The Free Edition is the Qt for Unix/X11 toolkit, licensed for development of free/Open Source software.
..and...
Qt/Windows is only available as Professional/Enterprise Edition, not as Free Edition.
Sure, you could port it, but what's the point? There's other freely available toolkits that you could port without pissing off the original developers... or you could just use one that's
free and cross-platform already.
Question 2:
Have you ever read GPL?
Question 3:
How many times does GPL mention Linux (or GNU/Linux)?
I won't get into GNOME vs. KDE, since I think they both pretty much suck right now (hey, I think the Windows UI sucks too, and I'm not even a Mac user...).
But there's a few points of yours that I think are debatable...
Mozilla is slow on an Athlon 900 machine with 384MB RAM, and this is at a 0.91 stage
I think either your machine must have some problems hardware-wise or your configuration must suck, because since Mozilla hit 0.9, it's been kicking the crap out of Netscape 4.x on any box I run it on, Windows or Linux... it runs great on my P2 266 with 128meg and Windows, on my K6 300 with 192meg on either Windows or Linux, and on my lowly P233mmx/64meg laptop on Linux.
I happily ditched Communicator on everything the week 0.9 came out and haven't looked back...
Although GTK will be around for a while, QTs cross platform (X,Framebuffer,Win32,Quartz) capabilities make it very popular for anyone writing cross platform apps.
I think you're wrong here... as I understand it, Qt costs money if you want to use it on anything but Linux... people are likely just to hop on the native toolkit and re-do the front end.
Dunno why wxWindows doesn't get more attention... I was going to wrap that around Gecko and call it a cross-platform browser, until Mozilla stopped sucking.
AFAIK there's no GNOME application design guidelines similar to the Windows / MacOS / KDE ones
Yeah, well, with the latest Windows Media Player and Quicktime Players, Apple and MS have seemed to toss those docs in the incinerator anyway. Bitch about them before you bitch about the GNOME folks, most of them are doing this stuff for free... anyway, with a properly designed widget set and a few common dialogs, you shouldn't have to deal with design docs, the toolkit should just grant common UI principles as a side-effect of using it (which, in my experience, GNOME/GTK seems to do a pretty good job of).
Outside the Unix world (which is the world Linux needs to win over for the World Domination)
Er, why? If Linux succeeds at world domination, then there won't be any "outside the Unix world" anymore =).
I stopped using ICQ a long time ago because I got tired of it...
Then, about a year later, I reinstalled it. I looked up my number in their directory and miraculously remembered my password.
As a result, my ICQ number is six digits long. The ones you get these days are eight (maybe nine?) digits long. When I give people my number, they think I've forgotten a digit or two.
However, if I start seeing ads in my client, I'm dumping it. Soon I suspect it will be time to see if IMUnified has actually produced anything, or spend some time with the latest Jabber versions and see if they've improved any from when I last tried them.
Oh well, since AOL bought Mirabilis, I've known the ad contamination was inevitable... Netscape, once one of the most respected and cutting-edge companies out there, now displays a pop-up ad on their homepage, the absolute limit of Bad Web Taste. At least they don't use the bright green (as in #00ff00, ow, ow) ones that seem to show up on AOL.com every time I have the misfortune to see it.
I don't know about anyone else, and maybe it's some sort of crime or something to say this here, but I like printed material and almost always prefer it to online or CD based documentation. Here's my reasoning.
Books are portable. Yeah, so are CDs, but to use them, I also need to haul around some portable computer-like device, which would cost me at the very least around $300 to accquire.
Books are durable. Nobody freaks when you knock a book off the table. The same can't be said for laptops. Spilled beverages might result in stains and wrinkled pages on books, instead of the major damage they often do to electronic devices. With CDs, you have to worry about scratches...
Books are malleable. What I mean by this is that I can fold pages, make notes in margins, highlight sections, etc, all with the simple and cheap tool known as a pen.
Books are easier to read than screens. This one is completely subjective, but I find that it's a lot more tolerable to stare at print for 8 hours straight than it is to stare at a CRT or LCD.
Books are reliable. They don't run out of batteries, they don't run out of bandwidth and they never ever crash
Books are easier to use. You don't have to wait for them to boot, and flipping pages is even simpler than clicking a mouse.
Print makes more efficient use of display space. You can fit a lot more readable text on one 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper than you could ever fit on a standard 17 inch monitor.
The only possible advantages I see in online documentation:
It has the potential to pull fresh, updated content from a remote location.
You can do full-text searches.
You can embed video, audio, 3D worlds, whatever into it.
Those are nice features, but I'd still choose paper any day of the week. I'm particularly fond of the emerging trend of packaging books with a CD-ROM containing the text of the book plus extra goodies - that way, you get the best of both worlds.
In summary, if it comes down to a choice between large packaging and online-only docs, I'll take the large packaging any day. Maybe I'm just selfish, but hey, I like books.
Ahem. While software houses and the like may love the royalty-free open standards, because it's basically a free thing to add to their product, the rest of the people who hate MP3 will hate Ogg Vorbis just as much.
Fraunhoffer will hate the format because it competes with their MP3 stuff. The RIAA will hate it for the same reasons they hate MP3. (Do realize that with the RIAA comes all the major music houses, Sony, BMG, etc.) If it's better sound quality, maybe they'll even hate it more. Hey, if they go on from audio to video, the MPAA will hate them, too! We won't see even a vauge glimmer of support from these guys for a format that doesn't include psychotically draconian measures for copy protection. Of course, even Joe Q. Random is annoyed by stuff like that, so it'll probably take several years before they can find something they can accept and everyone else can accept. (Think they can push something like that through? Look at the late and decidedly unlamented DIVX... That's the kind of scheme they all really want..)
The upside is that even if all these big money people despise the format, they really can't do anything about it (as far as the format itself goes), since it's not encumbered by patent or reverse engineering issues.
Each window is created in a separate name space. Adjustments made to the name space in a window do not affect other windows or programs, making it safe to experiment with local modifications to the name space, for example to substitute files from the dump file system when debugging.
I'm assuming that they really mean "process" when they say "window" here (and I could be wrong), but the things one could conceivably do with a complete and separate namespace per process make chroot look like kid toys.
If everything including the TCP stack is accessed as a file, and every process can have it's own namespace, then you could have a webserver that only sees the part of the filesystem (as in actual documents) that it needs to serve, and only sees the part of the network stack it needs to talk to..
The support for clustering also appears to be quite impressive. Check out the "import" and "cpu" commands..
Looks like something I'm going to have to check out. My main questions mostly have to do with what the security and access control mechanisms look like for exported resources. I don't want Joe X. Random importing my ethernet interface and then hopping out through that to wreak havoc on the world..
Another issue is that all tty/user input tasks seem to be under the control of the windowing system. I kind of like booting in textmode.. Plus, if all that stuff is handled by the windowing system, is the OS even capable of handling, say, a telnet daemon? Hate to sound stupid, but ya gotta wonder..
Oh well. I guess I'll cease my uninformed musing..
But what if I don't want the mess of mounting an image file system off of another filesystem?
Shouldn't it be possible to just create a partition on a disk of the correct size, dump their filesystem image to it (use dd, Luke), mark it as a BeOS partition in fdisk, and give it an entry in LILO?
That's what I'm going to try, anyway. The only reason I can see that it wouldn't work is if the image filesystem lacks a boot loader. Am I oversimplifying or missing something here?
Re:(OT) Rant on rants, maybe flamebait
on
Review: "Scream 3"
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· Score: 1
It's not like there's a quota of only X stories a day and it's pushing something "more important" out.
That's true. It does appear (at least to me, however) that both the quality and the quantity of Slasdot stories is dropping by the day. I remember not too long ago when I could check Slashdot every half hour and almost ALWAYS have something new to read. If I missed visiting the site for a day, I'd miss so many stories that I'd have to go back through 'Older Stuff' to read them all. Now there's stuff from a day or even two days ago still lingering on the bottom of my page, and even worse, it wasn't interesting enough to read the first time I saw it.
One would think that since Rob is getting paid to run the place, it'd be even better than before. Sadly, the exact opposite seems to be true.
Maybe now that it's an obligation rather than a hobby, it's less fun to work on? Or maybe everyone's just busy with post-IPO stuff and the effects of getting bought out for the second time.. If it's the latter, then hopefully things will settle down over there soon and Slasdot can once again live up to its reputation..
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
We know the source isn't on the floppy, so there goes option A. I don't have the floppy but from what people are saying, I'm going to assume there's no written offer as outlined in option B, so that's out the window. Option C might be a possiblity but that's for noncommercial distribution only, so it's no good for LinuxOne. So.. if there's no source and no offer, then they're in violation of the GPL. So yes, it does matter that there's no source on the floppy, and the authors of these programs who are upset about the distribution of their work are perfectly justified in being so. Unless, of course, the disk actually does comply with option B, in which case this post was pointless.
Well, I'm not a Microsoft plant, and I'd like to speak up and say that the NT servers at my company crash just about as frequently as the Linux servers; almost never. We really step on the servers too.. SQL, mail, WWW, tons of other stuff, and NT holds it's own. Granted, it's a lot harder to get NT to that level of stability, but it can be done. Different OSes for different uses; if Linux does something better, we use Linux. If NT does it better, we use NT.
I can honestly say that I use just about every key on my keyboard. I never type Ctrl-C; I was trained to use Ctrl-Break. Print Screen is handy when I'm writing help files for Windows apps my company puts out.. just run the app. Go through the procedure, take a screenshot at every step. Viola, help that even morons can understand. (The only thing I don't like much about that feature is the fact that it doesn't capture the mouse pointer. I have to paste it in =P). As for my function keys, I use WordPerfect 5.1 on my old DOS machine or under DOSEMU whenever I want to get words processed. I've even got the little template that goes around the function keys so that if I forget a combo, I can always look it up.
"Even though Canuck stereotypes are amusing and everything, where did this 'Canadians talk funny' thing come from? I've made many trips to BC and ontario and have yet to hear anyone speak in a weird accent or mispronounce 'about'..."
Actually, I've never heard the sterotypical Canadian accent come out of a Canadian's mouth (such as pronouncing 'about' as 'aboot', 'milk' as 'melk', etc), but I have heard this in people from northern Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. (Minnesota especially. Just say the word yourself and you'll hear it) I'm willing to theorize that the reason this mode of speech was pegged on Canadians is the fact that in general, Americans generalize a lot of things (Myself included, as you have just witnessed), and tend to think of those states as "practically Canada anyway."
"I see WinCE has a retarded inbred bastard child of Windows 9x(who itself isn't that great of a specimine)..I try to ignore it whenever possible;-)
But, it is a valid flavor of Windows...so yeah, there's 4."
WinCE is no more a flavor of windows than Win95 + LiteStep is a flavor of NeXTStep. It looks like Windows. The APIs are vaguely similar. But the code underneath it all isn't..
WinCE appears to be the product of some evil goon at MS who said "Hey! I know! Let's completely re-write 95 to run on PDAs, and let's strip out %95 of the features, and then, if there's anything left that we did correctly the first time, when we do CE we'll do it in a totally backwards and ghoulish way! Then, we'll write the APIs to slightly resemble that of normal Windows but change them in ways too twisted and fiendish to discuss at the moment! We'll also throw in a bunch more of the functions from normal Windows, but we'll just set our random character generator up to put code behind those, so instead of being different and/or weird compared to our regular stuff, they'll just NOT WORK AT ALL! And then, we'll pass it off as an actual version of Windows and say that it's really easy to port to from Windows when it's actually more painful than having your nose bitten off by a VT100 emulation!"
It's kind of scary to say this, but you shouldn't associate WinCE with Win95 because Win95 deserves more respect than that.
Hopefully Embedded NT won't be done by the same evil goon.
Hence the theory. The reason it never crashes under Linux is that Linux users who wound up with a Cyrix chip got sick of their box crashing and worked around the inherent braindeadness in the chip, where as MS said "Screw that. People who can only afford Cyrix chips can't afford our latest vesion of Office. Why should we fix our stuff for them? There's no money in that."
Yet another yummy reason why open source is better =). It produces code that is not only better in terms of distribution and modifiability (I'm not even sure if that's a word, but you should get what I mean), but also code that is better in terms of working on all hardware and not just the Intel chip-of-the-week.
"Uhmm.. if MicroSoft was going to get into the business of a UNIX or UNIX-like clone, they might as well bring Xenix back from the dead. Yuck."
*shrieks in terror, runs around room, falls on floor and flails about*
Xenix! Noooooooooooooooooooo!
Seriously, if Xenix is what Microsoft thinks UNIX should be like, then Microsoft is seriously warped. I've actually gotten my hands dirty with Xenix a few times in my life, and it's something I hope I never never never never never have to do again. It was obviously written by programmers who (a) hate the human race, and (b) were under the influence of extremely strong (we're talking CIA grade here, folks) mind-altering substances. Xenix radiates a "wrongness" than one can feel within a 3 mile radius of the machine that's running it, and by the time one could get close enough to the machine to actually see it, even Tux and the BSD Demon/Daemon/Cute-stylization-of-evil made physical would be renouncing their ties with UNIX and saying that Atari TOS is the only way to go.
They could have made Blair Witch Project a whole lot scarier for me by just saying there was a Xenix box somewhere out in those woods.
"NT doesn't allow any direct access to hardware. Thus, DOS games' sound often wont work, nor will DOS communications programs."
That's a bad thing? Sure, you lose DOS compatability, but hey, big deal. I don't want some rogue app talking directly to my hardware. If you let a program take direct and exclusive control over one of your devices, haven't you completely defeated the point of going to a multitasking OS? Or am I just being ignorant, and old DOS games are actually a crucial component of mission-critical server operating systems?
"Micro~1 sucks.... Have you seen how many Service Packs are around there??????"
Linux sucks.... Have you seen how many kernal versions are around there??????
Jeez, one would think you'd be happy that MS eventually gets around to fixing bugs and adding new needed features in their products. They do it slowly, but at least they do it.. and don't charge for it more than once every two years. Better than I'd expect or hope for from closed-source binary only stuff. Moving from NT 4 to NT 4 SP5 is like moving from Linux 2.0 to 2.2.. waaaay better.
"BTW, do you use the standard MS telnet to go to your linux box? I have some sort of curses problem trying that with MS telnet. Says something like terminal not supported. Same with the enhanced version of hyperterminal used as a telnet client."
MS couldn't spot a goot VT100 emulation if it showed up and bit Bill Gates' nose off. For VT100 under Win*, use Tera Term. It's the best terminal emulator out there for Windows (in my opinion) and even has a SSH plugin (though you'll have to hunt for it, and sometimes the SSH portion gets a little funky). I know Tucows has it somewhere.
Crappy companies that release crappy hardware only write drivers or design hardware for Windows consider the driver bug-free if it doesn't crash within 5 minutes of light use. Then they go out of business or get bought and eviscerated by the company that bought them.
Linux does better with this crappy hardware than Windows does because many drivers for Linux are written by people who really can't afford good hardware, but hate having their box crash. Therefore, they first write drivers that expect the hardware to do exactly what it should, and then write workarounds for particular pieces of crappy hardware so that they'll work correctly, too. Ever compiled a kernel? There's stuff like this all over it, and actually, that's a very good thing. So in many cases, the Linux drivers/code actually work better than the manufacturer supplied drivers/code.
Windows sucks with this crappy hardware because (a) the company doesn't care, or (b) if you don't have money, MS doesn't really care about you, and since they can certainly afford the top of the line, they aren't plagued by crashes from crappy hardware. If MS has to write a driver, they just write code that expects the hardware to do what it should, and freaks out if the hardware doesn't.
"Must be those damned non-Microsoft programs again."
Here's my theory.
If you set up ANY operating system in a shitty and haphazard manner, it will crash. This is true for both Linux and NT.
Linux comes out of the box (or the tar file, or the ftp site) set up in a fairly well-done manner. It's also relatively easy to set up Linux in a well-done manner (it's hard to do it perfectly, but that's hard on any os).
Windows 95/98/NT, however, comes out of the box set up in a shitty and haphazard manner. It's also fairly difficult to set up in a well done manner (and hard to do in a perfect manner, also).
However, if you really know what you're doing with NT (which I do, thank you), you'll actually get a groovy thing called uptime. The NT server here has been up since the day they released Service Pack 5, and before that, was up till the day they released SP 4. (and it handles a lot of shit. Shared drives and printers, WWW Server, SQL server, etc). The Linux box here has been up since I moved the kernel to 2.2.10, and before that, was up since I moved the kernel to 2.2.5 (it also handles a lot of shit.. Mail, DNS, WWW, FTP).
So.. as I see it, NT can be just as stable as Linux. The difference is, Linux usually comes to you already stable. NT you have to put a lot of work into.
"How easy is it to port an NT/Win 2000 application back to the good ol Win 3.11? I dont think that is "just" an recompile;)"
What's the motivation for porting a NT/Win2k application back to Win3.11? What exactly have you been smoking? It's like porting a big Linux application to Minix.
"And there are versions of windows being released RIGHT NOW (WinCE, and soon NT Embedded) that have next to no support for the win32 API."
When will people understand that WinCE (the most appropriately named Microsoft product ever) and NT Embedded are not Windows and Windows NT? They're completely different operating systems, with different code bases, and similar but different APIs, that try to share a common look and feel with MS's other products. It's kind of like complaining that porting your NeXTSTep wharf applications to LiteStep isn't seemless. Similar look, completely different guts.
"Can anyone actually name me an app that requires specific kernel version (or at least a certain version). Oh yeah, closed-source binary only kernel modules from don't count!"
ipchains. It requires at least a 2.1something kernel (though you can patch a 2.x kernel to work with it) and doesn't dig pre 2.0 kernels at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The version of Qt that is licensed under the GPL is only the Unix/X11 portion. If you want the Windows version you have to pay for it.
From Trolltech's website (http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faq/free.html) :
The Free Edition is the Qt for Unix/X11 toolkit, licensed for development of free/Open Source software.
Qt/Windows is only available as Professional/Enterprise Edition, not as Free Edition.
Sure, you could port it, but what's the point? There's other freely available toolkits that you could port without pissing off the original developers... or you could just use one that's free and cross-platform already.
Question 2: Have you ever read GPL?
Question 3: How many times does GPL mention Linux (or GNU/Linux)?
Yes and none =P.
But there's a few points of yours that I think are debatable...
Mozilla is slow on an Athlon 900 machine with 384MB RAM, and this is at a 0.91 stage
I think either your machine must have some problems hardware-wise or your configuration must suck, because since Mozilla hit 0.9, it's been kicking the crap out of Netscape 4.x on any box I run it on, Windows or Linux... it runs great on my P2 266 with 128meg and Windows, on my K6 300 with 192meg on either Windows or Linux, and on my lowly P233mmx/64meg laptop on Linux. I happily ditched Communicator on everything the week 0.9 came out and haven't looked back...
Although GTK will be around for a while, QTs cross platform (X,Framebuffer,Win32,Quartz) capabilities make it very popular for anyone writing cross platform apps.
I think you're wrong here... as I understand it, Qt costs money if you want to use it on anything but Linux... people are likely just to hop on the native toolkit and re-do the front end.
Dunno why wxWindows doesn't get more attention... I was going to wrap that around Gecko and call it a cross-platform browser, until Mozilla stopped sucking.
AFAIK there's no GNOME application design guidelines similar to the Windows / MacOS / KDE ones
Yeah, well, with the latest Windows Media Player and Quicktime Players, Apple and MS have seemed to toss those docs in the incinerator anyway. Bitch about them before you bitch about the GNOME folks, most of them are doing this stuff for free... anyway, with a properly designed widget set and a few common dialogs, you shouldn't have to deal with design docs, the toolkit should just grant common UI principles as a side-effect of using it (which, in my experience, GNOME/GTK seems to do a pretty good job of).
Outside the Unix world (which is the world Linux needs to win over for the World Domination)
Er, why? If Linux succeeds at world domination, then there won't be any "outside the Unix world" anymore =).
Hmm, AOL or MSN, AOL or MSN, AOL or MSN....?
Hemlock or arsenic, hemlock or arsenic, hemlock or arsenic...?
Then, about a year later, I reinstalled it. I looked up my number in their directory and miraculously remembered my password.
As a result, my ICQ number is six digits long. The ones you get these days are eight (maybe nine?) digits long. When I give people my number, they think I've forgotten a digit or two.
However, if I start seeing ads in my client, I'm dumping it. Soon I suspect it will be time to see if IMUnified has actually produced anything, or spend some time with the latest Jabber versions and see if they've improved any from when I last tried them.
Oh well, since AOL bought Mirabilis, I've known the ad contamination was inevitable... Netscape, once one of the most respected and cutting-edge companies out there, now displays a pop-up ad on their homepage, the absolute limit of Bad Web Taste. At least they don't use the bright green (as in #00ff00, ow, ow) ones that seem to show up on AOL.com every time I have the misfortune to see it.
The only possible advantages I see in online documentation:
Those are nice features, but I'd still choose paper any day of the week. I'm particularly fond of the emerging trend of packaging books with a CD-ROM containing the text of the book plus extra goodies - that way, you get the best of both worlds.
In summary, if it comes down to a choice between large packaging and online-only docs, I'll take the large packaging any day. Maybe I'm just selfish, but hey, I like books.
Ahem. While software houses and the like may love the royalty-free open standards, because it's basically a free thing to add to their product, the rest of the people who hate MP3 will hate Ogg Vorbis just as much.
Fraunhoffer will hate the format because it competes with their MP3 stuff. The RIAA will hate it for the same reasons they hate MP3. (Do realize that with the RIAA comes all the major music houses, Sony, BMG, etc.) If it's better sound quality, maybe they'll even hate it more. Hey, if they go on from audio to video, the MPAA will hate them, too! We won't see even a vauge glimmer of support from these guys for a format that doesn't include psychotically draconian measures for copy protection. Of course, even Joe Q. Random is annoyed by stuff like that, so it'll probably take several years before they can find something they can accept and everyone else can accept. (Think they can push something like that through? Look at the late and decidedly unlamented DIVX... That's the kind of scheme they all really want..)
The upside is that even if all these big money people despise the format, they really can't do anything about it (as far as the format itself goes), since it's not encumbered by patent or reverse engineering issues.
Each window is created in a separate name space. Adjustments made to the name space in a window do not affect other windows or programs, making it safe to experiment with local modifications to the name space, for example to substitute files from the dump file system when debugging.
I'm assuming that they really mean "process" when they say "window" here (and I could be wrong), but the things one could conceivably do with a complete and separate namespace per process make chroot look like kid toys.
If everything including the TCP stack is accessed as a file, and every process can have it's own namespace, then you could have a webserver that only sees the part of the filesystem (as in actual documents) that it needs to serve, and only sees the part of the network stack it needs to talk to..
The support for clustering also appears to be quite impressive. Check out the "import" and "cpu" commands..
Looks like something I'm going to have to check out. My main questions mostly have to do with what the security and access control mechanisms look like for exported resources. I don't want Joe X. Random importing my ethernet interface and then hopping out through that to wreak havoc on the world..
Another issue is that all tty/user input tasks seem to be under the control of the windowing system. I kind of like booting in textmode.. Plus, if all that stuff is handled by the windowing system, is the OS even capable of handling, say, a telnet daemon? Hate to sound stupid, but ya gotta wonder..
Oh well. I guess I'll cease my uninformed musing..
Shouldn't it be possible to just create a partition on a disk of the correct size, dump their filesystem image to it (use dd, Luke), mark it as a BeOS partition in fdisk, and give it an entry in LILO?
That's what I'm going to try, anyway. The only reason I can see that it wouldn't work is if the image filesystem lacks a boot loader. Am I oversimplifying or missing something here?
That's true. It does appear (at least to me, however) that both the quality and the quantity of Slasdot stories is dropping by the day. I remember not too long ago when I could check Slashdot every half hour and almost ALWAYS have something new to read. If I missed visiting the site for a day, I'd miss so many stories that I'd have to go back through 'Older Stuff' to read them all. Now there's stuff from a day or even two days ago still lingering on the bottom of my page, and even worse, it wasn't interesting enough to read the first time I saw it.
One would think that since Rob is getting paid to run the place, it'd be even better than before. Sadly, the exact opposite seems to be true.
Maybe now that it's an obligation rather than a hobby, it's less fun to work on? Or maybe everyone's just busy with post-IPO stuff and the effects of getting bought out for the second time.. If it's the latter, then hopefully things will settle down over there soon and Slasdot can once again live up to its reputation..
To quote the GPL:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
We know the source isn't on the floppy, so there goes option A. I don't have the floppy but from what people are saying, I'm going to assume there's no written offer as outlined in option B, so that's out the window. Option C might be a possiblity but that's for noncommercial distribution only, so it's no good for LinuxOne. So.. if there's no source and no offer, then they're in violation of the GPL. So yes, it does matter that there's no source on the floppy, and the authors of these programs who are upset about the distribution of their work are perfectly justified in being so. Unless, of course, the disk actually does comply with option B, in which case this post was pointless.
Well, I'm not a Microsoft plant, and I'd like to speak up and say that the NT servers at my company crash just about as frequently as the Linux servers; almost never. We really step on the servers too.. SQL, mail, WWW, tons of other stuff, and NT holds it's own. Granted, it's a lot harder to get NT to that level of stability, but it can be done. Different OSes for different uses; if Linux does something better, we use Linux. If NT does it better, we use NT.
I can honestly say that I use just about every key on my keyboard. I never type Ctrl-C; I was trained to use Ctrl-Break. Print Screen is handy when I'm writing help files for Windows apps my company puts out.. just run the app. Go through the procedure, take a screenshot at every step. Viola, help that even morons can understand. (The only thing I don't like much about that feature is the fact that it doesn't capture the mouse pointer. I have to paste it in =P). As for my function keys, I use WordPerfect 5.1 on my old DOS machine or under DOSEMU whenever I want to get words processed. I've even got the little template that goes around the function keys so that if I forget a combo, I can always look it up.
"Even though Canuck stereotypes are amusing and everything, where did this 'Canadians talk funny' thing
come from? I've made many trips to BC and ontario and have yet to hear anyone speak in a weird accent
or mispronounce 'about'..."
Actually, I've never heard the sterotypical Canadian accent come out of a Canadian's mouth (such as pronouncing 'about' as 'aboot', 'milk' as 'melk', etc), but I have heard this in people from northern Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. (Minnesota especially. Just say the word yourself and you'll hear it) I'm willing to theorize that the reason this mode of speech was pegged on Canadians is the fact that in general, Americans generalize a lot of things (Myself included, as you have just witnessed), and tend to think of those states as "practically Canada anyway."
"I see WinCE has a retarded inbred bastard child of Windows 9x(who itself isn't that great of a specimine)..I ;-)
try to ignore it whenever possible
But, it is a valid flavor of Windows...so yeah, there's 4."
WinCE is no more a flavor of windows than Win95 + LiteStep is a flavor of NeXTStep. It looks like Windows. The APIs are vaguely similar. But the code underneath it all isn't..
WinCE appears to be the product of some evil goon at MS who said "Hey! I know! Let's completely re-write 95 to run on PDAs, and let's strip out %95 of the features, and then, if there's anything left that we did correctly the first time, when we do CE we'll do it in a totally backwards and ghoulish way! Then, we'll write the APIs to slightly resemble that of normal Windows but change them in ways too twisted and fiendish to discuss at the moment! We'll also throw in a bunch more of the functions from normal Windows, but we'll just set our random character generator up to put code behind those, so instead of being different and/or weird compared to our regular stuff, they'll just NOT WORK AT ALL! And then, we'll pass it off as an actual version of Windows and say that it's really easy to port to from Windows when it's actually more painful than having your nose bitten off by a VT100 emulation!"
It's kind of scary to say this, but you shouldn't associate WinCE with Win95 because Win95 deserves more respect than that.
Hopefully Embedded NT won't be done by the same evil goon.
Hence the theory. The reason it never crashes under Linux is that Linux users who wound up with a Cyrix chip got sick of their box crashing and worked around the inherent braindeadness in the chip, where as MS said "Screw that. People who can only afford Cyrix chips can't afford our latest vesion of Office. Why should we fix our stuff for them? There's no money in that."
Yet another yummy reason why open source is better =). It produces code that is not only better in terms of distribution and modifiability (I'm not even sure if that's a word, but you should get what I mean), but also code that is better in terms of working on all hardware and not just the Intel chip-of-the-week.
.. replace "seemless" with "seamless" and you'll do just fine without flaming me ..
"Uhmm.. if MicroSoft was going to get into the business of a UNIX or UNIX-like clone, they might as well
bring Xenix back from the dead. Yuck."
*shrieks in terror, runs around room, falls on floor and flails about*
Xenix! Noooooooooooooooooooo!
Seriously, if Xenix is what Microsoft thinks UNIX should be like, then Microsoft is seriously warped. I've actually gotten my hands dirty with Xenix a few times in my life, and it's something I hope I never never never never never have to do again. It was obviously written by programmers who (a) hate the human race, and (b) were under the influence of extremely strong (we're talking CIA grade here, folks) mind-altering substances. Xenix radiates a "wrongness" than one can feel within a 3 mile radius of the machine that's running it, and by the time one could get close enough to the machine to actually see it, even Tux and the BSD Demon/Daemon/Cute-stylization-of-evil made physical would be renouncing their ties with UNIX and saying that Atari TOS is the only way to go.
They could have made Blair Witch Project a whole lot scarier for me by just saying there was a Xenix box somewhere out in those woods.
"NT doesn't allow any direct access to hardware. Thus, DOS games' sound often wont work, nor will DOS
communications programs."
That's a bad thing? Sure, you lose DOS compatability, but hey, big deal. I don't want some rogue app talking directly to my hardware. If you let a program take direct and exclusive control over one of your devices, haven't you completely defeated the point of going to a multitasking OS? Or am I just being ignorant, and old DOS games are actually a crucial component of mission-critical server operating systems?
"Micro~1 sucks.... Have you seen how many Service Packs are around there??????"
Linux sucks.... Have you seen how many kernal versions are around there??????
Jeez, one would think you'd be happy that MS eventually gets around to fixing bugs and adding new needed features in their products. They do it slowly, but at least they do it.. and don't charge for it more than once every two years. Better than I'd expect or hope for from closed-source binary only stuff. Moving from NT 4 to NT 4 SP5 is like moving from Linux 2.0 to 2.2.. waaaay better.
"BTW, do you use the standard MS telnet to go to your linux box? I have some sort of curses problem
trying that with MS telnet. Says something like terminal not supported. Same with the enhanced version of
hyperterminal used as a telnet client."
MS couldn't spot a goot VT100 emulation if it showed up and bit Bill Gates' nose off. For VT100 under Win*, use Tera Term. It's the best terminal emulator out there for Windows (in my opinion) and even has a SSH plugin (though you'll have to hunt for it, and sometimes the SSH portion gets a little funky). I know Tucows has it somewhere.
Fact:
Cyrix chips suck.
Theory:
Crappy companies that release crappy hardware only write drivers or design hardware for Windows consider the driver bug-free if it doesn't crash within 5 minutes of light use. Then they go out of business or get bought and eviscerated by the company that bought them.
Linux does better with this crappy hardware than Windows does because many drivers for Linux are written by people who really can't afford good hardware, but hate having their box crash. Therefore, they first write drivers that expect the hardware to do exactly what it should, and then write workarounds for particular pieces of crappy hardware so that they'll work correctly, too. Ever compiled a kernel? There's stuff like this all over it, and actually, that's a very good thing. So in many cases, the Linux drivers/code actually work better than the manufacturer supplied drivers/code.
Windows sucks with this crappy hardware because (a) the company doesn't care, or (b) if you don't have money, MS doesn't really care about you, and since they can certainly afford the top of the line, they aren't plagued by crashes from crappy hardware. If MS has to write a driver, they just write code that expects the hardware to do what it should, and freaks out if the hardware doesn't.
"Must be those damned non-Microsoft programs again."
Here's my theory.
If you set up ANY operating system in a shitty and haphazard manner, it will crash. This is true for both Linux and NT.
Linux comes out of the box (or the tar file, or the ftp site) set up in a fairly well-done manner. It's also relatively easy to set up Linux in a well-done manner (it's hard to do it perfectly, but that's hard on any os).
Windows 95/98/NT, however, comes out of the box set up in a shitty and haphazard manner. It's also fairly difficult to set up in a well done manner (and hard to do in a perfect manner, also).
However, if you really know what you're doing with NT (which I do, thank you), you'll actually get a groovy thing called uptime. The NT server here has been up since the day they released Service Pack 5, and before that, was up till the day they released SP 4. (and it handles a lot of shit. Shared drives and printers, WWW Server, SQL server, etc). The Linux box here has been up since I moved the kernel to 2.2.10, and before that, was up since I moved the kernel to 2.2.5 (it also handles a lot of shit.. Mail, DNS, WWW, FTP).
So.. as I see it, NT can be just as stable as Linux. The difference is, Linux usually comes to you already stable. NT you have to put a lot of work into.
"How easy is it to port an NT/Win 2000 application back to the good ol Win 3.11? I dont think that is "just" ;)"
an recompile
What's the motivation for porting a NT/Win2k application back to Win3.11? What exactly have you been smoking? It's like porting a big Linux application to Minix.
"And there are versions of windows being released RIGHT NOW (WinCE, and soon NT
Embedded) that have next to no support for the win32 API."
When will people understand that WinCE (the most appropriately named Microsoft product ever) and NT Embedded are not Windows and Windows NT? They're completely different operating systems, with different code bases, and similar but different APIs, that try to share a common look and feel with MS's other products. It's kind of like complaining that porting your NeXTSTep wharf applications to LiteStep isn't seemless. Similar look, completely different guts.
"Can anyone actually name me an app that requires specific kernel version (or at least a certain version). Oh
yeah, closed-source binary only kernel modules from don't count!"
ipchains. It requires at least a 2.1something kernel (though you can patch a 2.x kernel to work with it) and doesn't dig pre 2.0 kernels at all.