In Germany, a firm called CMG seems to have registered a trademark for the word 'Samba'. That trademark refers to banking software, which seems to handle all kinds of banking transactions, using forms, etc. If you feel like wading through a longish list of features in German, see their product site.
CMG, makers of that software, have sent out snail mails to all people subscribed on a German Samba mailing list (i.e. the UNIX SMB software), and have demanded that all users immediately stop using, distributing, or advertising said software. Yeah, that's right: if you're using it, you have to stop doing so right now.
CMG is doing a so-called 'Abmahnung', i.e. a non-judicial process in which a private business/person can demand money from someone disrespecting their trademarks/trade laws. The total value of this process - CMG wouldn't say how many people are affected - is said to be about 100 000 German marks (DM), which is about $60,000. Their lawyers are also demanding 1900 DM from each of the parties involved. That's right - you were using Samba, you got the letter, you have to pay their lawyers about $1200 - until August 8. They'll probably sue the involved parties for that sum of money afterwards.
The c't article adds that Volker Lendecke, one of the German Samba developers - in order to avoid such trademark issues - had already registered a Samba pictorial logo trademark in Germany last year.
Such 'Abmahnung' demands are pretty common in Germany, lawyer firms routinely search advertising directories, etc. for anything that may be considered ambiguous in any way, or infringing on anyone's trademarks, and send out ludicruous demands out, often to people who have no way of acting against them. Whilst it's easy to claim that Germans are idiots and no such thing would ever happen in the US (free speech, etc), please remember that frivolous suits are pretty uncommon in Germany: people claiming money for eating peanuts and suing because they were allergic to nuts and there was no 'WARNING: May contain nuts' label on the box, or people suing because they spilled hot McDonalds coffee on themselves, would be laughed out of court in Germany. This is a fairly normal thing - the same would happen in the US if, say, I created a mySQL spin-off and called my new database 'Oracle' or 'Interbase', I'd be in a lot of trouble for trademark infringement. *shrug* It's that simple. Firms have to defend their trademarks, or they lose them if they become diluted.
To start with, I'm sorry if this ends up being fairly strongly worded - but I thoroughly disagree with the very negative and aggressive means of disparaging and attacking the KDE project as a whole. As Lando Calrissian said - here goes nothing: KDE attempted from the very beginning to become the standard desktop of Linux by using a non-free toolkit. Apologies for the strong language, but that is an outright lie. How, in the name of Linus, can one attempt to become the standard Linux desktop by using a non-free toolkit? By doing so, one is rather going to incur the wrath of many Linux users who will not use it; therefore, using a non-free toolkit is the exact opposite of an attempt to become the standard Linux desktop. Two additional points - GNOME/GTK attempted that, said in a very outright and honest manner that they were doing so, and have more or less succeeded in becoming the 'standard' Linux desktop environment. Fanatic advocacy due to their free nature has added fuel to that. The fact that RedHat etc. are supporting them to such a degree is only more proof. The people behind KDE are very, very smart - they wouldn't have used a non-free toolkit if they'd seen a superior alternative; in their opinion (NOT MINE - NOT A REASON FOR FLAMEWARS) the QT libraries made coding easier than any other toolkit. So they used it. Not because they wanted to use it to gain 'Linux Desktop Supremacy'. Oh - and it's not the standard desktop of LINUX, for Theo's sake. It's intended for UNIX- and UNIX-like systems. I like my FreeBSD KDE desktop quite a lot.
KDE unfortunately has a long tradition in violating the free software spirit [...] This starts out as an outright flame. Using the shield of the 'free software spirit' isn't the best way to begin an argument. Quite a few people (BP, JWZ, ESR, RMS, etc) would wildly differ on what that spirit is, and how it's best interpreted. Quoting it as your main point of thrust to put the KDE project in a bad light will just evoke hatred and disgust from many.
When the free QT replacement Harmony was still in development (it achieved a rather advanced state!) the KDE project refused to agree to switch to this toolkit in the future[...] Now, several points: 1. Of course they refused to switch to it at some later undisclosed point in time. They were using QT, which at that time was a highly advanced, well-supported, well-documented toolkit. Harmony aimed to be an open copy of QT, but never reached a state where any type of reasonable compatibility was achieved. If I was asking anyone here to throw away their Windows boxen, because WINE/X/Berlin/Linux may one day support all the games through a compat layer (WINE), and is now already supporting quite a few (Fallout2, etc), what would you say? Even worse, for those developers, the switch to Harmony would have meant embracing a half- finished toolkit. If you've ever done any major dev work, you will know that buggy, unfinished, or plain incompatible development tools are the most grievous bane you could ever encounter. Users of MS Visual Studio would probably agree wholeheartedly.
2. and they even announced that they will incorporate any useful new features of future versions of QT, which made it impossible for Harmony to ever reach compatability That is the whole mantra of a lot of OSS development - if you see a good feature somewhere, you adopt it. Of course, if MS ever did so, their code would be closed, and nobody'd know how and what they did, and what they stole - but the KDE code has always been OPEN! If they took a feature from the Harmony kit and implemented it into software that is based on a Harmony-compatible toolkit, why would that invalidate Harmony compatibility? And even if the KDE people had broken the code for some reason, it'd be easy to see what they were doing, the CVS tree and the open code were and are there for everybody to see. (er, ok, maybe the KDE CVS tree merits another thread;)
3. Finally, KDE is blatantly ignoring their constant violation of the GPL of other peoples software that is used in KDE (e.g. in kfloppy) For the main KDE developers, it is fairly difficult to always be able to track down code, and its origins. Whilst it may be true that licenses were violated in KDE-incorporated code, how can Linus, for instance, be absolutely sure that the patch he was just mailed to improve TCP/IP stack stability doesn't in some way violate other licenses, e.g. the BSD license? I would give the KDE developers at least the benefit of doubt, collect and document said GPL violations, and report them on the public KDE dev mailing lists. If those attempts fail, document what's happening, put up a website, and mail an article to Slashdot - once it's read by a million geeks, how damn fast do you think the KDE guys will come around to fixing it? Corel etc. have been quite good at fixing those problems so far, no?
4. I will say goodbye to all KDE stuff and will now only use Gnome which is rapidly evolving into a comparably mature desktop environment [...] You see, this is how major flamewars start. You criticise the ATTITUDE and debatably also the LEGALITY of KDE maintainers and licenses, and follow it up by, quite frankly, only thinly veiling 'GNOME ROCKS! KDE SUX!'.
Even koffice will soon be made superflous by The Gimp, Sketch, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Abiword, gcalender Miguel freely admitted that for Gnumeric, for instance, he just [paraphrased quotation] 'copied every feature from MS Excel', an attitude that you aggressively criticised earlier on? And you follow it up, again, by basically saying 'Gnome software rocks!'.. *sigh*
I hope that many will follow this migration from KDE to Gnome. Holy Cron, could this be any more incendiary? I'm pretty sure that this is the first truly fully-fledged flame posted as an article on Slashdot. I know lots of people are just waiitng to flame the hell out of Dr. Bechly, but just leave it. Point out the flaws in his argument, but don't insult KDE, Gnome, GTK, E, or whatever else. Keep cool. I'm not sure I've managed to do so myself, and there's certainly a lot of finger-pointing in the lines above, but let's try to keep calm.
Obviously, we are starting with the two undisputed classics of the genre. The one that brought Japanese animation to the west in a big way more than a decade ago was
AKIRA, which still remains pretty much undisputed in terms of dramaturgical development and on-screen dynamics. Although an Anime masterpiece, it falls short of the outstanding graphic novels, which are quite possibly the best example of how to develop a story-arc in a graphic novel. (probably sharing that honour with Watchmen)
Then, seven or so years after Akira, Ghost in the Shell updated Anime in a way that struck a chord with western audiences in the outgoing 90s. At heart little more than a glorified action story, it didn't quite match Akira's superior characters and settings, but still belongs to the best action films of the 90s, bar none. And the animation is pretty much as good as it gets.
Anime feature films culminated with last year's Mononoke Hime, aka 'Princess Mononoke' in the US. Being an intricate, multi-layered story about man's interaction with nature and the world around us, it succeeded in ways that the gun-slinging examples mentioned above could not. There are no glorified mecha-style shootouts in Mononoke Hime, and it's not as action-packed as most others, but its story development succeeds where others would normally fail. Interestingly, unlike many other Anime products, Mononoke Hime also forsakes the display of super-villains bent on taking over the world in favour of more ambiguous shades of grey. Nobody should win, and everybody is right, in a certain way. Simplistic 'real' views of the world, maybe, but very successful. Er, and the US version is dubbed by Claire Danes, amongst others, if that's your thing.
With feature films out of the way, the best example of serialized Anime is undoubtedly Neon Genesis Evangelion (beating out the much more cartoony Appleseed, for instance), which strived to provide a cinematic experience in Anime format. Yeah, Eva does feature large Robots shooting the hell out of each other, but that's - blessedly - kept down to a minimum. The story arcs succeed reasonably well, and provide an experience of a scope and depth that most other Anime simply cannot match. One of the most popular Anime series in the west, deservedly so, and comparatively easy to get on tape. (not sure about DVD, but I'm certain it's on its way)
So much for that round-up. There's a lot of other good stuff as well, for instance the animated 'Street Fighter' full-length Anime film, which is superior to the Van Damme live-actioner in so many ways it's not funny. The ones above should serve as a good introduction to Anime - Akira and Ghost in the Shell are certainly the best ways to start, and probably not too difficult to get from your local video store.
For some bizarre reason, people in this thread keep insisting that the best choices for web scripting languages are those that don't mix the actual code (aka the 'logic') and HTML code.
And of course, they have a point. Unfortunately, they then argue that PHP is a poor choice because you have to mix PHP logic and HTML code in pages, (usually ending in.php3 or.php or whatever), which leads to obfuscated code, poor maintenance, and difficulty in separating the coding bit from the designing bit. And indeed, that's a bad thing, since your average interface designer will understand very little about those odd DB calls in the page, and will want to concentrate on getting his DHTML to display right.
So, PHP is a bad choice, right? Wrong.
Most people here seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that PHP3/4 can use the FastTemplate.class, which is (for Perl people out there, just another module) used for just that purposes - creating templates that don't have any PHP code in them. Instead, they have XML-like PHP calls in all the right places, and nothing else.
Example: Let's say Slashdot was coded in PHP, using Fast Templates. I haven't looked at the Slashcode lately, but I'm guessing that at the top of the page, it references your currently-used login name, and displays it. If Slashdot were coded in PHP, it could either have
get_current_loginname() ?>
or whatever. PHP code, right? Ugly. Don't want to mix code and HTML. So instead, we're using Fast Templates.
{DisplayCurrentUsername}
And that's pretty much it. You can predefine dynamic rows, blocks, whatever, and play around with variables inside them, but you simply use { } to denote a dynamic Fast Template call, and that's it. The entire code side is then handled by another fast template code file, call it index.php or whatever you want, where the defined { } variables are defined and coded in PHP. Which means full separation of code and HTML. When your designers start messing with the page, all they have to do is to remember to insert very short, simple calls like the ones above wherever they want to have them. They can even use font tags or any other mean of design to change the { } output in any way they wish, so the entire design part is up to them, and the coders don't have to worry about Netscape4x backwardscompatibility, etc.
And btw - Fast Templates really are fast. With the upcoming PHP4 Zend optimizer, tests have shown 100%+ speed increases over ASP, and it's all free, and well-documented. PHP has great database interaction modules, and for a site like Slashdot (or, to use an example that actually uses PHP, Freshmeat) there is no faster solution that PHP+mySQL. Many of the sites out there that have filenames ending in.tpl are in fact PHP template sites. No obfuscated code, and clear separation of form and content - isn't that what modern web coding practices should be about?
But of course, if you do choose that path, you will have to explain to your boss why that critical project came in way under budget, and much faster than expected. Won't that be just horrible?:-P
Hemos, did you actually check the Perlmonks link before putting it up? It's entire possible that the site has become so overloaded that it's caused their Perlscripts to freak and die, but it looks more like a simple configuration error.. when I went there, at 12:36pm GMT, I saw the following:
--
Software error:
Can't use string ("") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/Everything/HT ML.pm line 1550.
--
That looks like either a miscompilation or a bad configuration error. I hope the Perlmonk guys will manage to fix the problem ASAP - it's not often that your site gets the opportunity to be Slashdotted by so many geeks who are genuinely interested in Perl.
Anyway, so what about PHP, then?;-) (*duck*, *run*)
Alex T-B
PS: And no, this isn't meant to be a troll or flamebait against Perl. I genuinely like it. So there. PPS: I am just being told that the site has recovered. Ah, so Perl not only solves all problems, but can be fixed easily as well? Downloaditnow!
No offense, friend, but your reply was both hasty and misguided.
Yes, the HTML on The Times' website is fairly pathetic. Yes, it doesn't scale well. No, the 95% of web users who will ever look at it don't give a crap, and so it doesn't affect the webmasters who respond to customer needs, rather than complaints at Slashdot. Your ranting would've found a better place as a friendly email to the Webmasters. It probably would've been ignored, but then that's life if you try to be one of The Good Guys.
But now, on to the real issue.
the whole WWW gets uglier with each passing day
No shit. We're posting this on SLASHDOT, remember? The site that makes the HTML Validator choke and throw up dozens and dozens of errors in disgust. We're supposed to be the guys who fight for good code, open source, and the One True Way of Life, but what have WE, as a group, done to improve the Slashcode to be HTML4 compliant?
..because I'd rather be watching their movies than reading their HTML.
..or don't want to learn how to write HTML correctly, leave. If you'd rather make pretty pictures and movies, and let everyone see them, stay.
Did I miss something? The FIRST link is to Aaardman Studios, the makers of Wallace and Gromit, and the announced new films. What you are in fact ranting about is the website of The Times, one of Britains Conservative and corporate-owned broadsheet papers. Their terms and conditions are two years old as well, by the way. So please check what you're bitching about first, and then mention two completely unrelated companies in the same breath. Thanks.
Let's hope our friends at Slashdot don't have an account, because you're not allowed to link below the main page of their site without express written permission from the webmaster.
Oh, come on now. The rules and conditions were written in 1998, and even though the site resides in the UK, we know all about deep linking and its now established legality in the US. After all, the Slashdot servers reside in the US, so all complaints would be moot.
You also need their express written permission to use the trademarks "The Times" and "The Sunday Times". So can I say "My grandfather likes to read The Sunday Times"? Can I write it? Sue me already, I'd love to see it.
I assume you really enjoy exaggerating completely obvious points. 'The Times' and 'The Sunday Times' are registered trademarks. Which means they have to DEFEND them, otherwise their trademarks are lost. What this means, in detail, is that you're not allowed to use their trademarks for your own profit, or in a libellous or slanderous context, which is what the limitations to Free Speech(tm) in the US are.
So yes, you can go on about your Grandpa and The Sunday Times, but no, you can't create a newspaper, call it The Sunday Times, and sell it, or use the trademarked item to promote goods of your own. Is that so hard to understand?
Oh, and my favorite: we reserve the right to add or change this agreement, so if you do something we don't like, we can change that contract you agreed to, and sue you under the new one. Yeah, that's fair.
Duh, yes, it is. Terms and Conditions the world over include this clause. It doesn't mean that they're allowed to sue you for something you did BEFORE they changed the conditions. Re-read them. What they're doing is to protect themselves from having people exploit possible loopholes in the the rules. It's a normal clause, and that's it. All it means is that they reserve the right to fix any problems and patch rules loopholes, without the miscreant being able to complain 'since he used to do that when the rules were different so he should be able to continue doing that since the rules said - way back then - that it was legal. Ok?
Now, come on. I know you've got a lot of karma lately, but isn't this pretty much just pointless flaming? It doesn't help anyone to vent in this forum, all we're getting are just extended flamewars about bad HTML, etc, that lead nowhere. It's really a better idea to complain straight to their webmasters if you have any issue with the way their website works.
And finally - if you really need to bitch, you can find a great target in the owners of The Times, News Corp. Also owners of 20th Century Fox, Fox TV (aka Crappy TV 90210), innumerable TV and news publications, and a global media giant who's been cozying up with mainland china, has allowed their TV to be censored, and has had their chairman, Rupert 'Mogul' Murdoch openly criticise western media response to the Tiannanmen Massacre, so the Chinese dictatorship would allow his dubious media enterprise to operate in China.
See, now you have a much better target than crappy HTML:-)
Ok, let's go over this again, redundant as it may be. (*duck*)
It is legal for any one individual or corporation to link to anything on the internet, whether it is immediately accessible from the originator's website or not, including frames, etc. The judge mentioned that it should be mentioned, however, that the linked-to content was not originating on the website from which the link comes. This means I can embed a frame into my homepage that shows, for instance, a movie clip that's on Apple's website. The place that is being linked to can not protest against this in any legal manner. (But there're technical ways around it)
However, in this case, 2600.com is linking to sites that have software which was deemed illegal, yes, ILLEGAL by a court, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 2600.com has been stopped, by court order, from posting the software on their site, and are circumventing it by linking to it. Whether we like it or not (and I hate it), this is just a sneaky way around a court order (i.e. providing access to material banned by said court), and the judge probably won't like it at all. This has nothing to do with deep linking - said linking referred to a person's right to link to something (perfectly legal) even if the people on whose site it is don't want that to happen.
Unfortunately, people have been sued over linking to illegal material (MP3s mostly) before - Slashdot posted a story of the Swedish Kid who was arrested and sued over linking to MP3s on his site (an arrest initiated by the RIAA, and no, it's not the deCSS guy:)..
Seriously, guys - this is the real test, the one we've been waiting for. Is it illegal to LINK to material that is deemed 'unworthy' under our laws? To use a gun metaphor (which will probably start a flame war).. it's legal to sell a gun, or a knife, etc. in the US.. it's just illegal to use them to harm somebody else. In this case, 2600.com isn't even PROVIDING the materials.. it just tells people where they can be obtained. Can I be sued for telling you where a gunstore is?
I guess this'll finally show how free the system really is.
Well, my Linux box is at home, and I have to use the NT4 Server here at work to test the build.. here're a few brief experiences so far:
Using the 260k installer, and only grabbing the executable and the (7 megs?!) Java2 stuff, the install went fairly speedily (45 mins) over a 56k connection (13mb in total, without any of the feedback agents, Net2Phone, etc). No reboots were necessary, which is a nice step up from the 4.x releases, and of course IE. (although IE, to be fair, 'upgrades' a lot of system files under Winx)
Ok, first run. No, thanks, I don't want to sign up to Netcenter. And yes, I really really don't want to. I'm sure you nice Netscape, er, AOL guys would never do anything bad with my name and email address, but I just want to browse. Here it comes up, loading it is a bit faster than the 4.x tree. On we go to the Netcenter N6 page, ah, Dynamic HTML, finally implemented, nice moving 'Netscape' writing, fully selectable, etc. It's just eyecandy, but proves standards compliance. Wohoo!:) On we go.. let's see how fast Yahoo loads, my 'bare-bones' example for comparing IE and Mozilla so far. Ok, it's fine, not as speedy as IE5, but it's not an 'integral part of the OS', is it? Now the real test.. slashdot.org, loads fine, I enter my name - NO, I don't want you to remember my password, Moz.., er, Netscape - and on we go. Ah. Hmm. Well, either Slashdot isn't regularly tested with Mozilla, or it's _supposed_ to look this way. Most of the 'spacing' between objects is gone, i.e. the banner at the top of the screen is now touching the actual page instead of having a bit of space between the two of them. Since I turned the icons off, the slashboxes are now vertically sligned against the very top of the actual page, whereas the 'default' page has the icons in the top right corner aligning the slashboxes with the rest of the main page at the top. Ah well, broken HTML it ain't (unless you try to validate it:), and it's not a major issue.
[Side note: Copying text from Mozilla/N6 and pasting into Windows apps doesn't seem to work right now, neither using the right-click menu, nor the Edit menubar. Hmm. It lets me paste, but never copy. Especially since it blanks out the 'Paste' option after pasting, clearly thinking it has something buffered in the paste clipboard. Odd, but fixable.
Anyway, let's see what Netscape has to say about it on their main page. On we go, www.netscape.com... err.. crash. Hmm. Now, I'd have thought that they'd test their own homepage with their own browser? Nevermind, let's load it back up again - sigh, I didn't download the feedback client, so this bug will probably go unnoticed - and try it again.. and the page loads just fine. Odd. Very odd.
Anyway, let's have a look at the memory footprint.. task manager.. netscp6.exe..
29752k ??
I guess this is the memory footprint of a modern cutting-edge app.. but what were the two years of propaganda about 'small, fast app', 'efficient modular coding' etc. all about? I understand that IE5's memory usage (6megs right now) is partly due to the fact that a lot of its engine and parts are pre-loaded by the OS during startup.. and maybe under UNIX a lot of Netscape's code will reside in code already loaded by the X wm (widgets, etc).. but 30 megs? I just started the thing, it's not like hours of use have led it to leak memory like a bastard, accumulating dozens of megs of cached pages, etc, etc? The actual netscape executable is 356k large, probably so it can start fast and give a speedy impression. The 'components' dir, full of to-be-loaded.dlls, I assume, is another 6 megs large. The.dlls in the main dir are another 3 megs.. and I assume far from all are loaded at startup.
And the 'theme'-ability (i.e. skins, etc) aren't even included! I even disabled the sidebar, and reduced most options like What's Related? and Internet Keywords to a minimum, so I'd have a bare-bones, speedy browser, and nothing else. I'm guessing that part of it is the Java2 stuff that's loaded at startup - but the memory usage still baffles me. If it preloads all it needs, I'd at least expect it to be as fast as IE, if not better, seeing how IE5 is at its core based on a browser MS bought from Spyglass which in turn was a rebranded NCSA Mosaic licensee from 5++ years ago. (Check 'About' in IE5 if you don't believe me.) Ok, this is a pre-releases, still Alpha, not to be used widely, etc.. but seeing how the final.0 release is most likely going to have a mandatory includion of Net2Phone, the Instant Messenger, Skins, Shockwave and Realplayer included, the memory needed for it is going to balloon even more. Right now I'm using one of the servers here to test it, as I wanted something fairly speedy (FYI, it's a K6-2 450, 160MB RAM, NT4 Server, Service Pack 6a), amd I guess most people nowadays have relatively fast machines.. but it's still pretty excessive memory usage. I can load StarOffice and have a full office suite including a web browser loaded in that memory, if I have to.:-)
Ok, so in the time I needed to write this, (5 mins?) Netscape seems to have assimilated more memory for its personal needs. It now occupies 35 MB of RAM, and all I did to make it grow by 5 megs is to type some text in this textfield. Either it's doing funky stuff, or NT hates its guts. (and I'm waiting for people to post saying it's all NTs fault, and they've had Mozilla running on their 386 Linux boxes for months without crashes or memory problems:) I'm sure this isn't the fault of Gecko, the rendering engine at its core, but the browser built around it seems to have a few architectural issues. I hope the Mozilla guys will be able to give it a swift kick in the pants before the Netscape6 release. Press coverage of a sluggish Netscape that doesn't match IE's capabilities would probably kill it off for good on non-UNIX platforms. I think I better go and kill off all Netscape-related processes now before it sucks up the remaining memory and I have to reboot the machine.:-/ I just wonder what this is all about since the problematic factor, the skins engine, isn't even integrated into this release.
Apart from the memory issues, though, the Lizard seems to be a capable beast. Especially since this a pre-release do Slashdot Netscape's servers, grab the thing, and test it. With enough bugzilla reports, I'm sure the issues can be fixed in time for the release.
Alex T-B
PS: This post is coming to you courtesy of the fourth 'Submit' attempt. The Lizard keeps popping up a little box saying 'Connection refused by slashdot.org.. is that a HTTP error code. Which one? Please talk to me, Mozilla.:)
Ok, this'll get hammered mercilessly, but as Lando Calrissian once said.. here goes nothing:
Rob, you've been enormously successful with this site. You get million(s) of hits a day. And as your success grows, so does criticism. You don't learn that studying algorithms and putting together nifty CGI movies, but either in management school (oh, the horror) or through personal experience - as people's attention to your action increases, so does negative coverage. I mean, what're trying to do here is noble; a weblog of matters relevant to a small subsection of the population. Yeah, I know - it's frightening, but the type of geeks we are is and never will be the majority - 'cause if Jon Katz's Hellmouth articles taught us anything, then it was that we're a minority. We were the strange outcasts in school. We were weird. Why? Because we were different from everybody else - yeah, that's right. Everybody else was a majority. (Bear with me here, I'm getting to a point) Now, you've created a site that caters to - supposedly - every geek's wet dream, a concoction of tech news, relevant media stuff, general assorted 'rights online' politically-related stories and everything else one could possibly ever care about. And here's the catch. How many stories do you post a day? Not more than a dozen or two. Selected from 400++ daily submissions. Who makes the selections? You do. Hemos does. Roblimo. Emmett. The rest of the gang. And most of those people are either friends of yours or share a fairly near-identical view of what's relevant. Of what's news for nerds. Of what is Stuff That Matters. However, a million page views or so a day to Slashdot is likely to attract the attention of say, 20% of people whose views are fairly different from your own. Of those 20%, perhaps half will fairly violently disagree with the comments attached to stories - and with the general mood of the discussions going on after the stories are posted. I know Slashdot caters to a wide audience, but maybe there're tens of thousands of people reading this, people we're commonly deriding as PHBs. What do they want to read about? Tech news. Stuff that's relevant to their jobs. Perhaps they're even interested in the 63k+ Windows2k bugs, and need to make strategic decisions on how to upgrade their systems. Maybe they care that StarOffice is now supported by Sun. Or that LinuxCare has a deal with Dell. Like that very subsection that we're deriding, another subsection is very dissatisfied when a story they're submitting isn't posted. Perhaps some of the people bitching are not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. Perhaps they're just annoyed that their latest "M$ SUCKZ, D00D!" article was rejected and Slashdot instead posts something about "Research Institutions and Corporate Interests" - I mean, who carez, D00D? You're not giving any thought to the fact that Slashdot is probably one of the favourite places for script kiddies to go. Their juvenile sense for destruction can express itself in flaming away on the discussion threads. Finally a way for them to publically attract attention to their verbal skills. Finally a forum where their PEERS live. What many people don't figure out is that script kiddies often think that they're ELITE. Some of them may even quickly paste together a website mimicking Slashdot, to attract the same amount of peer attention that you, Rob, have done. So people worship them in the same sense that Rob has become an OSS hero and icon of geeks worldwide. Who became a multimillionaire (Andover money + stock options + VA Linux stock options == lots of AIBOs) simply by turning his hobby into his job. Who wouldn't want to become rich and famous by writing a web page? The complexity of the behind-the-scenes work necessary for Slashdot seems to be lost on many of them, though. Which is why you're in the limelight, Rob. Your work isn't appreciated. You are admired and hated at the same time. The time people spent honing their '$ winnuke www.microsoft.com' skills wasn't used to acquire any social skills. On the internet, people will flame if they dislike who you are, and what you stand for. Please Rob - don't be amazed and rant at people complaining about story submissions. Slashdot has become increasingly pro-Linux, anti-MS, pro-Libertarian, anti-Responsibility ("don't like that piece of software? hack it yourself!"), and unpalatable for many people. I still like it, but many others don't. Just please don't rant at the reactions caused by the creation of your own hands. It's become very, very big - and all that's missing is the 'Caveat Emptor' banner over the main page.
Finally - in the 'Ask Rob and Hemos anything' interview a while ago, people asked why the story submission queue wasn't opened up for moderation. You guys answered that you didn't really know what the person meant. To clarify: Have a separate page, or possibly even a very very long slashbox, where people can see all the stories currently in the submission queue. People with moderation points (that means more moderators) can then give moderation points to a story. Once the story reaches a certain number of points, it gets moved onto the front page. People can then set their 'threshold' for front page stories, and moderators can still give stories points, so I can for instance decide that I only want to see stories that received 20+ points, etc. Similarly, it's still possible to filter out stories that are on a certain subject - so I can still killfile Apache stories, or FreeBSD stuff. The result? A truly open source forum. Won't happen, though.
Anyway, here's the end of my offtopic troll flamebait rant. It's really not an ad hominem attack against Rob or anyone else in particular. However, once you reach a certain status/fame, you're subject to attacks by 'lesser' people - as ESR's 'take my job, please' rant once attested.
Hey Rob. I know this is more than one questions - please pick whichever you believe is most relevant.
Mr Katz, Rob Malda fairly correctly describes you as the most hated author on Slashdot. Whilst many of us seem to feel that you're simply looking at the issues you're writing about from an overblow point of view, seeing 'technical milestones of incredibly important significance', some of the posters on Slashdot have a particular peeve. Namely your qualifications. Slashdot.org is a very technical forum - many of the posters on here simply read it because they feel it best sums up technical events in the Real World. However, your expertise seems to be rudimentary, at best. Linux, the prodigal child of the Slashdot community, proved to be quite a problem, as you struggled with it for quite a while, even writing articles about the difficulties you had. Many of us felt that you wrote those articles so you become more accepted by the crowd, and to show that you aren't just a Windows techie. Now, after quite an intro, here're the questions:
What makes you so uniquely qualified to talk about the vital socio-technological issues that many of us are interested about? You seem to have little experience with high-tech environments or in-depth hardware/software knowledge, so most of us would have viewed you as a 'luser' type of layman only a few years ago.
Do you feel that your fame and notoriety stems mostly from the 'Hellmouth' article series, as many of us claim? After Hellmouth, your contributions to the community have been marginal at best, or so many claim. Your answer?
What do you feel about the seeming need of the puritan US society to censor and restrict access to everything they deem dirty, whilst crying 'But what about the children?'.. i.e. why is US Society as a whole so much in the grip of the Conservative religious right? Can we, a fairly enlightened community when it comes to freedom, do anything about it?
I understand your association and sympathy for the 'outcasts' of society - especially those bullied in school for being different, etc. However, you seem to have the need to incessantly call everybody who is different a 'Geek'. Don't you feel that your uniform classification in fact plays into the hands of those who would like to see people categorised, ideally at an early age through mandatory psychological tests, determining potential 'problem students', then isolating and brainwashing them?
You use the claim of 'Open Source' very casually, in fact asking for contributions for an 'Open Source' book at various stages. Do you understand that the fundamental values behind OS are that of sharing credit and fame? Will you be crediting every single idea as well as every single quotation you use in that book? Quoting sources when using ideas is mandatory for University essays - not doing so can result in a grade of zero, or worse. How open source will your work really be?
Finally - your short essay about flaming on the net and about not taking responsibility seemed to be the reaction to an email that struck a raw nerve. Certain, you are probably inundated with flames every day. However, don't you think that by setting yourself up in the limelight (Yes, 1 million people read Slashdot every day), thus attracting attention to yourself, you have only yourself to blame? The more famous you become, the more negative attention you will receive. The plaintive tone about ad hominem attacks was unwarrented - you want the fame, you got it. My final question refers to whether you believe that people are treating you unfairly. Are they?
Thanks, and apologies for the length and number of questions. Just pick one.:-)
It's easy to dismiss UseNet as an unwieldy, overblown relic of the times when people didn't zoom along over cable modems, viewing everything at 32bit colour on their 19" monitors. However, many people still live in that era. UseNet is enormously useful, if:
You don't have graphical access to the internet. Yes, text-based browsers make many things perfectly usable, but have you tried using board-type discussion forums using Lynx lately? Sites such as Slashdot are usable - but when you want to rapidly check on cross-references, determine posting status, etc, a newsreader such as 'tin' beats web browsing any day.
Secondly, a newsfeed is local. You browse articles on a local server, usually either on a campus/office network or just at the other end of your modem. I know many people praise the cheap and available nature of ADSL, Cable modems, etc, but in many places, individual high-speed access is just a dream. Take China and India, for example. What do you think is more realistic - millions of people clicking 'Read followup' in their Netscape/IE window, or selecting 'next article', thereby quickly retrieving a local article to their screen?
Guess what. Newsreader interfaces right now are superior to anything I've seen on the web for discussion forums. They're also much faster, but that's just a snide remark. Even the somewhat crippled newsreader in Communicator beats any configurability and power that, say, Infoworld's forum's offer. This really isn't mean to be a cheap shot at web forums - but newsreader interfaces have had more than a decade or two to mellow and be improved. Sure beats the 'Submit' and 'Preview' buttons, doesn't it?
Yeah, the binary problem is rampant. But so what? If your sysadmin has any clue as to what he's doing (and this means doing more than just configuring INN to auto-subscibe all), he'll be able to filter out anything he wants to. This specifically means binary postings, for instance. If a user desperately needs them (and I'm sure many do:), then www.deja.com remains an option.
This is probably a moot point to many, but UseNet has become a global cultural archive of our age. From the days of clear, simple, useful inter-governmental discussions, through the university glory days, finally when AOLers became the most maligned force on UseNet, and ultimately entering our current stage, UseNet has become a cultural mirror of society. Larry Wall's postings from more than a decade ago are still *somewhere*, and the Wall Quote Archive is a damn good proof of that:-)
Perhaps more importantly - UseNet is distributed. Yes, this means that a ridiculous lot of spam and other junk is moved around the net daily. But so what? I know that no site admin can censor what I want to read - there will always be open news servers, or even - oh dear - web interfaces like Deja.com. I will never ever have to fear that Andover and then VA Linux will mess with any freedom. I can create a new group, if peer approval is given. The people I want to talk to can subscribe to the group. Ultimate, anarchic freedom. Isn't this what the Internet is supposed to be all about - and what we're celebrating on Slashdot? We seem to believe that Slashdot is the ultimate free anarchical net community. Nonsense. UseNet is. Has been. Will be.
I remember reading through the 'Zen and the Art of UseNet' years and years ago, my mind lighting up with the pure joy at the realisation that UseNet was truly self-governed. So what if spam innundates the unmoderated groups? You can set up a moderator, if enough people care about your topic. Even create a new group and get rid of the old one. Spammers can't always get to you, but the information will always get out to those who want to reach it.
Personally, I believe that Usenet will continue existing long after those who're predicting its death right now have gone away. Maybe it'll be a beautified Usenet, with lots of graphics tacked on top, the way Deja is trying to turn it into a 'community-based' collection of 'forums'.. but so what? As long as it remains possible to read postings simply by manually connecting to a port and telling the server to give you postings, Usenet will survive. I don't see anyone predicting the death of e-mail or the web, yet both are full of spam and useless junk. But similarly to Usenet, both are based on extremely simple principles, and remain usable with an extremely low technological investment. Everything IE/Netscape/Outlook/Eudora/etc. may throw at you, from Templates to Style Sheets to embedded video, is just eyecandy. The underlying backbone, the information, survives.
God, that was sentimental. Now if that wasn't the pinnacle of geekdom - coming close to shedding tears over the beauty of bits and bytes and a text interface...:-)
Sorry, but at the most basic level your argument must be refuted: It simply isn't true that KDE2.0 won't be catering for 'the rest of us.' As the coders emphasized at multiple times in the interview, the 'theme' capability will extend beyond simple skin/button functions offered by conventional wmanagers. By implementing a relatively simple scripting method that can be understood even by newbies, KDE2 will offer something for 'the rest of us.' The example mentioned redesigns the UI to resemble BeOS, I believe, with a 200-line script, which, to be honest, isn't all that much more compared to the average-to-highly-customized.fvwm2rc.
Now, what I find 'terribly, terribly disappointing is the negative attitude facing the KDE2 developers because they do not join in the chants of 'developing the future of UIs and WMs', but instead focus on something at the moment significantly more important: Converting the existing GUI OS userbase to UNIX and GNU/Linux. The explicitly stated desire to emphasize visual elements from Windows and MacOS is vital: As much as we love the funky customizability of GTK/Gnome/E-based stuff, 90% of users will be looking for an interface that works, and, more importantly, is intuitive, easy-to-learn, and easily modifiable to a certain extent. E offers all this, but any long-term user of both system will understand KDE's more basic 'intuitive things that work well' approach. For those who want to push it to the next level (yes, 'the rest of us'), the scripted themeability of KDE2 should be sufficient. In fact, what worries me is the implication that what's 'sensible to non-UNIX people' is bad or in fact inferior to what's 'sensible to UNIX people.' I have been one of those 'Unix people' for close to 10 years now, nothing compared to the Xerox Dinos who've used GUIs for more than two decades, but I do realise that the traditional ease-of-use and intuitive use of my own favourite WM, fvwm2, lags behind the newers MacOS versions. Even E doesn't offer Joe User the simplicity of knowing what's going to happen if he clicks on this and that. Perhaps this is because E is so much more customizable than MacOS. Or perhaps it's because the MacOS GUI designers studied the way people perceive and use GUIs more than the E people, and used that information. Again, no offense to the awesome work done by the Gnome/E people. Finally, I fear that the attitude taken by Tom, one of the most important Unix/Perl pioneers and flag-bearers of the OSS world, somewhat reflects the underlying fear of those community members who would otherwise (justifiably) sneer at Gnome/KDE flamewars:
That KDE is a dumbed-down version of the X interface, meant to entice Windoze users and lock them into a simplistic Linux version.
That KDE developers say 'we don't care' about experienced UNIX users - the backbone of the society, which is thus stepped on and ignored on the Konquest for Desktop Dominance. (KDD? Have I just coined a buzzword?:)
And that ultimately the dumbing down of UNIX and GNU/Linux will weaken the OSS effort and the underlying principles and beliefs of UNIX. By that I also refer to the near-ridiculous customisability of WMs via cryptic.rc files. Which I like, by the way.
So what remains? At the end of the day, KDE makes a valiant effort to overcome those fears. Unfortunately, it doesn't really help all that much, since key people behind the OSS effort seem dismayed by the philosohpy behind KDE: 'Make it work work. Make it work well.' But isn't that also part of the philosophy behind Linux and OSS? Isn't Linux based on a monolithic kernel rather than a micro-kernel due to the fact that the latter is, to paraphrase Linus, 'an academic concept' rather than a proper functioning and tested system? Strange. And finally Tom, since you're one of the people behind the invaluable ORA Perl books, isn't Perl part of the driving force to 'just making stuff work'? Without trying to devalue your contribution to the community: Don't you think you're being dragged into a philosophico-conceptual flamewar raging not so much in the Slashdot polls but rather in the minds of UNIX developer? Namely, where to take our UNIX world next, and how to include the majority of the world's PC userbase without crippling GNU/Linux so it's usable for them?
I am torn back and forth between trying to protect my beloved complex Linux setup that is inaccessible to most newbies, and attempting to understand that, to quote Larry Wall and yourself, 'there is more than one way to do it.' Yes, KDE may be a more 'newbie-friendly system.' But they are trying to get it to play nice with Gnome/E, E already implementing some KDE hints, more soon to come. The Brave New World of full customizability and WM interoperation should offer us what we want without leaving newbies out in the cold. Which is what we want, isn't it?
Alex T-B
"Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."
Hey This isn't meant to be offensive to the Slashdot crew or Nathan in particular, and I understand that the comment added to the news posting was most likelt humorous in nature. But: Do you guys think that
> Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light.
is a good impression to give to non-hacker types reading Slashdot? (hacking, not cracking) Of course, lots of nerdy techies like myself:) read Slashdot, and we'll grin at the deCSS and MP3 comments, since we know stuff like that happens, because people simply exploit it. I've never deCSSed a DVD, not do I intend to ever copy one off the net. But many of the industry people who do read Slashdot and try to form an opinion of Open Source (Unreal and Q3 developers, for instance, both of whom have posted here previously), will form the opinion that we're just a bunch of immature geeks who'll steal their software, if necessary. Again, I know the comment was probably meant to be funny - but guys, we aren't alone here anymore. 'Suits' and industry people read Slashdot, and their opinion counts if we want to bring proper DVD support to Linux, for instance. Or if we want full Linux support for games, etc.
We're in a phase right now where everything that happens to Linux really, really matters. Let's not throw it away by acting childishly, and fitting into the 'zealot geek' stereotype many would like to categorise us as. Sorry, Nathan - this really isn't a flame against you.
Alex
"Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."
[Argl, I mis-posted the first. Anyway, as Lando Calrissian said, here goes nothing.]
One simple way for Microsoft to change and break Apache's dominance of the web server market is to introduce 'feature creep' with IIS and NT, by integrating new features into the OS and IIS that aren't accessible to other servers. An example was given with intranet corporate web posting. Sharing files and documents over a corporate intranet is the way to go. Email exchange and document sharing can be made much easier if it's all simply accessible with just a few mouseclicks from your Win98 desktop.
Now, everybody will want to put his drafts and whitepapers online quickly - and hey, look, there's a button just for that in Office2002. And it all integrates nicely with Win2k and IIS. Why run Apache, which doesn't support all those nifty features and makes it 'more difficult' for admins to install and run it? If the users clamor for it, they'll get it, right? After all, having admins mess about with incompatible stuff will annoy the management - this is all productivity loss, remember? Can't we just go with The Standard?
That'll be the first step.
Then, how does all that integrate with the outside world? Of course everybody in the firm will be using IE6 or 7, since it came with the OS and servers, and supports all the funky features Word2002 and IIS offer, 'for enhanced productivity and ease-of-use'. After all, it's all in the name of innovation - and annoyingly enough, it would make many things easier. But back to our example.
To tie everything in with the outside world, the corporate VPN and WAN, we need for our servers to communicate with each other. For instance so the offices everywhere can share the same documents. And send corporate email back and forth. And all of that ties in nicely with Exchange2k and all other corporate network solutions. From MS. All run on Win2k, with MS databases at the end.
After the internal structures of a business work so nicely together, we'll want the customers to be able to co-operate with all this. So we're adding special features. IE has an market dominance, anyway, and it ties in with everything else we're running.
Oh, you don't run MS? We're sorry, but our web logs and in-depth market research have shown that 92% of our customers are from home and corporate environments, which in turn mostly run IE. I'm afraid we can't support niche systems, Sir. We don't have the time, you understand?
This is how the web will be won. Unless Mozilla, Navigator 5, Konqueror, and Apache manage to impose a client-side as well as the existing server-side architecture on the market - an architecture that MS won't be able to break. Does anyone remember 'Chrome', MS proprietary web enhancements? Or ActiveX-only pages? Guess what - if MS manages to fight back in the server market, it'll flood it with proprietary tech that will be tied to its OS, its servers, and its browsers. And then it will be all over.
So don't stand around idly, but go over to the Konqueror and Mozilla pages, and contribute. Even non-coders can write man and help pages and contribute to design decisions. Even you can add bug reports. Everybody can help - but as long as the infighting and holy wars continue, MS can only win.
And do you really want to see the message Sorry, only for MS-enhanced browsers on your screen? They can win it, and they will win it from the server side. We're already retreating in mass from the client side. Tim O'Reilly isn't an idiot, and he isn't a firebrand - he makes valid points: The entire MS case, and the FoF will be utterly pointless if the market decides to vote for MS servers in the end.
Apologies if this sounds inflammatory - I don't advocate that all MS products are bad, some of their software is awesome - but the way they market things goes against everything I believe in.
Alex
"Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."
it is rather improbable that you will actually read this message, [and I expect it to be moderated down as flamebait], but please take note of the following few problems:
Have you considered that Slashdot is a professional forum as well as being the place where people simply discuss tech matters of all kinds? Your agreement to be interviewed, and your subsequent dismissal of questions will have more than a million people realising that you were, quite honestly, too cowardly to actually deal with what you _asked_ for. However, most interestingly, you are claiming that you don't intend to spend most of your life defending yourself from 'every individual who had a nasty thing to say about you'. But, again, you _REQUESTED_ to have questions posed to you.
More importantly, how do you think future employers will perceive you and your consulting service? If anybody ever chooses to hire your services, they'll instantly become the focus of concerted hacking attacks, both to prove that your security systems are incompetent, and to 'teach' them a lesson. By exposing your ignorance and scorning the tech community, you'll attract more than the usual 200-500 cracking attempts per day. And not to your site, which you supervise yourself 24/7. But to your clients' sites.
Many network security experts are 'under fire', since that seems to come with the job. It is unusual, however, to be the one and only 'security expert' who is continually harassing his own peers. I am saying that you are doing it, since you chose to answer with rhetoric rather than facts in the posting above. Since you are complaining about 'lack of maturity', what exactly do you think it is to ask for an interview by your peers, wait to see what is being asked, and then refuse to answer, claiming that it is 'stupid'.
You have every right to refuse to answer personal attacks. You also have every right to complain about lies being spread, and your close family being harassed because of your job. However, you have refused to even acknowledge that the following VALID questions were asked: Why you blocked links from Slashdot, displaying messages that it was a known hacker site. Why you ignore the allegations that you are a media fraud. Why you 'leaked' information about individuals being hackers, without any proof, and without any followup action.
You obviously like to see yourself in the role of the Cybermartyr, disliked and maligned by much of the cyberpeople, sacrificing his popularity for the security of the net, and a hefty bundle of cash, too. Are you aware of how childish this attitude is? Trying to co-operate with some of the people, especially Computer Professionals, many of whom frequent Slashdot, can only be a Good Thing. Of course you don't care, because you're getting media attention. Who cares about all the envious small minds on Slashdot? I was actually waiting for you to.sign off with Einstein's quotation about great minds always being attacked by mediocre ones. Everything you've said during this 'interview' just smacks of insecurity.
Just as a side note: Forbes just published an article that all but calls you a fraud, and mocks your claims of expertise. Do you realise that your incessant 'I don't care' behaviour is alienating the people that are supposed to hire you? You are becoming notorious, fast.
Finally, I realise that this posting in itself is biased. I just consider it to be highly offensive to see the netizens of Slashdot scorned and ridiculed by you. And all that because we wanted to know the truth about why you have *SUPPOSEDLY* run smear campaigns against many other network professionals.
All we wanted was the truth. I guess you think we just can't handle it.
Alex
-- "Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, here's the deal:
In Germany, a firm called CMG seems to have registered a trademark for the word 'Samba'. That trademark refers to banking software, which seems to handle all kinds of banking transactions, using forms, etc. If you feel like wading through a longish list of features in German, see their product site.
CMG, makers of that software, have sent out snail mails to all people subscribed on a German Samba mailing list (i.e. the UNIX SMB software), and have demanded that all users immediately stop using, distributing, or advertising said software. Yeah, that's right: if you're using it, you have to stop doing so right now.
CMG is doing a so-called 'Abmahnung', i.e. a non-judicial process in which a private business/person can demand money from someone disrespecting their trademarks/trade laws. The total value of this process - CMG wouldn't say how many people are affected - is said to be about 100 000 German marks (DM), which is about $60,000. Their lawyers are also demanding 1900 DM from each of the parties involved. That's right - you were using Samba, you got the letter, you have to pay their lawyers about $1200 - until August 8. They'll probably sue the involved parties for that sum of money afterwards.
The c't article adds that Volker Lendecke, one of the German Samba developers - in order to avoid such trademark issues - had already registered a Samba pictorial logo trademark in Germany last year.
Such 'Abmahnung' demands are pretty common in Germany, lawyer firms routinely search advertising directories, etc. for anything that may be considered ambiguous in any way, or infringing on anyone's trademarks, and send out ludicruous demands out, often to people who have no way of acting against them. Whilst it's easy to claim that Germans are idiots and no such thing would ever happen in the US (free speech, etc), please remember that frivolous suits are pretty uncommon in Germany: people claiming money for eating peanuts and suing because they were allergic to nuts and there was no 'WARNING: May contain nuts' label on the box, or people suing because they spilled hot McDonalds coffee on themselves, would be laughed out of court in Germany. This is a fairly normal thing - the same would happen in the US if, say, I created a mySQL spin-off and called my new database 'Oracle' or 'Interbase', I'd be in a lot of trouble for trademark infringement. *shrug* It's that simple. Firms have to defend their trademarks, or they lose them if they become diluted.
Alex T-B
St Andrews
To start with, I'm sorry if this ends up being fairly strongly worded - but I thoroughly disagree with the very negative and aggressive means of disparaging and attacking the KDE project as a whole. As Lando Calrissian said - here goes nothing:
KDE attempted from the very beginning to become the standard desktop of Linux by using a non-free toolkit.
Apologies for the strong language, but that is an outright lie. How, in the name of Linus, can one attempt to become the standard Linux desktop by using a non-free toolkit? By doing so, one is rather going to incur the wrath of many Linux users who will not use it; therefore, using a non-free toolkit is the exact opposite of an attempt to become the standard Linux desktop. Two additional points - GNOME/GTK attempted that, said in a very outright and honest manner that they were doing so, and have more or less succeeded in becoming the 'standard' Linux desktop environment. Fanatic advocacy due to their free nature has added fuel to that. The fact that RedHat etc. are supporting them to such a degree is only more proof. The people behind KDE are very, very smart - they wouldn't have used a non-free toolkit if they'd seen a superior alternative; in their opinion (NOT MINE - NOT A REASON FOR FLAMEWARS) the QT libraries made coding easier than any other toolkit. So they used it. Not because they wanted to use it to gain 'Linux Desktop Supremacy'.
Oh - and it's not the standard desktop of LINUX, for Theo's sake. It's intended for UNIX- and UNIX-like systems. I like my FreeBSD KDE desktop quite a lot.
KDE unfortunately has a long tradition in violating the free software spirit [...]
This starts out as an outright flame. Using the shield of the 'free software spirit' isn't the best way to begin an argument. Quite a few people (BP, JWZ, ESR, RMS, etc) would wildly differ on what that spirit is, and how it's best interpreted. Quoting it as your main point of thrust to put the KDE project in a bad light will just evoke hatred and disgust from many.
When the free QT replacement Harmony was still in development (it achieved a rather advanced state!) the KDE project refused to agree to switch to this toolkit in the future[...]
Now, several points:
1. Of course they refused to switch to it at some later undisclosed point in time. They were using QT, which at that time was a highly advanced, well-supported, well-documented toolkit. Harmony aimed to be an open copy of QT, but never reached a state where any type of reasonable compatibility was achieved. If I was asking anyone here to throw away their Windows boxen, because WINE/X/Berlin/Linux may one day support all the games through a compat layer (WINE), and is now already supporting quite a few (Fallout2, etc), what would you say? Even worse, for those developers, the switch to Harmony would have meant embracing a half- finished toolkit. If you've ever done any major dev work, you will know that buggy, unfinished, or plain incompatible development tools are the most grievous bane you could ever encounter. Users of MS Visual Studio would probably agree wholeheartedly.
2. and they even announced that they will incorporate any useful new features of future versions of QT, which made it impossible for Harmony to ever reach compatability
That is the whole mantra of a lot of OSS development - if you see a good feature somewhere, you adopt it. Of course, if MS ever did so, their code would be closed, and nobody'd know how and what they did, and what they stole - but the KDE code has always been OPEN! If they took a feature from the Harmony kit and implemented it into software that is based on a Harmony-compatible toolkit, why would that invalidate Harmony compatibility? And even if the KDE people had broken the code for some reason, it'd be easy to see what they were doing, the CVS tree and the open code were and are there for everybody to see. (er, ok, maybe the KDE CVS tree merits another thread
3. Finally, KDE is blatantly ignoring their constant violation of the GPL of other peoples software that is used in KDE (e.g. in kfloppy)
For the main KDE developers, it is fairly difficult to always be able to track down code, and its origins. Whilst it may be true that licenses were violated in KDE-incorporated code, how can Linus, for instance, be absolutely sure that the patch he was just mailed to improve TCP/IP stack stability doesn't in some way violate other licenses, e.g. the BSD license? I would give the KDE developers at least the benefit of doubt, collect and document said GPL violations, and report them on the public KDE dev mailing lists. If those attempts fail, document what's happening, put up a website, and mail an article to Slashdot - once it's read by a million geeks, how damn fast do you think the KDE guys will come around to fixing it? Corel etc. have been quite good at fixing those problems so far, no?
4. I will say goodbye to all KDE stuff and will now only use Gnome which is rapidly evolving into a comparably mature desktop environment [...]
You see, this is how major flamewars start. You criticise the ATTITUDE and debatably also the LEGALITY of KDE maintainers and licenses, and follow it up by, quite frankly, only thinly veiling 'GNOME ROCKS! KDE SUX!'.
Even koffice will soon be made superflous by The Gimp, Sketch, Sodipodi, Gnumeric, Abiword, gcalender
Miguel freely admitted that for Gnumeric, for instance, he just [paraphrased quotation] 'copied every feature from MS Excel', an attitude that you aggressively criticised earlier on? And you follow it up, again, by basically saying 'Gnome software rocks!'
I hope that many will follow this migration from KDE to Gnome.
Holy Cron, could this be any more incendiary? I'm pretty sure that this is the first truly fully-fledged flame posted as an article on Slashdot. I know lots of people are just waiitng to flame the hell out of Dr. Bechly, but just leave it. Point out the flaws in his argument, but don't insult KDE, Gnome, GTK, E, or whatever else. Keep cool. I'm not sure I've managed to do so myself, and there's certainly a lot of finger-pointing in the lines above, but let's try to keep calm.
Alex T-B
St Andrews
Well,
Obviously, we are starting with the two undisputed classics of the genre. The one that brought Japanese animation to the west in a big way more than a decade ago was
AKIRA, which still remains pretty much undisputed in terms of dramaturgical development and on-screen dynamics. Although an Anime masterpiece, it falls short of the outstanding graphic novels, which are quite possibly the best example of how to develop a story-arc in a graphic novel. (probably sharing that honour with Watchmen)
Then, seven or so years after Akira, Ghost in the Shell updated Anime in a way that struck a chord with western audiences in the outgoing 90s. At heart little more than a glorified action story, it didn't quite match Akira's superior characters and settings, but still belongs to the best action films of the 90s, bar none. And the animation is pretty much as good as it gets.
Anime feature films culminated with last year's Mononoke Hime, aka 'Princess Mononoke' in the US. Being an intricate, multi-layered story about man's interaction with nature and the world around us, it succeeded in ways that the gun-slinging examples mentioned above could not. There are no glorified mecha-style shootouts in Mononoke Hime, and it's not as action-packed as most others, but its story development succeeds where others would normally fail. Interestingly, unlike many other Anime products, Mononoke Hime also forsakes the display of super-villains bent on taking over the world in favour of more ambiguous shades of grey. Nobody should win, and everybody is right, in a certain way. Simplistic 'real' views of the world, maybe, but very successful. Er, and the US version is dubbed by Claire Danes, amongst others, if that's your thing.
With feature films out of the way, the best example of serialized Anime is undoubtedly Neon Genesis Evangelion (beating out the much more cartoony Appleseed, for instance), which strived to provide a cinematic experience in Anime format. Yeah, Eva does feature large Robots shooting the hell out of each other, but that's - blessedly - kept down to a minimum. The story arcs succeed reasonably well, and provide an experience of a scope and depth that most other Anime simply cannot match. One of the most popular Anime series in the west, deservedly so, and comparatively easy to get on tape. (not sure about DVD, but I'm certain it's on its way)
So much for that round-up. There's a lot of other good stuff as well, for instance the animated 'Street Fighter' full-length Anime film, which is superior to the Van Damme live-actioner in so many ways it's not funny. The ones above should serve as a good introduction to Anime - Akira and Ghost in the Shell are certainly the best ways to start, and probably not too difficult to get from your local video store.
Alex T-B
Why, oh why?
For some bizarre reason, people in this thread keep insisting that the best choices for web scripting languages are those that don't mix the actual code (aka the 'logic') and HTML code.
And of course, they have a point. Unfortunately, they then argue that PHP is a poor choice because you have to mix PHP logic and HTML code in pages, (usually ending in
So, PHP is a bad choice, right? Wrong.
Most people here seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that PHP3/4 can use the FastTemplate.class, which is (for Perl people out there, just another module) used for just that purposes - creating templates that don't have any PHP code in them. Instead, they have XML-like PHP calls in all the right places, and nothing else.
Example: Let's say Slashdot was coded in PHP, using Fast Templates. I haven't looked at the Slashcode lately, but I'm guessing that at the top of the page, it references your currently-used login name, and displays it. If Slashdot were coded in PHP, it could either have
get_current_loginname() ?>
or whatever. PHP code, right? Ugly. Don't want to mix code and HTML. So instead, we're using Fast Templates.
{DisplayCurrentUsername}
And that's pretty much it. You can predefine dynamic rows, blocks, whatever, and play around with variables inside them, but you simply use { } to denote a dynamic Fast Template call, and that's it. The entire code side is then handled by another fast template code file, call it index.php or whatever you want, where the defined { } variables are defined and coded in PHP. Which means full separation of code and HTML. When your designers start messing with the page, all they have to do is to remember to insert very short, simple calls like the ones above wherever they want to have them. They can even use font tags or any other mean of design to change the { } output in any way they wish, so the entire design part is up to them, and the coders don't have to worry about Netscape4x backwardscompatibility, etc.
And btw - Fast Templates really are fast. With the upcoming PHP4 Zend optimizer, tests have shown 100%+ speed increases over ASP, and it's all free, and well-documented. PHP has great database interaction modules, and for a site like Slashdot (or, to use an example that actually uses PHP, Freshmeat) there is no faster solution that PHP+mySQL. Many of the sites out there that have filenames ending in
But of course, if you do choose that path, you will have to explain to your boss why that critical project came in way under budget, and much faster than expected. Won't that be just horrible?
Alex T-B
*cough*
Hemos, did you actually check the Perlmonks link before putting it up? It's entire possible that the site has become so overloaded that it's caused their Perlscripts to freak and die, but it looks more like a simple configuration error.. when I went there, at 12:36pm GMT, I saw the following:
--
Software error:
Can't use string ("") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use
at
--
That looks like either a miscompilation or a bad configuration error. I hope the Perlmonk guys will manage to fix the problem ASAP - it's not often that your site gets the opportunity to be Slashdotted by so many geeks who are genuinely interested in Perl.
Anyway, so what about PHP, then?
Alex T-B
PS: And no, this isn't meant to be a troll or flamebait against Perl. I genuinely like it. So there.
PPS: I am just being told that the site has recovered. Ah, so Perl not only solves all problems, but can be fixed easily as well? Downloaditnow!
No offense, friend, but your reply was both hasty and misguided.
Yes, the HTML on The Times' website is fairly pathetic. Yes, it doesn't scale well. No, the 95% of web users who will ever look at it don't give a crap, and so it doesn't affect the webmasters who respond to customer needs, rather than complaints at Slashdot. Your ranting would've found a better place as a friendly email to the Webmasters. It probably would've been ignored, but then that's life if you try to be one of The Good Guys.
But now, on to the real issue.
the whole WWW gets uglier with each passing day
No shit. We're posting this on SLASHDOT, remember? The site that makes the HTML Validator choke and throw up dozens and dozens of errors in disgust. We're supposed to be the guys who fight for good code, open source, and the One True Way of Life, but what have WE, as a group, done to improve the Slashcode to be HTML4 compliant?
..or don't want to learn how to write HTML correctly, leave. If you'd rather make pretty pictures and movies, and let everyone see them, stay.
Did I miss something? The FIRST link is to Aaardman Studios, the makers of Wallace and Gromit, and the announced new films. What you are in fact ranting about is the website of The Times, one of Britains Conservative and corporate-owned broadsheet papers. Their terms and conditions are two years old as well, by the way. So please check what you're bitching about first, and then mention two completely unrelated companies in the same breath. Thanks.
Let's hope our friends at Slashdot don't have an account, because you're not allowed to link below the main page of their site without express written permission from the webmaster.
Oh, come on now. The rules and conditions were written in 1998, and even though the site resides in the UK, we know all about deep linking and its now established legality in the US. After all, the Slashdot servers reside in the US, so all complaints would be moot.
You also need their express written permission to use the trademarks "The Times" and "The Sunday Times". So can I say "My grandfather likes to read The Sunday Times"? Can I write it? Sue me already, I'd love to see it.
I assume you really enjoy exaggerating completely obvious points. 'The Times' and 'The Sunday Times' are registered trademarks. Which means they have to DEFEND them, otherwise their trademarks are lost. What this means, in detail, is that you're not allowed to use their trademarks for your own profit, or in a libellous or slanderous context, which is what the limitations to Free Speech(tm) in the US are.
So yes, you can go on about your Grandpa and The Sunday Times, but no, you can't create a newspaper, call it The Sunday Times, and sell it, or use the trademarked item to promote goods of your own. Is that so hard to understand?
Oh, and my favorite: we reserve the right to add or change this agreement, so if you do something we don't like, we can change that contract you agreed to, and sue you under the new one. Yeah, that's fair.
Duh, yes, it is. Terms and Conditions the world over include this clause. It doesn't mean that they're allowed to sue you for something you did BEFORE they changed the conditions. Re-read them. What they're doing is to protect themselves from having people exploit possible loopholes in the the rules. It's a normal clause, and that's it. All it means is that they reserve the right to fix any problems and patch rules loopholes, without the miscreant being able to complain 'since he used to do that when the rules were different so he should be able to continue doing that since the rules said - way back then - that it was legal. Ok?
Now, come on. I know you've got a lot of karma lately, but isn't this pretty much just pointless flaming? It doesn't help anyone to vent in this forum, all we're getting are just extended flamewars about bad HTML, etc, that lead nowhere. It's really a better idea to complain straight to their webmasters if you have any issue with the way their website works.
And finally - if you really need to bitch, you can find a great target in the owners of The Times, News Corp. Also owners of 20th Century Fox, Fox TV (aka Crappy TV 90210), innumerable TV and news publications, and a global media giant who's been cozying up with mainland china, has allowed their TV to be censored, and has had their chairman, Rupert 'Mogul' Murdoch openly criticise western media response to the Tiannanmen Massacre, so the Chinese dictatorship would allow his dubious media enterprise to operate in China.
See, now you have a much better target than crappy HTML
Alex T-B
*sigh*
Ok, let's go over this again, redundant as it may be. (*duck*)
It is legal for any one individual or corporation to link to anything on the internet, whether it is immediately accessible from the originator's website or not, including frames, etc. The judge mentioned that it should be mentioned, however, that the linked-to content was not originating on the website from which the link comes. This means I can embed a frame into my homepage that shows, for instance, a movie clip that's on Apple's website. The place that is being linked to can not protest against this in any legal manner. (But there're technical ways around it)
However, in this case, 2600.com is linking to sites that have software which was deemed illegal, yes, ILLEGAL by a court, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 2600.com has been stopped, by court order, from posting the software on their site, and are circumventing it by linking to it. Whether we like it or not (and I hate it), this is just a sneaky way around a court order (i.e. providing access to material banned by said court), and the judge probably won't like it at all. This has nothing to do with deep linking - said linking referred to a person's right to link to something (perfectly legal) even if the people on whose site it is don't want that to happen.
Unfortunately, people have been sued over linking to illegal material (MP3s mostly) before - Slashdot posted a story of the Swedish Kid who was arrested and sued over linking to MP3s on his site (an arrest initiated by the RIAA, and no, it's not the deCSS guy
Seriously, guys - this is the real test, the one we've been waiting for. Is it illegal to LINK to material that is deemed 'unworthy' under our laws? To use a gun metaphor (which will probably start a flame war)
I guess this'll finally show how free the system really is.
Alex T-B
Well, my Linux box is at home, and I have to use the NT4 Server here at work to test the build.. here're a few brief experiences so far:
Using the 260k installer, and only grabbing the executable and the (7 megs?!) Java2 stuff, the install went fairly speedily (45 mins) over a 56k connection (13mb in total, without any of the feedback agents, Net2Phone, etc). No reboots were necessary, which is a nice step up from the 4.x releases, and of course IE. (although IE, to be fair, 'upgrades' a lot of system files under Winx)
Ok, first run. No, thanks, I don't want to sign up to Netcenter. And yes, I really really don't want to. I'm sure you nice Netscape, er, AOL guys would never do anything bad with my name and email address, but I just want to browse.
Here it comes up, loading it is a bit faster than the 4.x tree. On we go to the Netcenter N6 page, ah, Dynamic HTML, finally implemented, nice moving 'Netscape' writing, fully selectable, etc. It's just eyecandy, but proves standards compliance. Wohoo!
On we go.. let's see how fast Yahoo loads, my 'bare-bones' example for comparing IE and Mozilla so far. Ok, it's fine, not as speedy as IE5, but it's not an 'integral part of the OS', is it?
Now the real test.. slashdot.org, loads fine, I enter my name - NO, I don't want you to remember my password, Moz.., er, Netscape - and on we go.
Ah. Hmm. Well, either Slashdot isn't regularly tested with Mozilla, or it's _supposed_ to look this way. Most of the 'spacing' between objects is gone, i.e. the banner at the top of the screen is now touching the actual page instead of having a bit of space between the two of them. Since I turned the icons off, the slashboxes are now vertically sligned against the very top of the actual page, whereas the 'default' page has the icons in the top right corner aligning the slashboxes with the rest of the main page at the top. Ah well, broken HTML it ain't (unless you try to validate it
[Side note: Copying text from Mozilla/N6 and pasting into Windows apps doesn't seem to work right now, neither using the right-click menu, nor the Edit menubar. Hmm. It lets me paste, but never copy. Especially since it blanks out the 'Paste' option after pasting, clearly thinking it has something buffered in the paste clipboard. Odd, but fixable.
Anyway, let's see what Netscape has to say about it on their main page. On we go, www.netscape.com... err.. crash. Hmm. Now, I'd have thought that they'd test their own homepage with their own browser? Nevermind, let's load it back up again - sigh, I didn't download the feedback client, so this bug will probably go unnoticed - and try it again.. and the page loads just fine. Odd. Very odd.
Anyway, let's have a look at the memory footprint.. task manager.. netscp6.exe..
29752k ??
I guess this is the memory footprint of a modern cutting-edge app.. but what were the two years of propaganda about 'small, fast app', 'efficient modular coding' etc. all about? I understand that IE5's memory usage (6megs right now) is partly due to the fact that a lot of its engine and parts are pre-loaded by the OS during startup.. and maybe under UNIX a lot of Netscape's code will reside in code already loaded by the X wm (widgets, etc).. but 30 megs? I just started the thing, it's not like hours of use have led it to leak memory like a bastard, accumulating dozens of megs of cached pages, etc, etc?
The actual netscape executable is 356k large, probably so it can start fast and give a speedy impression. The 'components' dir, full of to-be-loaded
And the 'theme'-ability (i.e. skins, etc) aren't even included! I even disabled the sidebar, and reduced most options like What's Related? and Internet Keywords to a minimum, so I'd have a bare-bones, speedy browser, and nothing else. I'm guessing that part of it is the Java2 stuff that's loaded at startup - but the memory usage still baffles me. If it preloads all it needs, I'd at least expect it to be as fast as IE, if not better, seeing how IE5 is at its core based on a browser MS bought from Spyglass which in turn was a rebranded NCSA Mosaic licensee from 5++ years ago. (Check 'About' in IE5 if you don't believe me.)
Ok, this is a pre-releases, still Alpha, not to be used widely, etc.. but seeing how the final
Ok, so in the time I needed to write this, (5 mins?) Netscape seems to have assimilated more memory for its personal needs. It now occupies 35 MB of RAM, and all I did to make it grow by 5 megs is to type some text in this textfield. Either it's doing funky stuff, or NT hates its guts. (and I'm waiting for people to post saying it's all NTs fault, and they've had Mozilla running on their 386 Linux boxes for months without crashes or memory problems
I'm sure this isn't the fault of Gecko, the rendering engine at its core, but the browser built around it seems to have a few architectural issues. I hope the Mozilla guys will be able to give it a swift kick in the pants before the Netscape6 release. Press coverage of a sluggish Netscape that doesn't match IE's capabilities would probably kill it off for good on non-UNIX platforms. I think I better go and kill off all Netscape-related processes now before it sucks up the remaining memory and I have to reboot the machine.
Apart from the memory issues, though, the Lizard seems to be a capable beast. Especially since this a pre-release do Slashdot Netscape's servers, grab the thing, and test it. With enough bugzilla reports, I'm sure the issues can be fixed in time for the release.
Alex T-B
PS: This post is coming to you courtesy of the fourth 'Submit' attempt. The Lizard keeps popping up a little box saying 'Connection refused by slashdot.org.. is that a HTTP error code. Which one? Please talk to me, Mozilla.
Ok, this'll get hammered mercilessly, but as Lando Calrissian once said.. here goes nothing:
Rob, you've been enormously successful with this site. You get million(s) of hits a day. And as your success grows, so does criticism.
You don't learn that studying algorithms and putting together nifty CGI movies, but either in management school (oh, the horror) or through personal experience - as people's attention to your action increases, so does negative coverage. I mean, what're trying to do here is noble; a weblog of matters relevant to a small subsection of the population. Yeah, I know - it's frightening, but the type of geeks we are is and never will be the majority - 'cause if Jon Katz's Hellmouth articles taught us anything, then it was that we're a minority. We were the strange outcasts in school. We were weird. Why? Because we were different from everybody else - yeah, that's right. Everybody else was a majority.
(Bear with me here, I'm getting to a point)
Now, you've created a site that caters to - supposedly - every geek's wet dream, a concoction of tech news, relevant media stuff, general assorted 'rights online' politically-related stories and everything else one could possibly ever care about. And here's the catch. How many stories do you post a day? Not more than a dozen or two. Selected from 400++ daily submissions. Who makes the selections? You do. Hemos does. Roblimo. Emmett. The rest of the gang. And most of those people are either friends of yours or share a fairly near-identical view of what's relevant. Of what's news for nerds. Of what is Stuff That Matters. However, a million page views or so a day to Slashdot is likely to attract the attention of say, 20% of people whose views are fairly different from your own. Of those 20%, perhaps half will fairly violently disagree with the comments attached to stories - and with the general mood of the discussions going on after the stories are posted. I know Slashdot caters to a wide audience, but maybe there're tens of thousands of people reading this, people we're commonly deriding as PHBs. What do they want to read about? Tech news. Stuff that's relevant to their jobs. Perhaps they're even interested in the 63k+ Windows2k bugs, and need to make strategic decisions on how to upgrade their systems. Maybe they care that StarOffice is now supported by Sun. Or that LinuxCare has a deal with Dell. Like that very subsection that we're deriding, another subsection is very dissatisfied when a story they're submitting isn't posted. Perhaps some of the people bitching are not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. Perhaps they're just annoyed that their latest "M$ SUCKZ, D00D!" article was rejected and Slashdot instead posts something about "Research Institutions and Corporate Interests" - I mean, who carez, D00D? You're not giving any thought to the fact that Slashdot is probably one of the favourite places for script kiddies to go. Their juvenile sense for destruction can express itself in flaming away on the discussion threads. Finally a way for them to publically attract attention to their verbal skills. Finally a forum where their PEERS live. What many people don't figure out is that script kiddies often think that they're ELITE. Some of them may even quickly paste together a website mimicking Slashdot, to attract the same amount of peer attention that you, Rob, have done. So people worship them in the same sense that Rob has become an OSS hero and icon of geeks worldwide. Who became a multimillionaire (Andover money + stock options + VA Linux stock options == lots of AIBOs) simply by turning his hobby into his job. Who wouldn't want to become rich and famous by writing a web page? The complexity of the behind-the-scenes work necessary for Slashdot seems to be lost on many of them, though. Which is why you're in the limelight, Rob. Your work isn't appreciated. You are admired and hated at the same time. The time people spent honing their '$ winnuke www.microsoft.com' skills wasn't used to acquire any social skills. On the internet, people will flame if they dislike who you are, and what you stand for.
Please Rob - don't be amazed and rant at people complaining about story submissions. Slashdot has become increasingly pro-Linux, anti-MS, pro-Libertarian, anti-Responsibility ("don't like that piece of software? hack it yourself!"), and unpalatable for many people. I still like it, but many others don't. Just please don't rant at the reactions caused by the creation of your own hands. It's become very, very big - and all that's missing is the 'Caveat Emptor' banner over the main page.
Finally - in the 'Ask Rob and Hemos anything' interview a while ago, people asked why the story submission queue wasn't opened up for moderation. You guys answered that you didn't really know what the person meant. To clarify: Have a separate page, or possibly even a very very long slashbox, where people can see all the stories currently in the submission queue. People with moderation points (that means more moderators) can then give moderation points to a story. Once the story reaches a certain number of points, it gets moved onto the front page. People can then set their 'threshold' for front page stories, and moderators can still give stories points, so I can for instance decide that I only want to see stories that received 20+ points, etc. Similarly, it's still possible to filter out stories that are on a certain subject - so I can still killfile Apache stories, or FreeBSD stuff.
The result? A truly open source forum. Won't happen, though.
Anyway, here's the end of my offtopic troll flamebait rant. It's really not an ad hominem attack against Rob or anyone else in particular. However, once you reach a certain status/fame, you're subject to attacks by 'lesser' people - as ESR's 'take my job, please' rant once attested.
int end_of_rant();
Alex T-B
Hey Rob. I know this is more than one questions - please pick whichever you believe is most relevant.
Mr Katz,
Rob Malda fairly correctly describes you as the most hated author on Slashdot. Whilst many of us seem to feel that you're simply looking at the issues you're writing about from an overblow point of view, seeing 'technical milestones of incredibly important significance', some of the posters on Slashdot have a particular peeve. Namely your qualifications.
Slashdot.org is a very technical forum - many of the posters on here simply read it because they feel it best sums up technical events in the Real World. However, your expertise seems to be rudimentary, at best. Linux, the prodigal child of the Slashdot community, proved to be quite a problem, as you struggled with it for quite a while, even writing articles about the difficulties you had. Many of us felt that you wrote those articles so you become more accepted by the crowd, and to show that you aren't just a Windows techie. Now, after quite an intro, here're the questions:
Thanks, and apologies for the length and number of questions. Just pick one.
Alex T-B
It's easy to dismiss UseNet as an unwieldy, overblown relic of the times when people didn't zoom along over cable modems, viewing everything at 32bit colour on their 19" monitors. However, many people still live in that era. UseNet is enormously useful, if:
- You don't have graphical access to the internet. Yes, text-based browsers make many things perfectly usable, but have you tried using board-type discussion forums using Lynx lately? Sites such as Slashdot are usable - but when you want to rapidly check on cross-references, determine posting status, etc, a newsreader such as 'tin' beats web browsing any day.
- Secondly, a newsfeed is local. You browse articles on a local server, usually either on a campus/office network or just at the other end of your modem. I know many people praise the cheap and available nature of ADSL, Cable modems, etc, but in many places, individual high-speed access is just a dream. Take China and India, for example. What do you think is more realistic - millions of people clicking 'Read followup' in their Netscape/IE window, or selecting 'next article', thereby quickly retrieving a local article to their screen?
- Guess what. Newsreader interfaces right now are superior to anything I've seen on the web for discussion forums. They're also much faster, but that's just a snide remark. Even the somewhat crippled newsreader in Communicator beats any configurability and power that, say, Infoworld's forum's offer. This really isn't mean to be a cheap shot at web forums - but newsreader interfaces have had more than a decade or two to mellow and be improved. Sure beats the 'Submit' and 'Preview' buttons, doesn't it?
- Yeah, the binary problem is rampant. But so what? If your sysadmin has any clue as to what he's doing (and this means doing more than just configuring INN to auto-subscibe all), he'll be able to filter out anything he wants to. This specifically means binary postings, for instance. If a user desperately needs them (and I'm sure many do
:), then www.deja.com remains an option. - This is probably a moot point to many, but UseNet has become a global cultural archive of our age. From the days of clear, simple, useful inter-governmental discussions, through the university glory days, finally when AOLers became the most maligned force on UseNet, and ultimately entering our current stage, UseNet has become a cultural mirror of society. Larry Wall's postings from more than a decade ago are still *somewhere*, and the Wall Quote Archive is a damn good proof of that
:-) - Perhaps more importantly - UseNet is distributed. Yes, this means that a ridiculous lot of spam and other junk is moved around the net daily. But so what? I know that no site admin can censor what I want to read - there will always be open news servers, or even - oh dear - web interfaces like Deja.com. I will never ever have to fear that Andover and then VA Linux will mess with any freedom. I can create a new group, if peer approval is given. The people I want to talk to can subscribe to the group. Ultimate, anarchic freedom. Isn't this what the Internet is supposed to be all about - and what we're celebrating on Slashdot? We seem to believe that Slashdot is the ultimate free anarchical net community. Nonsense. UseNet is. Has been. Will be.
- I remember reading through the 'Zen and the Art of UseNet' years and years ago, my mind lighting up with the pure joy at the realisation that UseNet was truly self-governed. So what if spam innundates the unmoderated groups? You can set up a moderator, if enough people care about your topic. Even create a new group and get rid of the old one. Spammers can't always get to you, but the information will always get out to those who want to reach it.
Personally, I believe that Usenet will continue existing long after those who're predicting its death right now have gone away. Maybe it'll be a beautified Usenet, with lots of graphics tacked on top, the way Deja is trying to turn it into a 'community-based' collection of 'forums'I don't see anyone predicting the death of e-mail or the web, yet both are full of spam and useless junk. But similarly to Usenet, both are based on extremely simple principles, and remain usable with an extremely low technological investment. Everything IE/Netscape/Outlook/Eudora/etc. may throw at you, from Templates to Style Sheets to embedded video, is just eyecandy. The underlying backbone, the information, survives.
God, that was sentimental. Now if that wasn't the pinnacle of geekdom - coming close to shedding tears over the beauty of bits and bytes and a text interface...
Alex T-B
Tom - this is an intricate issue.
Sorry, but at the most basic level your argument must be refuted: It simply isn't true that KDE2.0 won't be catering for 'the rest of us.' As the coders emphasized at multiple times in the interview, the 'theme' capability will extend beyond simple skin/button functions offered by conventional wmanagers. By implementing a relatively simple scripting method that can be understood even by newbies, KDE2 will offer something for 'the rest of us.' The example mentioned redesigns the UI to resemble BeOS, I believe, with a 200-line script, which, to be honest, isn't all that much more compared to the average-to-highly-customized
Now, what I find 'terribly, terribly disappointing is the negative attitude facing the KDE2 developers because they do not join in the chants of 'developing the future of UIs and WMs', but instead focus on something at the moment significantly more important: Converting the existing GUI OS userbase to UNIX and GNU/Linux.
The explicitly stated desire to emphasize visual elements from Windows and MacOS is vital: As much as we love the funky customizability of GTK/Gnome/E-based stuff, 90% of users will be looking for an interface that works, and, more importantly, is intuitive, easy-to-learn, and easily modifiable to a certain extent. E offers all this, but any long-term user of both system will understand KDE's more basic 'intuitive things that work well' approach.
For those who want to push it to the next level (yes, 'the rest of us'), the scripted themeability of KDE2 should be sufficient.
In fact, what worries me is the implication that what's 'sensible to non-UNIX people' is bad or in fact inferior to what's 'sensible to UNIX people.' I have been one of those 'Unix people' for close to 10 years now, nothing compared to the Xerox Dinos who've used GUIs for more than two decades, but I do realise that the traditional ease-of-use and intuitive use of my own favourite WM, fvwm2, lags behind the newers MacOS versions. Even E doesn't offer Joe User the simplicity of knowing what's going to happen if he clicks on this and that. Perhaps this is because E is so much more customizable than MacOS. Or perhaps it's because the MacOS GUI designers studied the way people perceive and use GUIs more than the E people, and used that information.
Again, no offense to the awesome work done by the Gnome/E people.
Finally, I fear that the attitude taken by Tom, one of the most important Unix/Perl pioneers and flag-bearers of the OSS world, somewhat reflects the underlying fear of those community members who would otherwise (justifiably) sneer at Gnome/KDE flamewars:
So what remains? At the end of the day, KDE makes a valiant effort to overcome those fears. Unfortunately, it doesn't really help all that much, since key people behind the OSS effort seem dismayed by the philosohpy behind KDE: 'Make it work work. Make it work well.'
But isn't that also part of the philosophy behind Linux and OSS?
Isn't Linux based on a monolithic kernel rather than a micro-kernel due to the fact that the latter is, to paraphrase Linus, 'an academic concept' rather than a proper functioning and tested system?
Strange. And finally Tom, since you're one of the people behind the invaluable ORA Perl books, isn't Perl part of the driving force to 'just making stuff work'?
Without trying to devalue your contribution to the community: Don't you think you're being dragged into a philosophico-conceptual flamewar raging not so much in the Slashdot polls but rather in the minds of UNIX developer? Namely, where to take our UNIX world next, and how to include the majority of the world's PC userbase without crippling GNU/Linux so it's usable for them?
I am torn back and forth between trying to protect my beloved complex Linux setup that is inaccessible to most newbies, and attempting to understand that, to quote Larry Wall and yourself, 'there is more than one way to do it.' Yes, KDE may be a more 'newbie-friendly system.' But they are trying to get it to play nice with Gnome/E, E already implementing some KDE hints, more soon to come. The Brave New World of full customizability and WM interoperation should offer us what we want without leaving newbies out in the cold. Which is what we want, isn't it?
Alex T-B
"Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."
Hey
This isn't meant to be offensive to the Slashdot crew or Nathan in particular, and I understand that the comment added to the news posting was most likelt humorous in nature. But: Do you guys think that
> Cool, MP3's and DECSS'd DVD movies at the speed of the light.
is a good impression to give to non-hacker types reading Slashdot? (hacking, not cracking) Of course, lots of nerdy techies like myself
But many of the industry people who do read Slashdot and try to form an opinion of Open Source (Unreal and Q3 developers, for instance, both of whom have posted here previously), will form the opinion that we're just a bunch of immature geeks who'll steal their software, if necessary.
Again, I know the comment was probably meant to be funny - but guys, we aren't alone here anymore. 'Suits' and industry people read Slashdot, and their opinion counts if we want to bring proper DVD support to Linux, for instance. Or if we want full Linux support for games, etc.
We're in a phase right now where everything that happens to Linux really, really matters. Let's not throw it away by acting childishly, and fitting into the 'zealot geek' stereotype many would like to categorise us as.
Sorry, Nathan - this really isn't a flame against you.
Alex
"Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."
[Argl, I mis-posted the first. Anyway, as Lando Calrissian said, here goes nothing.]
One simple way for Microsoft to change and break Apache's dominance of the web server market is to introduce 'feature creep' with IIS and NT, by integrating new features into the OS and IIS that aren't accessible to other servers.
An example was given with intranet corporate web posting. Sharing files and documents over a corporate intranet is the way to go. Email exchange and document sharing can be made much easier if it's all simply accessible with just a few mouseclicks from your Win98 desktop.
Now, everybody will want to put his drafts and whitepapers online quickly - and hey, look, there's a button just for that in Office2002.
And it all integrates nicely with Win2k and IIS. Why run Apache, which doesn't support all those nifty features and makes it 'more difficult' for admins to install and run it? If the users clamor for it, they'll get it, right?
After all, having admins mess about with incompatible stuff will annoy the management - this is all productivity loss, remember? Can't we just go with The Standard?
That'll be the first step.
Then, how does all that integrate with the outside world? Of course everybody in the firm will be using IE6 or 7, since it came with the OS and servers, and supports all the funky features Word2002 and IIS offer, 'for enhanced productivity and ease-of-use'. After all, it's all in the name of innovation - and annoyingly enough, it would make many things easier. But back to our example.
To tie everything in with the outside world, the corporate VPN and WAN, we need for our servers to communicate with each other. For instance so the offices everywhere can share the same documents. And send corporate email back and forth. And all of that ties in nicely with Exchange2k and all other corporate network solutions. From MS. All run on Win2k, with MS databases at the end.
After the internal structures of a business work so nicely together, we'll want the customers to be able to co-operate with all this. So we're adding special features. IE has an market dominance, anyway, and it ties in with everything else we're running.
Oh, you don't run MS? We're sorry, but our web logs and in-depth market research have shown that 92% of our customers are from home and corporate environments, which in turn mostly run IE. I'm afraid we can't support niche systems, Sir. We don't have the time, you understand?
This is how the web will be won. Unless Mozilla, Navigator 5, Konqueror, and Apache manage to impose a client-side as well as the existing server-side architecture on the market - an architecture that MS won't be able to break.
Does anyone remember 'Chrome', MS proprietary web enhancements? Or ActiveX-only pages? Guess what - if MS manages to fight back in the server market, it'll flood it with proprietary tech that will be tied to its OS, its servers, and its browsers. And then it will be all over.
So don't stand around idly, but go over to the Konqueror and Mozilla pages, and contribute. Even non-coders can write man and help pages and contribute to design decisions. Even you can add bug reports. Everybody can help - but as long as the infighting and holy wars continue, MS can only win.
And do you really want to see the message
Sorry, only for MS-enhanced browsers
on your screen? They can win it, and they will win it from the server side. We're already retreating in mass from the client side. Tim O'Reilly isn't an idiot, and he isn't a firebrand - he makes valid points: The entire MS case, and the FoF will be utterly pointless if the market decides to vote for MS servers in the end.
Apologies if this sounds inflammatory - I don't advocate that all MS products are bad, some of their software is awesome - but the way they market things goes against everything I believe in.
Alex
"Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."
Mr Vranesevich,
it is rather improbable that you will actually read this message, [and I expect it to be moderated down as flamebait], but please take note of the following few problems:
All we wanted was the truth. I guess you think we just can't handle it.
Alex
--
"Your telnet is talking to itself. Welcome to the wacky world of TCP/IP."