with)...
(refuses to answer question)
Ernest Park: would you mind providing a comment less vague and subjective, focused more on the community acceptance and success of the GPLv3 family of licenses?
Richard Stallman: The free software movement is not merely personal. It is a political movement like the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, etc.
(in other words, no)
What an asshat! Not only does he refuse to respond to the interview, because the interviewer uses the term "open source" (the term used by the majority of people working on GPL and other similar licenses) he also manages to compare himself to Martin Luther King Jr.
It's interesting that he thinks he's leading a "political movement" that no one in the US congress has ever heard of, and that most people who have simply refer to as open source software, and doesn't see as a political movement at all, but a development methodology.
The actual number of projects using GPLv3 seems quite small, about 3000, and of course the most important GPL project, the Linux kernel, will never change for both legal reasons (not all committers are available), and Linus' ideological reasons.
Is the GPLv3 even meaningful if the kernel does not change licenses? My understanding is that it was primarily designed to undermine Tivo and DRM, which cannot be done in a meaningful if the kernel isn't part of the deal.
The article tries to conflate licenses issued with the "or later" clause as GPLv3; however, I think they misunderstand the legal implications of that clause. It means that the *user* may follow the terms and conditions of later licenses; however, the user does not gain any further rights in GPLv3 as I understand it, the author merely loses rights (to use the resulting binaries under locked down hardware). Since the *author* can still use the code under the GPLv2 and so can tivo, there is effectively no change until the license itself is changed, so GPLv2 with "or later" clauses don't matter.
GPLv3 seems dead on arrival. A number of FSF projects will use it, but I don't know of any FSF projects where the anti tivoization stuff would even have any effect, unless I don't understand the new restrictions properly.
"If you're not trying to write a high-performance scalable computing cluster app, or an operating system, or a fancy computer game, then bloat really isn't an issue."
That leaves what exactly? Dinky web apps that are not used by many people, so performance doesn't matter? Internal apps?
People care about performance not because *all* or even *most* applications need high performance but because the most *interesting* ones do. Also, complexity analysis is core to computer science.
Now, you don't need to throw away performance to get advanced language features, or at least, a reasonable compromise can be reached. C++ has a lot of nifty language features, and it getting a lot more in the next revision (like closures, type inference, and concepts). Java also pays attention to performance, although it isn't quite on par with C++. Many advanced language features have no performance costs, or can be implemented in such a way that those costs are minimal. Some language implementers simply do not care about performance and create a suboptimal implementation.
If these traits help you be more successful, than by what criteria are they "bad" or "dark"?
Saying someone has risk taking behavior is just another way of saying they are brave. Cowardice is not a virtue.
Saying someone is narcissistic is just a way of saying they have a healthy sense of self worth.
You can take good traits, and rename them as something bad all day long; however, these are merely the attitudes of someone who is lacking, trying to make up for it by pretending that what they lack is a bad thing.
The most legitimate criteria for judging behavior is how successful it makes someone. A moral system that upholds those who fail as shining ideals is problematic.
Consider, what if we lived in a society where the *dumbest* people were seen as the most virtuous and best. Intelligence of an individual in modern society is clearly necessary for both that individual and society to survive and thrive. Yet, the intelligent could be seen as somehow evil because their existence is problematic to those who are dumb, as they are easily able to acquire more money and resources than some people might feel is their "fair share."
Similarly those with assertive personalities and at least some exploitative behavior are sometimes resented because they are able to obtain more success than seems "fair." However, these traits are clearly necessary in some degree both to the individual and society. If people can't take what they want and takes risks, they can't strive to achieve greatness, and will merely wallow in mediocrity. Nor can someone without an assertive personality defend himself properly.
What would society be like if everyone was polite and courteous all the time and never took more than an equal share? It wouldn't be life at all. Such behavior is contrary to the behavior of all living things, contrary to evolution. Living things that do not compete would merely degrade over time. Without individuals with exploitative behavior there would be no one to remove the weak members of the gene pool. Without predators to weed out the sickly and weak, the prey themselves will suffer in the long run.
The articles assertion that these personality traits are evolutionarily beneficial, is clearly true. What is false and self contradictory is the suggestion that these personality traits are somehow bad or "evil."
>Question: How long did it take Wine to come up with >something mostly compatible with Windows? Fifteen years? There's no way to answer that question, because wine is *still* not mostly compatible with windows. It implements a small subset of win32 that lets them run a few versions of office and some other random applications... Just because they released 1.0 doesn't mean it is "mostly compatible."
>GNU Classpath is mostly compatible now. Much like Wine. Not Even Close. Just, no. Have you ever actually *used* GNU classpath? Specifically, swing and awt are quite lacking, and probably a number of other miscellaneous things.
That's not to say you can't use it if you only happen to need the subset of functionality that classpath supports. I've written small software for embedded devices where I only used pretty basic functionality that happened to be available. Good luck if you need something more than that.
There's been little incentive to build a replacement for sun's implementations of the java libraries since they can just be had from sun or a licensee for most platforms. I don't think anyone seriously used the old open source java stack, including gnu classpath, for anything except maybe embedded devices. it shipped with some linux distros like redhat, but anyone who's not just joking around immediately replaces that with sun java.
Generally, systems with multiple mutually compatible implementations from different vendors are rare. An effort towards standardization by all the major developers is required.
Open standards are a good idea, but difficult to make work for complicated systems.
Sun has made a good effort towards standardization, but has almost unintentionally quashed alternative implementations by simply being too successful as the primary vendor of java.
I see a lot of numbers thrown around for what a reasonable salary is for a software developer. It would be nice to see some real data as to what jobs get what salaries.
Every company has this kind of data internally, but the public is intentionally left in the dark because companies know that they can get away with paying less if employees know less about what they are worth.
What I'd like to see is a detailed breakdown on what people are getting paid based on job title, location, prior job experience, and education, which seem to me to most likely be the most significant factors.
I've been pretty happy with the salaries I've been paid, but just the same, it's stupid to not want to have information that could give you a better hand in negotiations.
I find the newsgroups in alt to be useless duplications of newsgroups in the big 8, except with more spam.
Of course, I personally don't read much outside of comp.* and especially comp.lang.* so I may be a little biased.
I think it's a shame though, how little attention newsgroups get these days, with lots of people starting up mailing lists, which are much more annoying to deal with since everything gets shuffled into your inbox. I've always found moderated usenet groups to be the best way to have technical discussions.
I subscribe to tons of technical mailing lists and newsgroups, and since lots of discussion groups and threads are just so much easier to deal with on usenet clients than email clients (especially gmail), I tend to miss what's going on in mailing lists, whereas it's easy to keep up to date with newsgroups.
It's true that you can use filters to achieve some of the same control on mailing lists, but it's an extra step necessary to subscribe in a group, and mail clients typically just don't handle discussion groups that well. Things like threads that branch off into a number of different subdiscussions tend to be untrackable in most mail clients, especially gmail that offers no tree view.
Also, things like the global hierarchy of newsgroups ensure that there isn't mailing list duplication across topics. For instance, there are numerous java mailing lists out there for various subjects (all of which are fairly low volume), but really only one java newsgroup comp.lang.java.programmer which because it is easy to find and in a standard location, remains high volume and prevents people from accidentally starting up their own java newsgroup because they couldn't find the main one.
>Since the team has moved on to other projects >that are keeping them busy, we don't have time >to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 >or to continue to maintain it.'
That hasn't stopped google from keeping *every other items in googles product lineup*.
Seriously though, google has *way* too many products, many of which are buggy, feature incomplete, and in perpetual beta status. It is about time they trimmed the fat in a big way and focused on improving their successful products, rather than trying to have a dinky and ignored entry in every category.
Personally, I use: 1. Search 2. Ads 3. Gmail (still in beta and now falling behind the competition...) 4. Reader (which, in terms of design, is probably the best google app ever) 5. Google groups (pretty good, but could see a lot of improvement) 6. Youtube (which has also fallen *way* behind the competition in terms of video resolution).
These are the products they need to improve, instead of letting every engineer scratch his personal itch.
Re:Anything else out there?
on
The State of X.Org
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
>E.g. it takes 20-30 minutes to start >doing something with Linux kernel. That may be true in some cases...
>There are piles and piles of documentation and forums where you can find anything.
Ahah... ahaha. No. The Linux kernel is very poorly documented. Your comment should read "there's *out of date* and *useless* documentation, scattered around the internet where you will never find it."
Unless you consider the source itself documentation... which is hard to argue for a source tree that is millions of lines.
the most problematic piece of software on Linux in terms of usability and reliability.
It was a cool idea back in the day, but even the vaunted network transparency is much slower than the competition (it is uncompressed, and doesn't have standard widgets that the client knows how to draw without being told).
My question is, would it be possible to keep the existing X drivers, throw away the rest of the legacy code, and build a modern window server on top of it?
There's no real reason to retain compatibility with X at the API level, as it's easy enough to build X as a rootless window server on top of a foreign window server i.e. the way OSX runs X11 applications.
I'd like a GNOME based window server. Something that exports GTK as the primary interface, and integrates with gconf for easy configuration changes that don't require restarting the window server. As it stands, X is too low level and maintains an artificial separation between toolkit and window manager that other desktops have shown isn't particularly beneficial. Instead, I'd like a high level of integration.
The best C++ editor out there for Linux, which he actually mentions in his article, is *Slickedit* which is commercial and actually quite expensive. I've used it, and it is worth every dollar.
What about Textmate? Visual Studios? Araxis Merge? Fog Bugz?
If anything the market for development tools has massively expanded. It's true, closed source developers have to work hard to stay ahead of the open source curve, but plenty of companies have succeeded at this.
Frankly, the spit and polish benefit of software developed by a company with UI experts, QA people, and all the other roles that are usually absent in open source teams tend to create more usable software, and even developers care about usability in their tools. The idea that most developers don't mind piece of crap UI's is a myth.
That's not to say there aren't good open source tools. Obviously, GCC is good, and there are numerous open source editors. However, having used both sets of tools extensively, I can assure you that the open source dev tools world still lags behind significantly.
>There are certainly other venues for peer review, >so why journals?
What... like slashdot? Do you want a *web 2.0* peer review?
Journals aren't democratic, they are peer review by experts, not Joe Blow.
I agree that electronic distribution of existing journals would be nice... but realistically the high cost of journals and the publishing time can't go down, because those are costs and time associated with the peer review.
Slashdot Mirror
>If the majority of games can work on even one distro out of the box, the other distros will lose users.
It's called *WINDOWS*.
>It is the simple model of evolution at work
Indeed.
>Whatever combination of distro and package code that enables PC gaming on Linux will BE the standard.
One of the... many... many reasons there are no virtually no games on Linux is because *there are no standards* so software written a few years ago doesn't work a few years later if it's distributed in binary form.
Windows has games because not just because it has a large audience, but also because you can ship a game for windows and the exact same binary will still run years later.
Even on the transition to vista, most software actually worked if you turned compatibility mode on, and UAC off. You can still run *starcraft* on vista. Starcraft from *1995*.
Here's a link to a commercial Linux game from the 90s.
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/exile3/linuxexile3.html
Go ahead, download the demo. Have fun getting that to run...
Seriously, reread that post. If you think he's serious about "4 years will be more than enough to have an actually usable professional Video Editor for Linux" is serious, then you must be new to software, and open source software especially.
>And I think that these 4 years will give Krita and GIMP the time they need to become full-featured and more user-friendly, respectively.
Yeah, GIMP, which was started in *1995*, just needs another 4 years to be not such a piece of shit.
Do you guys get it now? It's *funny*, *laugh*.
Is that 3% marketshare just on the desktop would be larger than Linux's total installed base right now.
Try guessing again, but try shifting all of your numbers right a digit.
Linux didn't grow that much over the last 3 years, or very much at all for that matter, and there's no reason to think it's going to grow more in the next 3 years.
Where linux will be in 2014, hell, actually, I'm pretty sure I know what Linux's future will be in 2020 for that matter.
In 2020:
1. Slashdot will announce that 2020 will be the year of the Linux desktop, and they will be wrong for the 24th year in a row.
2. X will still be broken, and the community will still be too disorganized to fix it.
3. Wine will still be broken, and in fact, may have actually gotten worse, if that's possible.
3. Linux applications written in 2008, or even in 2015 will no longer run, because no one writing open source even knows what the fuck ABI stands for.
4. For the same reason, very few commercial developers will write software for Linux.
5. People will still post tired arguments about why all of Linux's flaws are its strengths on slashdot's, but to an ever smaller crowd.
6. Some company that is actually organized and knows what it is doing will write a free operating system, and Linux's user base will dry up overnight. After all, it's not like you can have vendor lock in on a system where even the software written for the system doesn't work on the system.
Go Linux.
are those who work at slashdot.
Where would slashdot be without Microsoft to bash? They might have to do some actual journalism.
needs to learn that there is a difference between being a revolutionary and just being really annoying.
One changes the world, the other just makes people hate you. They seem to be in the camp of people that think that as long as people hate you, you must be doing something right.
>It's just that everything about Apple's approach
>to marketing their products creeps me out and
>causes me to experience an anxious nausea whenever
>I come into contact with their products or with
>dedicated users of their products.
Yes, your first contact with good looking people that actually bathe and exercise may leave you disoriented.
>They might want to take a long and hard look at
>how well the RIAA campaign of "pissing off the
>people you are trying to convert" is working.
How does something the RIAA did justify the FSF acting like a bunch of jerks? This is a story about the FSF and Apple.
there is no tree view widget on the mac (neither carbon nor cocoa)?
I can't help but notice that there is a tree view on Linux.
has supported open source software for quite a while in various forms. Everyone likes to talk about Microsoft as if it were trying to destroy Linux and open source... but I've never heard someone who worked there say that, and I know plenty, and had even interned there in the past.
The idea that Microsoft is the enemy of open source has more to do with the fact that some well known members of the open source community have used scary stories about the evils of Microsoft to rally people around them. Microsoft is the "other," that which is meant to inspire fear so that people will give up their critical reasoning and blindly follow a leader *cough* Richard Stallman *cough*. It's a pretty common trick. You might have seen is practiced in politics before.
Micrisoft does compete with Linux to some degree, as they compete with many products on many fronts, but Microsoft's main competitor is not Linux. The story of the epic battle between Linux and Windows, Open Source and Enslaved Software, Freedom Loving Nerds and Corporate Goons, is just a story. Software is a business, not a political ideology. 95% of the people in the industry read the evangelistic crap on Slashdot and roll their eyes.
>The two biggest computing-providers of today, Amazon as well as Google, are building their concurrent offerings on top of really concurrent programming languages and systems
Google is largely a C++ company, a language that doesn't include explicit support for concurrency (although the next version, C++0x, will).
They mention erlang only being used in a relatively small project that most of google's own software doesn't support yet.
Note, that google gears is used in the excellent google reader software (although not much else).
>Well, considering that Larry Lessig (EFF/Creative Commons/Change Congress) and the FSF have been advising Sen. Obama,
What do you mean by advising? Are you saying that Lessig is a paid part of his campaign team (I don't think so) or are you saying that he lobbied Obama, and so probably has had a conversation or two with him at some point (sounds much more likely)?
Futhermore, open source issues are only part of what the EFF deals with. Their RIAA court cases are actually much more high profile.
For most of society, software licensing issues are way below the radar. Most people have no idea what the difference between freeware, free software, and open source software is. It's all just software downloaded off the internet to them. There are only a million or so coders in the united states, and they are the only ones who really have any reason to care if the source is available.
Ernest Park: ... Do you have any comments on the GPLv3 site and the progress that we've been maintaining?
Richard Stallman: In general, I'm rather unhappy with Palamida, both for terminology (it generally uses the term "open source", which stands for values I disagree with) ...
(refuses to answer question)
Ernest Park: would you mind providing a comment less vague and subjective, focused more on the community acceptance and success of the GPLv3 family of licenses?
Richard Stallman: The free software movement is not merely personal. It is a political movement like the environmental movement, the civil rights movement, etc.
(in other words, no)
What an asshat! Not only does he refuse to respond to the interview, because the interviewer uses the term "open source" (the term used by the majority of people working on GPL and other similar licenses) he also manages to compare himself to Martin Luther King Jr.
It's interesting that he thinks he's leading a "political movement" that no one in the US congress has ever heard of, and that most people who have simply refer to as open source software, and doesn't see as a political movement at all, but a development methodology.
The actual number of projects using GPLv3 seems quite small, about 3000, and of course the most important GPL project, the Linux kernel, will never change for both legal reasons (not all committers are available), and Linus' ideological reasons.
Is the GPLv3 even meaningful if the kernel does not change licenses? My understanding is that it was primarily designed to undermine Tivo and DRM, which cannot be done in a meaningful if the kernel isn't part of the deal.
The article tries to conflate licenses issued with the "or later" clause as GPLv3; however, I think they misunderstand the legal implications of that clause. It means that the *user* may follow the terms and conditions of later licenses; however, the user does not gain any further rights in GPLv3 as I understand it, the author merely loses rights (to use the resulting binaries under locked down hardware). Since the *author* can still use the code under the GPLv2 and so can tivo, there is effectively no change until the license itself is changed, so GPLv2 with "or later" clauses don't matter.
GPLv3 seems dead on arrival. A number of FSF projects will use it, but I don't know of any FSF projects where the anti tivoization stuff would even have any effect, unless I don't understand the new restrictions properly.
"If you're not trying to write a high-performance scalable computing cluster app, or an operating system, or a fancy computer game, then bloat really isn't an issue."
That leaves what exactly? Dinky web apps that are not used by many people, so performance doesn't matter? Internal apps?
People care about performance not because *all* or even *most* applications need high performance but because the most *interesting* ones do. Also, complexity analysis is core to computer science.
Now, you don't need to throw away performance to get advanced language features, or at least, a reasonable compromise can be reached. C++ has a lot of nifty language features, and it getting a lot more in the next revision (like closures, type inference, and concepts). Java also pays attention to performance, although it isn't quite on par with C++. Many advanced language features have no performance costs, or can be implemented in such a way that those costs are minimal. Some language implementers simply do not care about performance and create a suboptimal implementation.
If these traits help you be more successful, than by what criteria are they "bad" or "dark"?
Saying someone has risk taking behavior is just another way of saying they are brave. Cowardice is not a virtue.
Saying someone is narcissistic is just a way of saying they have a healthy sense of self worth.
You can take good traits, and rename them as something bad all day long; however, these are merely the attitudes of someone who is lacking, trying to make up for it by pretending that what they lack is a bad thing.
The most legitimate criteria for judging behavior is how successful it makes someone. A moral system that upholds those who fail as shining ideals is problematic.
Consider, what if we lived in a society where the *dumbest* people were seen as the most virtuous and best. Intelligence of an individual in modern society is clearly necessary for both that individual and society to survive and thrive. Yet, the intelligent could be seen as somehow evil because their existence is problematic to those who are dumb, as they are easily able to acquire more money and resources than some people might feel is their "fair share."
Similarly those with assertive personalities and at least some exploitative behavior are sometimes resented because they are able to obtain more success than seems "fair." However, these traits are clearly necessary in some degree both to the individual and society. If people can't take what they want and takes risks, they can't strive to achieve greatness, and will merely wallow in mediocrity. Nor can someone without an assertive personality defend himself properly.
What would society be like if everyone was polite and courteous all the time and never took more than an equal share? It wouldn't be life at all. Such behavior is contrary to the behavior of all living things, contrary to evolution. Living things that do not compete would merely degrade over time. Without individuals with exploitative behavior there would be no one to remove the weak members of the gene pool. Without predators to weed out the sickly and weak, the prey themselves will suffer in the long run.
The articles assertion that these personality traits are evolutionarily beneficial, is clearly true. What is false and self contradictory is the suggestion that these personality traits are somehow bad or "evil."
>Question: How long did it take Wine to come up with
>something mostly compatible with Windows? Fifteen years?
There's no way to answer that question, because wine is *still* not mostly compatible with windows. It implements a small subset of win32 that lets them run a few versions of office and some other random applications... Just because they released 1.0 doesn't mean it is "mostly compatible."
>GNU Classpath is mostly compatible now. Much like Wine.
Not Even Close. Just, no. Have you ever actually *used* GNU classpath? Specifically, swing and awt are quite lacking, and probably a number of other miscellaneous things.
That's not to say you can't use it if you only happen to need the subset of functionality that classpath supports. I've written small software for embedded devices where I only used pretty basic functionality that happened to be available. Good luck if you need something more than that.
There's been little incentive to build a replacement for sun's implementations of the java libraries since they can just be had from sun or a licensee for most platforms. I don't think anyone seriously used the old open source java stack, including gnu classpath, for anything except maybe embedded devices. it shipped with some linux distros like redhat, but anyone who's not just joking around immediately replaces that with sun java.
Generally, systems with multiple mutually compatible implementations from different vendors are rare. An effort towards standardization by all the major developers is required.
Open standards are a good idea, but difficult to make work for complicated systems.
Sun has made a good effort towards standardization, but has almost unintentionally quashed alternative implementations by simply being too successful as the primary vendor of java.
I see a lot of numbers thrown around for what a reasonable salary is for a software developer. It would be nice to see some real data as to what jobs get what salaries.
Every company has this kind of data internally, but the public is intentionally left in the dark because companies know that they can get away with paying less if employees know less about what they are worth.
What I'd like to see is a detailed breakdown on what people are getting paid based on job title, location, prior job experience, and education, which seem to me to most likely be the most significant factors.
I've been pretty happy with the salaries I've been paid, but just the same, it's stupid to not want to have information that could give you a better hand in negotiations.
I find the newsgroups in alt to be useless duplications of newsgroups in the big 8, except with more spam.
Of course, I personally don't read much outside of comp.* and especially comp.lang.* so I may be a little biased.
I think it's a shame though, how little attention newsgroups get these days, with lots of people starting up mailing lists, which are much more annoying to deal with since everything gets shuffled into your inbox. I've always found moderated usenet groups to be the best way to have technical discussions.
I subscribe to tons of technical mailing lists and newsgroups, and since lots of discussion groups and threads are just so much easier to deal with on usenet clients than email clients (especially gmail), I tend to miss what's going on in mailing lists, whereas it's easy to keep up to date with newsgroups.
It's true that you can use filters to achieve some of the same control on mailing lists, but it's an extra step necessary to subscribe in a group, and mail clients typically just don't handle discussion groups that well. Things like threads that branch off into a number of different subdiscussions tend to be untrackable in most mail clients, especially gmail that offers no tree view.
Also, things like the global hierarchy of newsgroups ensure that there isn't mailing list duplication across topics. For instance, there are numerous java mailing lists out there for various subjects (all of which are fairly low volume), but really only one java newsgroup comp.lang.java.programmer which because it is easy to find and in a standard location, remains high volume and prevents people from accidentally starting up their own java newsgroup because they couldn't find the main one.
>Since the team has moved on to other projects
>that are keeping them busy, we don't have time
>to update the extension to work with Firefox 3
>or to continue to maintain it.'
That hasn't stopped google from keeping *every other items in googles product lineup*.
Seriously though, google has *way* too many products, many of which are buggy, feature incomplete, and in perpetual beta status. It is about time they trimmed the fat in a big way and focused on improving their successful products, rather than trying to have a dinky and ignored entry in every category.
Personally, I use:
1. Search
2. Ads
3. Gmail (still in beta and now falling behind the competition...)
4. Reader (which, in terms of design, is probably the best google app ever)
5. Google groups (pretty good, but could see a lot of improvement)
6. Youtube (which has also fallen *way* behind the competition in terms of video resolution).
These are the products they need to improve, instead of letting every engineer scratch his personal itch.
>E.g. it takes 20-30 minutes to start
>doing something with Linux kernel.
That may be true in some cases...
>There are piles and piles of documentation and forums where you can find anything.
Ahah... ahaha. No. The Linux kernel is very poorly documented. Your comment should read "there's *out of date* and *useless* documentation, scattered around the internet where you will never find it."
Unless you consider the source itself documentation... which is hard to argue for a source tree that is millions of lines.
the most problematic piece of software on Linux in terms of usability and reliability.
It was a cool idea back in the day, but even the vaunted network transparency is much slower than the competition (it is uncompressed, and doesn't have standard widgets that the client knows how to draw without being told).
My question is, would it be possible to keep the existing X drivers, throw away the rest of the legacy code, and build a modern window server on top of it?
There's no real reason to retain compatibility with X at the API level, as it's easy enough to build X as a rootless window server on top of a foreign window server i.e. the way OSX runs X11 applications.
I'd like a GNOME based window server. Something that exports GTK as the primary interface, and integrates with gconf for easy configuration changes that don't require restarting the window server. As it stands, X is too low level and maintains an artificial separation between toolkit and window manager that other desktops have shown isn't particularly beneficial. Instead, I'd like a high level of integration.
The best C++ editor out there for Linux, which he actually mentions in his article, is *Slickedit* which is commercial and actually quite expensive. I've used it, and it is worth every dollar.
What about Textmate? Visual Studios? Araxis Merge? Fog Bugz?
If anything the market for development tools has massively expanded. It's true, closed source developers have to work hard to stay ahead of the open source curve, but plenty of companies have succeeded at this.
Frankly, the spit and polish benefit of software developed by a company with UI experts, QA people, and all the other roles that are usually absent in open source teams tend to create more usable software, and even developers care about usability in their tools. The idea that most developers don't mind piece of crap UI's is a myth.
That's not to say there aren't good open source tools. Obviously, GCC is good, and there are numerous open source editors. However, having used both sets of tools extensively, I can assure you that the open source dev tools world still lags behind significantly.
>There are certainly other venues for peer review,
>so why journals?
What... like slashdot? Do you want a *web 2.0* peer review?
Journals aren't democratic, they are peer review by experts, not Joe Blow.
I agree that electronic distribution of existing journals would be nice... but realistically the high cost of journals and the publishing time can't go down, because those are costs and time associated with the peer review.