I hate to contribute to this but...
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 2
I hate to try to be the voice of reason in here, and I'm sure I'll be flamed to the hilt, but here goes anyway.
the article had some points, however, it was a little overboard in it's 'gnome sucks, kde rocks' attitude. It's fine to feel that way, but when every sentance is a slam, you (or at least I) get a sick feeling reading it.
some of the points, like making money from gnome, are kina irrelevant. In the interview posted on/. the other day (link) the way they were going to make money was by keeping the software free and open (beer+speech) but offer a *service* to aid people using it. This is how people can survive economically in an open source world.. this is also a service that I would use.
KDE vs GNOME is personal preferance. Both have good and bad points, but in the end, you use what you like or are comfortable with. I use gnome becuase I like the way it looks and feels. [random other person] uses kde for the same reasons. Who cares beyond that.
At the end user level I don't care at all if one is written in C and the other C++. I care if the applications and environment *feel* comfortable to me and the apps do what I need.
It appears everyone is missing the "use the right tools for the right job" philosophy that comes as the result of most "us vs. them" arguments. Macs have their place, as do windows machines, as do linux machines, as does kde/gnome/fvwm/xfmail/mutt/pine/elm/gimp/photoshop ....
having read some articles on UI design I know that both kde and gnome break a huge number of rules... or at least ideas of how a "well designed" GUI should work.
I really don't think that GNOME is out to kill KDE. It is there as an alternative, though it was started because of the politics of KDE.
Alternatives are good.
Choice is good.
Competition is good. One thing about the gnome/kde debates that people seem to miss is that a huge number of STANDARDS compliant (or at least semi-standards compliant) apps have been written since this whole war started. While the kde coders are trying to outdo the gnome coders they are all creating decent apps and making them better over time. The end result of this is that in the end we have more choice, more apps, and better apps.
Now folks lets come to our senses, realize that we're all on the same team with the same objective... to make linux better.
Re:One good point -- too much C in open software
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
(Score: 0, boring)
Dude, don't get me wrong... I love perl. Hell, I code in it 8 hours a day, 6 days a week... but it is not the be all and end all of languages. It rocks, and when I use C I *wish* C had it's ease of string/hash/array manipulation (these days I'd give my kidney for easy string manip in C). But there is a place for everything, and compiled C/C++ has it's place:)
...and the article say, it's about chips for appliances -- for now.
Anyone who has seen Pirates of Silicon Valley will be able to correlate this to MS's "please apple, send us your pre-production system so we can design apps for it... just apps, we promise, we don't have any intention of doing any OS stuff at all... we promise."
Still, it'll be an interesting time watching this happen... though IIRC there is already a "winchip" out there.
Ah yes, but don't forget that this is a *leak* and therefor there is a chance it's not true. Remember how they set the title of SW:VI to "revenge of the jedi" for a while, and then at the last minute changed it to ROTJ? This could be what could happen here... maybe Lucas want's to be a bit more secretive this time and leak a fake (and may I say obvious) title while the title that will be released might be quite different.
I've run both and I don't think there's really any difference. The cable shared access thing might be a factor, but as far as speed... well, the incoming and outgoing speeds are completely arbitrary, this is just a setting the provider sets up on their system. There's no "real" limit that says that ADSL only gets 640K up... it's just what the provider sets up.
I'd say go with whoever gives you better service. If you're on a system that says you can't run servers, either switch or block the service scanner with an ipchains rule. Personally the one I'd go with is the one you never have to call:) My system has an uptime of forever simply because a) I never reboot and b) my provider doesn't blow up my connection ever, so I don't have to worry about my connection going down.
*Shameless Plug*
For quick and easy VPN/ipmasq setup maybe check out my companies product called Gateway Guardian. Similar to the LRP in that it's a single disk system, but that's about it. All the set up is done in a java application and there is no linux knowledge needed for setting up the firwall or VPN. Oh, and the personal edition is free.
*end shameless plug*
Personally I'd use IPMasq regardless of the # of IPs I get. Right now I'm on Telus's ADSL with one DHCP address which is masqing 4 (though with lan parties that jumps up considerabley) addresses inside.
IMNSHO you should use masqing or at *least* a decent firewall on xDSL or cable modem simply because you really don't want your documents, pr0n or private mail being snooped by your neighbors or even the @HOME people.
The only reason I'd use the multiple IPs is to set up a separate web/mail/whatever server on a DMZ for myself. Of course, you're not allowed to set up a webserver right? Well, a little ipchains magic to block the scanning address:)
Re:I actually have good things to say about Mozill
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
As for startup time (always the problem with normal Mozillas) - it is now much, much quicker than Netscape 4 on either Windows of Linux, and
getting close to IE5 (which is the fastest starting browser I've ever seen, except maybe Lynx or something).
Yes, ie5 is fast... of course, while the browser starts up fast, the OS is slow... hmm... wonder how that works:)
Same with realplayer (and a few other programs I've installed) under windows. I really don't like loosing the extra time and memory while it loads itself into the taskbar so it can "start" quickly.
I think that malda plants these people and their articles so that we'll all comment, and increase page hits on/., driving up his revenue from banner ads!
First of all, don't get me wrong, I love mozilla. The Raptor/Gecko rendering engine makes me want to cream every time I resize a 400 message slashdot forum and it doesn't have to reload the entire fscking page. It rocks.
However, I have to agree with the suck.com article when they say that mozilla should have released a 1.0 far sooner. I want a good browser, and I think a lot of other people do too. Netscape sucks and people are getting tired of using it. I really really just want a (galeon like but without all the hoops you have to jump through) good browser that renders well and in compliance to standards (whatever they are).
I don't need mail, news, XUL, XML, XBSL, a mozoffice, a mozchat, a mozOS or anything else (yes, I know that some of those don't exists, but you get the point right?). I just want a browser.
IMHO once a 1.0 browser has been released, bug fixed, etc, then add in all the other stuff, like mail, news, chat, etc. XUL is cool so that people can skin everything, but do you really think that that's needed by 99% of the people out there? Esp the ones like myself who have basically 2 choices for graphical browsers under linux (netscape and mozilla).
Again, don't get me wrong, I've been using the milestones and nightly builds and watching things get better and more stable all the time and been loving them and singing the praises of mozilla. I just want a good browser.
There IS actually a screensaver along simliar lines. Head over to electricsheep.org for details of their SS.
Electric sheep is an internet server and xscreensaver module that displays mpeg video of an animated fractal flame. In the background it contributes render cycles to the next animation. Periodically it uploads completed frames to the server, where they are compressed for distribution to all clients.
So maybe having a secondary board to run your screensaver off of isn't that far off:)
Well, following the model of a street performer, they can pack up and leave any time, even if it's right in the middle of your favorite [song|act|juggling|magic trick]. They have no obligation to go on and it's up to the people who are the fans to throw $ in their hat (or into the amazon website).
I personally don't think he's really trying to make money here but is conducting an experiment to see if you can cut out the middleman and communicate directly with the fans. I plan to download it and I plan to pay my $1, if for nothing more than to prove to myself that when I say that I want to get rid of the evil middlemen and that I'll directly support the artists that I'm a fan of, I will.
Yes, the web has gotten huge and enormous and entire companies are based off it, but HTML is a MARKUP language. This means that it's supposed to tell the browser what sort of text it is supposed to be. Ie: H1 is a header... it's not 14 point aria bold, it's a header. Just like EM is emphisised, be it by italics, bolding, whatever. The whole point of HTML originally was NOT to define exactly what a webpage should look like, but to add markup to it.
Yes, the web has gotten way more refined these days, but we should all remember that there WILL be people accessing your pages in everything from lynx to mozilla to arena. Blocking them out or ignoring users who aren't using the latest and greatest of the 2 (or 1) web browsers out there are rude and inconsiderate bastards:)
Well, actually the hard part about the above is the regex, not the perl. In fact, the only part of the line that is perl is "$okay_tags" and perhaps the ";" at the end. The rest comes from the wonderful world of line nois^W^Wregular expressions.
Perl also makes regexs *easier* to read, and it allows you to do things like split up a regex onto multiple lines and so forth...
1) The applications I use are here today, not tomorrow, not next year. I got tired of trying out really beta software for Linux for the stuff I use, and the stuff that wasn't beta was very unpolished, very cluttered, very unfocused. Think GNUCash vs. Quicken or even Money and you'll see what I mean.
I can't argue with this. The apps are coming, and in reality I doubt any of them (minus the GIMP perhaps) would really stand up on a feature to feature, bug to bug competition.
2) X is slow and crappy and unresponsive. I run a dual CPU system and it annoys the hell out of me. X likes to crash, taking my whole system with it, usually. It just sucks balls. I stated before that the client-server architecture inherent in X is NOT NEEDED for typical home/end users. BeOS does the GUI right. You want to beat the GUI experience that Win2K gives? Ditch X and come up with something new.
I've never had this problem. Before I upgraded I was on a Cel-300 on a matrox millenium and I found no difference between windows and linux performace. Now this also depends a lot on your X setup and window manager, but I've never had issues with X.
3) I've not *touched* my registry since installing Win2k. I had to "touch" all kinds of config files weekly under Linux, just to install stuff.
I don't touch my windows registry either, but for a different reason:). You can have a stock linux system up and going without any realy system config file touching, but yes, sometimes you have to "touch" things. If you're running a server you have to configure all sorts of things. This configuration is done by editing files, just as setting up IIS requires you to configure settings within IIS. Sure there is no editing of those old archane text files, but there is "touching".
4) Who cares about freedom to do with the software? Can't you see that RMS wants you to be paid MINIMUM WAGE for your work? How dare you code for money! nono, that was a rant, sorry. Rather, most users don't give a rat's ass about GPL or whatever. They want to install a software package and then use it. They don't want to have to search freshmeat.net for some obscure graphics lib or a specific version or whatever. Win2K at least halfway has this right. how many updates have I done to Win2K? Two or Three, the security update patch, couple drivers. And they installed *smoothly* with a double click. Every week I was scouring for the latest glibc or whatever to get whatever to work. Too much of a hassle.
I work as a programmer for a linux company so the GPL is quite important. If anything it allows us to use "free" linux software and modify it to our hearts desire and build new linux solutions and sell them. Yes, we contribute back. No, I don't really belive that all software should be free, no one should get paid for any coding and all profits in a company should be from support or what have you.
4. Linux just felt too beta to do anything that I would want to do. The feel is not right on the OS. I don't care how smooth the architecture is or how stable it is (to an extent). Think of it this way: My Ti Graphing Calculator I had for engineering never crashed on me, but you don't hear me extolling it's stability virtues. Win2K didn't crash on me until I installed EverCrack.
That's how you feel. Linux has crashed on my way less than windows has, and it feels far more solid for me.
Like I said though, I'm a coder who does perl, C, cgi and web like stuff and because of my occupation Linux is a far more natural choice than windows.
It is personal choice though... which is what I hope we all realize this... I choose linux, someone else chooses windows, someone else chooses BeOS.... different tools for different jobs.
Well, if there are no windows machines around, and someone submits a story that says "come look at this cool video" and you can't go and check it, do you just blindly post, hoping it's not some pr0n or something thats *really* lame, or do you not post the story? On one hand it's elitist, on the other, it's needed to ensure that no stories of "unknown" quality are put up..
my $0.02
alan, who doesn't have a way to view quicktime 4 at his compound
I think he means development tools for windows. Of course free GNU tools are cheaper, but good dev tools under windows (I'm guessing) aren't all that cheap. MS gives them out really really cheaply because they know that people using those dev tools will make software for their OS, thus requiring other people to buy said OS. This is of course cheaper than buying the equivelant [whatever other companys there are] tools.
Now going to linux/gnu/gcc is all nice and good but some people can't switch over (for their jobs at least) for any number of reasons.
Alan (who for the record works at a linux only company)
Of course, this is the same thing that happened with the 300k banned from napster... create new account, download more metallica mp3s...
Unless they start to request a credit card number for accounts... not to charge of course, no no no, this would just be to verify that you *had* one, and therefor were old enough to use the service.
Granted, all this would do is increase the number (and quality) of credit card number generators out there:)
I guess they decided that having their own language libraries and extensions wasn't good enough and they had to have their own entire language. Based off of the bad parts of existing languages of course...
Not that I care of course, as I can't run.exes under linux anyway. Well, I suppose I could use wine or vmware, but that would indicate that I actually *care* about MS's attempts to subvert programming languages...
I particularily enjoy the part about how it eliminates programming errors though... that sort of relates to one of my favorite quotes from Larry Christensen:
"Perl wasn't designed to stop you from doing stupid things because that would prevent you from doing clever things".
I mean come on... a fair number of us here (a majority if I may be so bold) are *nix users anyway, and this will not affect us in any way. The technology *idea* sounds good, but do anyone here really think they can pull it off without screwing it up?
Also, knowing MS, their security on this will be "adequate" and suddenly the script kiddies out there will be able to crack into this from anywhere in the world? They'll also have to add functionality into the OS to accomplish this and hook it all in seamlessly, and this will make windows even more (if it's possible) unstable.
I was going to a college in the fraser valley in BC, Canada. It was a university-college, and the program was CIS (Computer Information Systems) which is a mix of business (bleah) and computing. Basically the thought was you get a good idea of all the things you need to survive out there, not just pure CS.
Why develop under linux? Or rather, why is it better to develop under?
Source code.
Let me steal a story from a co-worker of mine for a few minutes....
He was a rabid NT developer and had developed an extremely cool SNMP application using some hidden API stuff in windows. This was all done with available debugging tools from MS. Basically MS came to his boss and said "stop this now or we'll sue you". His boss folded and made my co-worker stop coding.
Now remember, no reverse engineering was done. No kernels were hacked, and no dlls were harmed. He, being a very smart guy, did brilliant code.
The hidden API in question was available from MS however, and for free. All you had to do was sign up to one of their developer programs, for only $50K/year (or some similar outragious amount), and you get access to all their hidden little things.
Not long after this he checked out linux. Not only was the entire inards of the system available, but you were *encouraged* to look at it, fix it, comment on it, etc.
At the Linux World Expo Last February, Linus Torvalds asked the crowd "how many of you have contributed to the Linux kernel?" Quite a few hands were raised. "Now how many of you have contributed to the Windows kernel?" 2 hands were (gingerly) raised. "And that," he said, "is the difference between Windows and Linux." (paraphrased, my appologies Linus.
So to end my rant, I'd say that the tools in windows are the same, and lets be honest, probably better or more mature (yes, I know, I do my coding with vi and gcc too...) than those in Linux, but the availability of information from the innards of Linux, and the whole open source movement for that matter, is what makes the difference.
When I was in college my advanced pascal class (this was 94ish) introduced us to the concepts of pointers, memory allocation, constructors, destructors and object orientation.
I was fscking lost. When did you dereference again? Do I have to allocate memory? Huh?
The semester after I took assembler. Suddenly all these concepts came to life! Wow! I know what a string is now, I know what I'm actually doing when I allocate memory! Wow, suddenly I understand why I need a constructor and destructor! Null terminated string is not just a term but an idea I can visualize in my head!
That's my personal experience with this anyway. YMMV. However, I gotta agree with anyone who says that it is the Right Thing to teach from the ground up. If people had to take an assembler class *before* they got to take their "become a high paid programmer by cranking out crap in VB in 6 weeks" class, I think we'd have better programmers out there.
Now I don't begrudge people needing apps Now(tm). A friend of mine does VB programming and I admit that it has it's place. Being able to produce a program and worry about UI rather than worrying about HOW it's doing it is a good thing. But there *has* to be a nice melding of the two.
and IBM didn't know MS were going to screw them over with OS/2.
It was pretty clear with the release of Windows 3.0 that Microsoft was a whore.
I don't know about that... win 3.0 was my first exposure to windows, and I don't know about you guys, but 3.0 SUCKED. I mean, all windows suck, but 3.0 really sucked. Compared to 3.0, 3.1 was a dream to work with. I personally think that it was with 3.1 that (publically anyway) MS became the leader.
Now that said, there wasn't really another company doing the sort of thing that windows was (at least with the advertising clout that MS had).
Slashdot Mirror
- the article had some points, however, it was a little overboard in it's 'gnome sucks, kde rocks' attitude. It's fine to feel that way, but when every sentance is a slam, you (or at least I) get a sick feeling reading it.
- some of the points, like making money from gnome, are kina irrelevant. In the interview posted on
/. the other day (link) the way they were going to make money was by keeping the software free and open (beer+speech) but offer a *service* to aid people using it. This is how people can survive economically in an open source world.. this is also a service that I would use.
- KDE vs GNOME is personal preferance. Both have good and bad points, but in the end, you use what you like or are comfortable with. I use gnome becuase I like the way it looks and feels. [random other person] uses kde for the same reasons. Who cares beyond that.
- At the end user level I don't care at all if one is written in C and the other C++. I care if the applications and environment *feel* comfortable to me and the apps do what I need.
- It appears everyone is missing the "use the right tools for the right job" philosophy that comes as the result of most "us vs. them" arguments. Macs have their place, as do windows machines, as do linux machines, as does kde/gnome/fvwm/xfmail/mutt/pine/elm/gimp/photosho
p ....
- having read some articles on UI design I know that both kde and gnome break a huge number of rules... or at least ideas of how a "well designed" GUI should work.
- I really don't think that GNOME is out to kill KDE. It is there as an alternative, though it was started because of the politics of KDE.
- Alternatives are good.
- Choice is good.
- Competition is good. One thing about the gnome/kde debates that people seem to miss is that a huge number of STANDARDS compliant (or at least semi-standards compliant) apps have been written since this whole war started. While the kde coders are trying to outdo the gnome coders they are all creating decent apps and making them better over time. The end result of this is that in the end we have more choice, more apps, and better apps.
Now folks lets come to our senses, realize that we're all on the same team with the same objective... to make linux better.(Score: 0, boring) :)
Dude, don't get me wrong... I love perl. Hell, I code in it 8 hours a day, 6 days a week... but it is not the be all and end all of languages. It rocks, and when I use C I *wish* C had it's ease of string/hash/array manipulation (these days I'd give my kidney for easy string manip in C). But there is a place for everything, and compiled C/C++ has it's place
Anyone who has seen Pirates of Silicon Valley will be able to correlate this to MS's "please apple, send us your pre-production system so we can design apps for it... just apps, we promise, we don't have any intention of doing any OS stuff at all... we promise."
Still, it'll be an interesting time watching this happen... though IIRC there is already a "winchip" out there.
--arc
Ah yes, but don't forget that this is a *leak* and therefor there is a chance it's not true. Remember how they set the title of SW:VI to "revenge of the jedi" for a while, and then at the last minute changed it to ROTJ? This could be what could happen here... maybe Lucas want's to be a bit more secretive this time and leak a fake (and may I say obvious) title while the title that will be released might be quite different.
I'd say go with whoever gives you better service. If you're on a system that says you can't run servers, either switch or block the service scanner with an ipchains rule. Personally the one I'd go with is the one you never have to call :) My system has an uptime of forever simply because a) I never reboot and b) my provider doesn't blow up my connection ever, so I don't have to worry about my connection going down.
*Shameless Plug*
For quick and easy VPN/ipmasq setup maybe check out my companies product called Gateway Guardian. Similar to the LRP in that it's a single disk system, but that's about it. All the set up is done in a java application and there is no linux knowledge needed for setting up the firwall or VPN. Oh, and the personal edition is free.
*end shameless plug*
Personally I'd use IPMasq regardless of the # of IPs I get. Right now I'm on Telus's ADSL with one DHCP address which is masqing 4 (though with lan parties that jumps up considerabley) addresses inside.
:)
IMNSHO you should use masqing or at *least* a decent firewall on xDSL or cable modem simply because you really don't want your documents, pr0n or private mail being snooped by your neighbors or even the @HOME people.
The only reason I'd use the multiple IPs is to set up a separate web/mail/whatever server on a DMZ for myself. Of course, you're not allowed to set up a webserver right? Well, a little ipchains magic to block the scanning address
Yes, ie5 is fast... of course, while the browser starts up fast, the OS is slow... hmm... wonder how that works :)
Same with realplayer (and a few other programs I've installed) under windows. I really don't like loosing the extra time and memory while it loads itself into the taskbar so it can "start" quickly.
</sarcasm>
I think that malda plants these people and their articles so that we'll all comment, and increase page hits on /., driving up his revenue from banner ads!
Yea, that's it... gotta be.....
However, I have to agree with the suck.com article when they say that mozilla should have released a 1.0 far sooner. I want a good browser, and I think a lot of other people do too. Netscape sucks and people are getting tired of using it. I really really just want a (galeon like but without all the hoops you have to jump through) good browser that renders well and in compliance to standards (whatever they are).
I don't need mail, news, XUL, XML, XBSL, a mozoffice, a mozchat, a mozOS or anything else (yes, I know that some of those don't exists, but you get the point right?). I just want a browser.
IMHO once a 1.0 browser has been released, bug fixed, etc, then add in all the other stuff, like mail, news, chat, etc. XUL is cool so that people can skin everything, but do you really think that that's needed by 99% of the people out there? Esp the ones like myself who have basically 2 choices for graphical browsers under linux (netscape and mozilla).
Again, don't get me wrong, I've been using the milestones and nightly builds and watching things get better and more stable all the time and been loving them and singing the praises of mozilla. I just want a good browser.
Regards
Electric sheep is an internet server and xscreensaver module that displays mpeg video of an animated fractal flame. In the background it contributes render cycles to the next animation. Periodically it uploads completed frames to the server, where they are compressed for distribution to all clients.
So maybe having a secondary board to run your screensaver off of isn't that far off :)
Well, following the model of a street performer, they can pack up and leave any time, even if it's right in the middle of your favorite [song|act|juggling|magic trick]. They have no obligation to go on and it's up to the people who are the fans to throw $ in their hat (or into the amazon website).
I personally don't think he's really trying to make money here but is conducting an experiment to see if you can cut out the middleman and communicate directly with the fans. I plan to download it and I plan to pay my $1, if for nothing more than to prove to myself that when I say that I want to get rid of the evil middlemen and that I'll directly support the artists that I'm a fan of, I will.
my $0.02CND.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou.
:)
Yes, the web has gotten huge and enormous and entire companies are based off it, but HTML is a MARKUP language. This means that it's supposed to tell the browser what sort of text it is supposed to be. Ie: H1 is a header... it's not 14 point aria bold, it's a header. Just like EM is emphisised, be it by italics, bolding, whatever. The whole point of HTML originally was NOT to define exactly what a webpage should look like, but to add markup to it.
Yes, the web has gotten way more refined these days, but we should all remember that there WILL be people accessing your pages in everything from lynx to mozilla to arena. Blocking them out or ignoring users who aren't using the latest and greatest of the 2 (or 1) web browsers out there are rude and inconsiderate bastards
My $0.02
Well, actually the hard part about the above is the regex, not the perl. In fact, the only part of the line that is perl is "$okay_tags" and perhaps the ";" at the end. The rest comes from the wonderful world of line nois^W^Wregular expressions.
Perl also makes regexs *easier* to read, and it allows you to do things like split up a regex onto multiple lines and so forth...
HTH
1) The applications I use are here today, not tomorrow, not next year. I got tired of trying out really beta software for Linux for the stuff I use, and the stuff that wasn't beta was very unpolished, very cluttered, very unfocused. Think GNUCash vs. Quicken or even Money and you'll see what I mean.
I can't argue with this. The apps are coming, and in reality I doubt any of them (minus the GIMP perhaps) would really stand up on a feature to feature, bug to bug competition.
2) X is slow and crappy and unresponsive. I run a dual CPU system and it annoys the hell out of me. X likes to crash, taking my whole system with it, usually. It just sucks balls. I stated before that the client-server architecture inherent in X is NOT NEEDED for typical home/end users. BeOS does the GUI right. You want to beat the GUI experience that Win2K gives? Ditch X and come up with something new.
I've never had this problem. Before I upgraded I was on a Cel-300 on a matrox millenium and I found no difference between windows and linux performace. Now this also depends a lot on your X setup and window manager, but I've never had issues with X.
3) I've not *touched* my registry since installing Win2k. I had to "touch" all kinds of config files weekly under Linux, just to install stuff.
I don't touch my windows registry either, but for a different reason :). You can have a stock linux system up and going without any realy system config file touching, but yes, sometimes you have to "touch" things. If you're running a server you have to configure all sorts of things. This configuration is done by editing files, just as setting up IIS requires you to configure settings within IIS. Sure there is no editing of those old archane text files, but there is "touching".
4) Who cares about freedom to do with the software? Can't you see that RMS wants you to be paid MINIMUM WAGE for your work? How dare you code for money! nono, that was a rant, sorry. Rather, most users don't give a rat's ass about GPL or whatever. They want to install a software package and then use it. They don't want to have to search freshmeat.net for some obscure graphics lib or a specific version or whatever. Win2K at least halfway has this right. how many updates have I done to Win2K? Two or Three, the security update patch, couple drivers. And they installed *smoothly* with a double click. Every week I was scouring for the latest glibc or whatever to get whatever to work. Too much of a hassle.
I work as a programmer for a linux company so the GPL is quite important. If anything it allows us to use "free" linux software and modify it to our hearts desire and build new linux solutions and sell them. Yes, we contribute back. No, I don't really belive that all software should be free, no one should get paid for any coding and all profits in a company should be from support or what have you.
4. Linux just felt too beta to do anything that I would want to do. The feel is not right on the OS. I don't care how smooth the architecture is or how stable it is (to an extent). Think of it this way: My Ti Graphing Calculator I had for engineering never crashed on me, but you don't hear me extolling it's stability virtues. Win2K didn't crash on me until I installed EverCrack.
That's how you feel. Linux has crashed on my way less than windows has, and it feels far more solid for me.
Like I said though, I'm a coder who does perl, C, cgi and web like stuff and because of my occupation Linux is a far more natural choice than windows.
It is personal choice though... which is what I hope we all realize this... I choose linux, someone else chooses windows, someone else chooses BeOS.... different tools for different jobs.
Well, if there are no windows machines around, and someone submits a story that says "come look at this cool video" and you can't go and check it, do you just blindly post, hoping it's not some pr0n or something thats *really* lame, or do you not post the story? On one hand it's elitist, on the other, it's needed to ensure that no stories of "unknown" quality are put up..
my $0.02
alan, who doesn't have a way to view quicktime 4 at his compound
From what I understand from the geeks in space of late, there are win9x machines in the compound they use for diablo.
I think he means development tools for windows. Of course free GNU tools are cheaper, but good dev tools under windows (I'm guessing) aren't all that cheap. MS gives them out really really cheaply because they know that people using those dev tools will make software for their OS, thus requiring other people to buy said OS. This is of course cheaper than buying the equivelant [whatever other companys there are] tools.
Now going to linux/gnu/gcc is all nice and good but some people can't switch over (for their jobs at least) for any number of reasons.
Alan
(who for the record works at a linux only company)
Of course, this is the same thing that happened with the 300k banned from napster... create new account, download more metallica mp3s...
:)
Unless they start to request a credit card number for accounts... not to charge of course, no no no, this would just be to verify that you *had* one, and therefor were old enough to use the service.
Granted, all this would do is increase the number (and quality) of credit card number generators out there
I guess they decided that having their own language libraries and extensions wasn't good enough and they had to have their own entire language. Based off of the bad parts of existing languages of course...
.exes under linux anyway. Well, I suppose I could use wine or vmware, but that would indicate that I actually *care* about MS's attempts to subvert programming languages...
Not that I care of course, as I can't run
I particularily enjoy the part about how it eliminates programming errors though... that sort of relates to one of my favorite quotes from Larry Christensen:
"Perl wasn't designed to stop you from doing stupid things because that would prevent you from doing clever things".
I mean come on... a fair number of us here (a majority if I may be so bold) are *nix users anyway, and this will not affect us in any way. The technology *idea* sounds good, but do anyone here really think they can pull it off without screwing it up?
Also, knowing MS, their security on this will be "adequate" and suddenly the script kiddies out there will be able to crack into this from anywhere in the world? They'll also have to add functionality into the OS to accomplish this and hook it all in seamlessly, and this will make windows even more (if it's possible) unstable.
I was going to a college in the fraser valley in BC, Canada. It was a university-college, and the program was CIS (Computer Information Systems) which is a mix of business (bleah) and computing. Basically the thought was you get a good idea of all the things you need to survive out there, not just pure CS.
Why develop under linux? Or rather, why is it better to develop under?
Source code.
Let me steal a story from a co-worker of mine for a few minutes....
He was a rabid NT developer and had developed an extremely cool SNMP application using some hidden API stuff in windows. This was all done with available debugging tools from MS. Basically MS came to his boss and said "stop this now or we'll sue you". His boss folded and made my co-worker stop coding.
Now remember, no reverse engineering was done. No kernels were hacked, and no dlls were harmed. He, being a very smart guy, did brilliant code.
The hidden API in question was available from MS however, and for free. All you had to do was sign up to one of their developer programs, for only $50K/year (or some similar outragious amount), and you get access to all their hidden little things.
Not long after this he checked out linux. Not only was the entire inards of the system available, but you were *encouraged* to look at it, fix it, comment on it, etc.
At the Linux World Expo Last February, Linus Torvalds asked the crowd "how many of you have contributed to the Linux kernel?" Quite a few hands were raised. "Now how many of you have contributed to the Windows kernel?" 2 hands were (gingerly) raised. "And that," he said, "is the difference between Windows and Linux." (paraphrased, my appologies Linus.
So to end my rant, I'd say that the tools in windows are the same, and lets be honest, probably better or more mature (yes, I know, I do my coding with vi and gcc too...) than those in Linux, but the availability of information from the innards of Linux, and the whole open source movement for that matter, is what makes the difference.
Agreed.
When I was in college my advanced pascal class (this was 94ish) introduced us to the concepts of pointers, memory allocation, constructors, destructors and object orientation.
I was fscking lost. When did you dereference again? Do I have to allocate memory? Huh?
The semester after I took assembler. Suddenly all these concepts came to life! Wow! I know what a string is now, I know what I'm actually doing when I allocate memory! Wow, suddenly I understand why I need a constructor and destructor! Null terminated string is not just a term but an idea I can visualize in my head!
That's my personal experience with this anyway. YMMV. However, I gotta agree with anyone who says that it is the Right Thing to teach from the ground up. If people had to take an assembler class *before* they got to take their "become a high paid programmer by cranking out crap in VB in 6 weeks" class, I think we'd have better programmers out there.
Now I don't begrudge people needing apps Now(tm). A friend of mine does VB programming and I admit that it has it's place. Being able to produce a program and worry about UI rather than worrying about HOW it's doing it is a good thing. But there *has* to be a nice melding of the two.
Here you go (in case the opera site is still /.ed).
I don't know about that... win 3.0 was my first exposure to windows, and I don't know about you guys, but 3.0 SUCKED. I mean, all windows suck, but 3.0 really sucked. Compared to 3.0, 3.1 was a dream to work with. I personally think that it was with 3.1 that (publically anyway) MS became the leader.
Now that said, there wasn't really another company doing the sort of thing that windows was (at least with the advertising clout that MS had).