I wonder, would we see noticable speed increases if a major Linux distribution (say, Mandrake) were to build all of their binary packages using the Intel compiler? The usefulness of this compiler for the average Linux user seems questionable given that all distros come with a perfectly wonderful compiler (gcc), but a use like this seems like a shoe-in.
Assuming, of course, that you would actually see any speed up. I wonder if any distro maintainers have bought the compiler and are rebuilding their binaries to compare execution speed, load times, and binary size?
We use PostgreSQL on Linux here at TrustCommerce. "Mission critical" might be an overstatement (it's credit card processing, which is important but not exactly life-or-death).
I don't know about Grandma, but we have all of our support staff, including our secretaries, running Mandrake 8 and they like it just fine. There's a few basic install details that our syadmin has to handle in order to make the machines usable for them, such as making StarOffice be the default app to open MS Word and Excel docs and acroread as the default for opening PDFs, but other than that they don't have much trouble.
The biggest "problem" we've had so far is that they try to double click icons on the desktop, opening the app twice - but except for one person I can think of, when we told them that you can change the launch action to be a double click through the KDE menu, they said, "No, I like this better...I just need to get used to it."
The "proper" sort of error handling varies wildly depending on the application type. For example:
A game should pretty much always abort if anything goes wrong. Missing or corrupted datafiles, etc. Diagnoic information will only be useful to programmers, so no need to make it terribly user friendly - just tell them to resintall the game.
A server application should give detailed messages which go to a logfile, pinning down exactly what it was trying to do, and what line it was on if parsing a file.
A productivity application can go easy on the diagnostic information, like a game, but being able to recover gracefully is far more important. At the very least, allowing the user to save their data before they restart the program.
A viewer-type program should be able to recover gracefully and just fill the area it can't parse or that is causing a problem with a blank space or something. Like a web browser that can't load a picture. If it's something like a file viewer that can't load a certain font, it should be able to fall back to a default font so that the document is still readable.
If CompuServe 7 comes packaged with Gecko, it could be one step toward rekindling the Web browser wars from the late '90s. Once the hands-down leader of browser technology, Netscape Communications, now a division of AOL, has let its browser slip into the middle of the pack.
Yes, but this time, the browser wars will be a fight to provide customers with the highest level of web standards compliance, rendering speed, cross-platform capability, and truly useful features. I, for one, think that this sounds like a good thing. (Even though I will probably not be using anything but Konqueror ever again.)
Having built numerous e-commerce sites and even worked on a commercial shopping cart written entirely in Perl, I can't say that I think it's the best choice. It's great if the job is small; it's quick to code, is installed on almost all hosting providers, and so forth. But for large projects the code becomes very difficult to manage, mainly because getting people to write clean Perl code is difficult.
There's a second downside: lack of good SSL networking. SSL is critical for credit card processing. I ported the GPL version of TCLink for Perl, and we ran into a lot of problems due to lack of a standard SSL library. For the first version of the client we ended up distributing a patched version of Net::SSLeay which added all of the certificate authentication functions we needed (and are missing from the standard install of Net::SSLeay). Later this became such a headache for the various platforms we were trying to support that we just coded a.xs version of the Perl client which wrapped around our C library. This has proven to be much easier to maintain.
Long story short: sure, Perl's great. Is it the best choice for e-commerce? I'm not so sure.
It depends heavily upon the type of development you're doing. Quite simply: if you're creating an end-user application such as a word processor or a game, an IDE like KDevelop is definitely the way to go. The app itself is highly visual, so creating it with visual tools makes sense. More importantly, with most apps, there's just a single program that you're writing and debugging, which the IDE can handle quite neatly.
Server tasks, on the other hand, are an entirely different story. Here you have something that is probably not terribly visual; most of the code runs in a place that the user will never see or have access to. You've got many little helper scripts, processes, client/server applications, processes communicating across many different machines, processes running automatically in the middle of the night - managing all of this with an IDE is probably impossible.
I do both types of programming at my place of employment. The core of our business is a payment gateway, which is hugely complex, and involves dozens of servers spread out across the United States communicating with each other, as well as internally, with a hundred and one small programs passing data off to one another. We do all our work on this part of our business with ssh, bash, vi, Perl, SQL, and occasionally some C.
On the other hand, I've worked on a few end-user applications (point of sale apps, install programs, reporting frontends) and KDevelop is great for them. Designing your widget layout in QDesigner is a breeze, and then integrating that back into your C++ code in KDevelop is drop-down simple. The embedded debugger is wonderful, as well.
Moral of the story: Choose the best tool for the job.
I've been using CVS for five years, and although it took me a while to learn its twists and turns, I now think that it is an absolutely excellent piece of software. I have been forced to use other major alternatives at various companies I've worked for (the most notable being Perforce and MS SourceSafe) and CVS is vastly superior to the others I have used. (I have not used Bitkeeper, so I can't compare it.)
Granted, it is missing a few important features such as the ability to flags files as having no revision history (so that large binaries can be stored without killing the server on commits and updates) and the ability to rename files and directories. But those are relatively minor complaints compared to all that it does do well.
My complaint with CVSup is that there's no commandline client! Since I often do work on remote servers with X ports firewalled, this is a bit of a problem for me.
Moreover, the GUI for the client is just *ugly*. It's this really bad pink colorscheme with Motif style widgets.
The software works really well as far as doing updates quickly and in a minimum of network traffic, but it's completely beyond me why the default client is GUI only. I've also searched for commandline tools but have yet to find anything, anyone know if such a beast exists?
As someone who works for a credit card processor, allow me to state that this issue is not a technical one, but rather a liability one. The credit card companies actually make it pretty easy to do international transactions, even currency convertion, as long as the settlement to the acquiring bank is in your native currency. (That is, a card from outside the US will be settled in dollars, and you'll be charged a slightly inflated convertion rate.)
However, when it comes to card-not-present transactions, and especially e-commerce transactions, merchant banks get nervous. You (and indirectly, your merchant bank) is shouldering the risk of fraud for any transactions that run through your account. The merchant banks usually respond to those that take out-of-country cards by jacking the discount rate up by a ridiculous amount. Whereas you might have been paying 2.5% before now you're paying 3% or 3.5%. And that's on ALL transactions! So even if you take one international card for every 100 transactions that you do, you're still getting charged the huge rate on ALL transactions.
Quite simply, the merchant looses money, unless they are getting a fairly substantial quantity of overseas orders. We do processing for many free software/open source related companies, and for them the US is just one small part of their customer base. But for your average hardware merchant...well, it just isn't worth it.
I want to own stock in companies that I believe in. I really do. But stocks appear to me to have little to do with the *company* and so much more to do with the *market*. If I buy Mandrake stock and Linux comes into favor on the stock market again, my stock goes up. If it goes out of favor, it goes down. There's little connection to whether or not Mandrake is delivering quality products to its customers, which to me is what a company is all about.
If there was a way I could own stock that directly reflected the success of the company rather than the ebb and flow of the market, I'd do it in a second.
Although I would generally be termed a Windows-hater (or, probably more accurately, a "Windows-strong-disliker"), I have to say that this looks like a strong step forward for Microsoft's OS. Interesting that while Apple seems to be moving away from the "dumbed-down" niche of operating systems, Microsoft is moving towards it - which makes sense.
Perhaps MS has finally noted the vast lead in usability that competing desktops (BeOS, KDE 2, and OSX being the primary contenders) have taken over the standard Windows interface. More competition means better interfaces for everyone. Does this mean that (finally!) the consumer is starting to count in this industry?
There's a happy medium in there somewhere wherein filenames are descriptive but not unreasonably long. Certainly I think that spaces are rather silly - it has long been a convention to seperate different "objects" with spaces, so even though you _can_ use them in filenames, I don't really think that you should. Especially when you consider that spaces aren't allowed in URLs, which have become almost as - or perhaps more - important than regular files.
For the file example you mentioned, I think the filename should be something like MatroxG400driverV4.3en.exe, although even that is pushing my limit on filename length.
Back in the "old days", I worked at a company that created products that ran on Linux, Windows, and DOS. This was about four years ago and there weren't as many choices. We used:
rendering: Glide
input: DirectInput on Windows,/dev/js0 on Linux
sound: Midas
widget set: Qt on Linux, win32 on Windows, text mode hackery on DOS
There were plenty of custom code blocks (file access, system timers, keyboard input, window setup) but they were all small, very quick to write, and self-contained.
In other words, it's actually no big deal to not use a single, all-encompassing library to protect you from the horrors of coding to a specific platform.
However, there are other choices these days. OpenGL+OpenAL+Qt would make a pretty nice, completely cross-platform toolkit setup that should do everything you want and more.
And of course there's SDL, which I think is probably the best choice. I haven't used it extensively myself, but everything I've seen looks very good, and moreover it's what Loki uses, so that's a pretty good recommend right there.
Having been in (and out, here and there, including right now) the industry professionally for about five years, here's my advise.
Write a game.
No one will hire you without experience (unless you get lucky), so give yourself your own experience. Sit down and create a complete game, 2D or 3D, with graphics (drawn in the Gimp or modeled in Blender), sound (recorded on a cheap microphone and edited in DAP), written in the language used almost exclusively in the US game industry (C++).
It doesn't have to be the most amazing thing since sliced bread, but it should do all the basic things that a game should, and do them well. It should be the kind of thing that someone should look at and say, "Wow, this guy knows how to write a game."
It doesn't have to be long, or even all that much fun. It's really more of a demo than it is a game. But it should carry all the trappings of a semi-professional title, visible the moment you load into the game.
That's how I got my first job, and that's how almost everyone I know in the industry got their first job.
FWIW, here's the companies I've worked for. They are usually always on the lookout for new talent.
The format looks cool, but it's still rough. I've been offering both MP3 and Vorbis from my download page for a while, and the few people that do try out the Vorbis version have complaints like:
- Can't get it to work with winamp
- Can't download it on Macintosh due to screwey MIME types
- My own complaint: the file is signifigantly larger than the matching MP3, yet the sound quality is noticably worse.
I'll check out this new beta. I'd say don't throw out notlame or your mp3 players just yet, but hopefully it will be up to par with MP3s (and maybe better!) very soon.
Oh, a point in its favor: getting the plugin for playing the files running on xmms was a breeze.
Normally I'm against this sort of pushing users to upgrade. But this is a special case; similar, in fact, to the libc5 vs. glibc2 upgrade.
The situation is that the 4.0 browsers were the fallout of a browser war, products made at the peak of that battle, and so bear all the scars and ugliness that went with it. Luckily that battle has ended, and the needs of the users (both viewers and creators of content) are considered paramount once again.
We need to leave behind this horrible cruft, and the sooner the better. I'm not sure I agree with the Javascript; besides Javascript itself being a product of the browser war, lazy coders tend to forget that there are more than two browsers out there. (Thank goodness for Konquerer's modifiable user agent string!)
My view for a while has been this: I code to web standards, use.PNGs for my images, and make sure my pages work as expected on Konquerer, Mozilla, and IE 5.5. I also run my pages through tidy. After all that, if you can't view my page, then you need to upgrade your browser. I see no need to bug the user about it, they'll figure it out. (Then again maybe not. But I still don't want to bug them about it.)
This is a great news. Dejanews was the reason I started using the web for the first time, many years ago, and remained a useful tool up until around early 1999. I hope that Google can restore them to their former glory.
If you claim that a given probe is supposed to land on the target celestial body, and it crashes, then you look really dumb and everyone questions your ability.
But if you claim that you're trying to crash, and then you "manage" to land it perfectly, then suddenly everyone is impressed with your genuis...
I've sent in many rebates over the years. Never have I bought something *because* of the rebate; but when I'm offered a few dollars back on something I was purchasing anyways, I usually go for it.
Well, so far, I've only ever once received the money back. To be specific, it was Circuit City, a $30 rebate on the delivery of my $1000+ refrigerator.
Here's the standard "font fix" I apply to Red Hat.
First, install the 100dpi fonts, included on the CD but not automatically installed.
Next, go into the font server config/etc/X11/fs/config and make all of the lines have ":unscaled" versions first, at the top.
Next, grab Win32 fonts (if you have access to them) and drop them in a directory somewhere. Add this directory to the font server config.
Go to www.gimp.org and go to Resources, then Fonts. Download sharefont and freefont and install them using the type1inst script. Do similar things with the ":unscaled" in the font server config file.
Finally, adjust any apps you're using to have fonts you like. Netscape can usually be fixed pretty easily by turning off the "allow font scaling" boxes in the preferences. If you're using high resolution and 100dpi fonts, you may want to scale up the fonts in some apps, such as your xterm program.
Finally - use KDE2! The KDE team has done a really good job of only using nice fonts in all of their apps. In particular, browsing the web with Konquerer (especially 2.1beta2) looks great. In fact, I've long since forgotten my days of X-font-suckiness, but I remember them sometimes when I make the mistake of loading up Netscape...
Finally, there *is* antialiased font servers available, both for Gnome and KDE. Personally I don't think KDE really needs it, but it certainly is nice looking. Presumably this feature will be rolled into upcoming releases for both of these packages.
Now, my question is this: since it's obviously quite possible to make X fonts not suck, WHY THE HELL DO DISTROS NOT DO THIS BY DEFAULT? It boggles my mind. Isn't this the sort of thing they should be worried about, especially desktop-oriented distros like Mandrake?
Ah well. Hopefully soon enough we'll have a fully anti-aliased kernel 2.4/XFree 4.0/KDE 2.1-based distro with nice fonts preinstalled. It certainly is about time.
Another ridiculous article
on
eWeek on Linux
·
· Score: 3
Funny, my company has been using Linux (and other free software) for mission-critical application in the enterprise for years. That includes all the stuff they mentioned - database, financial, CRM, and more. Linux does have a journaling filesystem as of 2.4.1, and it's actually had them for quite a while if you don't mind doing some kernel patching.
In fact, I would say that the only other platform that is as capable (and probably more so) that Linux in this regard is Solaris on Sparc hardware. Solaris has its own set of problems (mostly that it feels like an "old" UNIX to me, making it hard to develop on), but certainly is quite capable.
I guess these journalists (and the people they interview) just insist on handing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars over to Sun and Oracle. That's fine, since the products they sell are good. But for young companies with a limited cashflow (as we were just a few short years ago), that's not an option.
In that case, Linux (or one of the free *BSDs) is your only choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder, would we see noticable speed increases if a major Linux distribution (say, Mandrake) were to build all of their binary packages using the Intel compiler? The usefulness of this compiler for the average Linux user seems questionable given that all distros come with a perfectly wonderful compiler (gcc), but a use like this seems like a shoe-in.
Assuming, of course, that you would actually see any speed up. I wonder if any distro maintainers have bought the compiler and are rebuilding their binaries to compare execution speed, load times, and binary size?
We use PostgreSQL on Linux here at TrustCommerce. "Mission critical" might be an overstatement (it's credit card processing, which is important but not exactly life-or-death).
I don't know about Grandma, but we have all of our support staff, including our secretaries, running Mandrake 8 and they like it just fine. There's a few basic install details that our syadmin has to handle in order to make the machines usable for them, such as making StarOffice be the default app to open MS Word and Excel docs and acroread as the default for opening PDFs, but other than that they don't have much trouble.
The biggest "problem" we've had so far is that they try to double click icons on the desktop, opening the app twice - but except for one person I can think of, when we told them that you can change the launch action to be a double click through the KDE menu, they said, "No, I like this better...I just need to get used to it."
If CompuServe 7 comes packaged with Gecko, it could be one step toward rekindling the Web browser wars from the late '90s. Once the hands-down leader of browser technology, Netscape Communications, now a division of AOL, has let its browser slip into the middle of the pack.
Yes, but this time, the browser wars will be a fight to provide customers with the highest level of web standards compliance, rendering speed, cross-platform capability, and truly useful features. I, for one, think that this sounds like a good thing. (Even though I will probably not be using anything but Konqueror ever again.)
Having built numerous e-commerce sites and even worked on a commercial shopping cart written entirely in Perl, I can't say that I think it's the best choice. It's great if the job is small; it's quick to code, is installed on almost all hosting providers, and so forth. But for large projects the code becomes very difficult to manage, mainly because getting people to write clean Perl code is difficult.
.xs version of the Perl client which wrapped around our C library. This has proven to be much easier to maintain.
There's a second downside: lack of good SSL networking. SSL is critical for credit card processing. I ported the GPL version of TCLink for Perl, and we ran into a lot of problems due to lack of a standard SSL library. For the first version of the client we ended up distributing a patched version of Net::SSLeay which added all of the certificate authentication functions we needed (and are missing from the standard install of Net::SSLeay). Later this became such a headache for the various platforms we were trying to support that we just coded a
Long story short: sure, Perl's great. Is it the best choice for e-commerce? I'm not so sure.
It depends heavily upon the type of development you're doing. Quite simply: if you're creating an end-user application such as a word processor or a game, an IDE like KDevelop is definitely the way to go. The app itself is highly visual, so creating it with visual tools makes sense. More importantly, with most apps, there's just a single program that you're writing and debugging, which the IDE can handle quite neatly.
Server tasks, on the other hand, are an entirely different story. Here you have something that is probably not terribly visual; most of the code runs in a place that the user will never see or have access to. You've got many little helper scripts, processes, client/server applications, processes communicating across many different machines, processes running automatically in the middle of the night - managing all of this with an IDE is probably impossible.
I do both types of programming at my place of employment. The core of our business is a payment gateway, which is hugely complex, and involves dozens of servers spread out across the United States communicating with each other, as well as internally, with a hundred and one small programs passing data off to one another. We do all our work on this part of our business with ssh, bash, vi, Perl, SQL, and occasionally some C.
On the other hand, I've worked on a few end-user applications (point of sale apps, install programs, reporting frontends) and KDevelop is great for them. Designing your widget layout in QDesigner is a breeze, and then integrating that back into your C++ code in KDevelop is drop-down simple. The embedded debugger is wonderful, as well.
Moral of the story: Choose the best tool for the job.
I've been using CVS for five years, and although it took me a while to learn its twists and turns, I now think that it is an absolutely excellent piece of software. I have been forced to use other major alternatives at various companies I've worked for (the most notable being Perforce and MS SourceSafe) and CVS is vastly superior to the others I have used. (I have not used Bitkeeper, so I can't compare it.)
Granted, it is missing a few important features such as the ability to flags files as having no revision history (so that large binaries can be stored without killing the server on commits and updates) and the ability to rename files and directories. But those are relatively minor complaints compared to all that it does do well.
The project I'm excited about is Subversion.
My complaint with CVSup is that there's no commandline client! Since I often do work on remote servers with X ports firewalled, this is a bit of a problem for me.
Moreover, the GUI for the client is just *ugly*. It's this really bad pink colorscheme with Motif style widgets.
The software works really well as far as doing updates quickly and in a minimum of network traffic, but it's completely beyond me why the default client is GUI only. I've also searched for commandline tools but have yet to find anything, anyone know if such a beast exists?
As someone who works for a credit card processor, allow me to state that this issue is not a technical one, but rather a liability one. The credit card companies actually make it pretty easy to do international transactions, even currency convertion, as long as the settlement to the acquiring bank is in your native currency. (That is, a card from outside the US will be settled in dollars, and you'll be charged a slightly inflated convertion rate.)
However, when it comes to card-not-present transactions, and especially e-commerce transactions, merchant banks get nervous. You (and indirectly, your merchant bank) is shouldering the risk of fraud for any transactions that run through your account. The merchant banks usually respond to those that take out-of-country cards by jacking the discount rate up by a ridiculous amount. Whereas you might have been paying 2.5% before now you're paying 3% or 3.5%. And that's on ALL transactions! So even if you take one international card for every 100 transactions that you do, you're still getting charged the huge rate on ALL transactions.
Quite simply, the merchant looses money, unless they are getting a fairly substantial quantity of overseas orders. We do processing for many free software/open source related companies, and for them the US is just one small part of their customer base. But for your average hardware merchant...well, it just isn't worth it.
I want to own stock in companies that I believe in. I really do. But stocks appear to me to have little to do with the *company* and so much more to do with the *market*. If I buy Mandrake stock and Linux comes into favor on the stock market again, my stock goes up. If it goes out of favor, it goes down. There's little connection to whether or not Mandrake is delivering quality products to its customers, which to me is what a company is all about.
If there was a way I could own stock that directly reflected the success of the company rather than the ebb and flow of the market, I'd do it in a second.
Although I would generally be termed a Windows-hater (or, probably more accurately, a "Windows-strong-disliker"), I have to say that this looks like a strong step forward for Microsoft's OS. Interesting that while Apple seems to be moving away from the "dumbed-down" niche of operating systems, Microsoft is moving towards it - which makes sense.
Perhaps MS has finally noted the vast lead in usability that competing desktops (BeOS, KDE 2, and OSX being the primary contenders) have taken over the standard Windows interface. More competition means better interfaces for everyone. Does this mean that (finally!) the consumer is starting to count in this industry?
There's a happy medium in there somewhere wherein filenames are descriptive but not unreasonably long. Certainly I think that spaces are rather silly - it has long been a convention to seperate different "objects" with spaces, so even though you _can_ use them in filenames, I don't really think that you should. Especially when you consider that spaces aren't allowed in URLs, which have become almost as - or perhaps more - important than regular files.
For the file example you mentioned, I think the filename should be something like MatroxG400driverV4.3en.exe, although even that is pushing my limit on filename length.
*cough*
*cough*
(I'd say that your gateway being secure is as important, if not more so, that your storefront itself.)
Back in the "old days", I worked at a company that created products that ran on Linux, Windows, and DOS. This was about four years ago and there weren't as many choices. We used:
/dev/js0 on Linux
rendering: Glide
input: DirectInput on Windows,
sound: Midas
widget set: Qt on Linux, win32 on Windows, text mode hackery on DOS
There were plenty of custom code blocks (file access, system timers, keyboard input, window setup) but they were all small, very quick to write, and self-contained.
In other words, it's actually no big deal to not use a single, all-encompassing library to protect you from the horrors of coding to a specific platform.
However, there are other choices these days. OpenGL+OpenAL+Qt would make a pretty nice, completely cross-platform toolkit setup that should do everything you want and more.
And of course there's SDL, which I think is probably the best choice. I haven't used it extensively myself, but everything I've seen looks very good, and moreover it's what Loki uses, so that's a pretty good recommend right there.
Also, you might check out the links here.
Having been in (and out, here and there, including right now) the industry professionally for about five years, here's my advise.
Write a game.
No one will hire you without experience (unless you get lucky), so give yourself your own experience. Sit down and create a complete game, 2D or 3D, with graphics (drawn in the Gimp or modeled in Blender), sound (recorded on a cheap microphone and edited in DAP), written in the language used almost exclusively in the US game industry (C++).
It doesn't have to be the most amazing thing since sliced bread, but it should do all the basic things that a game should, and do them well. It should be the kind of thing that someone should look at and say, "Wow, this guy knows how to write a game."
It doesn't have to be long, or even all that much fun. It's really more of a demo than it is a game. But it should carry all the trappings of a semi-professional title, visible the moment you load into the game.
That's how I got my first job, and that's how almost everyone I know in the industry got their first job.
FWIW, here's the companies I've worked for. They are usually always on the lookout for new talent.
Cinematix Studios in Mesa, AZ
Angel Studios in Carlsbad, CA
Treyarch LLC in El Segundo, CA
The format looks cool, but it's still rough. I've been offering both MP3 and Vorbis from my download page for a while, and the few people that do try out the Vorbis version have complaints like:
- Can't get it to work with winamp
- Can't download it on Macintosh due to screwey MIME types
- My own complaint: the file is signifigantly larger than the matching MP3, yet the sound quality is noticably worse.
I'll check out this new beta. I'd say don't throw out notlame or your mp3 players just yet, but hopefully it will be up to par with MP3s (and maybe better!) very soon.
Oh, a point in its favor: getting the plugin for playing the files running on xmms was a breeze.
Normally I'm against this sort of pushing users to upgrade. But this is a special case; similar, in fact, to the libc5 vs. glibc2 upgrade.
.PNGs for my images, and make sure my pages work as expected on Konquerer, Mozilla, and IE 5.5. I also run my pages through tidy. After all that, if you can't view my page, then you need to upgrade your browser. I see no need to bug the user about it, they'll figure it out. (Then again maybe not. But I still don't want to bug them about it.)
The situation is that the 4.0 browsers were the fallout of a browser war, products made at the peak of that battle, and so bear all the scars and ugliness that went with it. Luckily that battle has ended, and the needs of the users (both viewers and creators of content) are considered paramount once again.
We need to leave behind this horrible cruft, and the sooner the better. I'm not sure I agree with the Javascript; besides Javascript itself being a product of the browser war, lazy coders tend to forget that there are more than two browsers out there. (Thank goodness for Konquerer's modifiable user agent string!)
My view for a while has been this: I code to web standards, use
2001-04-01 7:00:00
Would be quite an april fool's joke, eh?
Silly rabit, vinyl is for DJs.
This is a great news. Dejanews was the reason I started using the web for the first time, many years ago, and remained a useful tool up until around early 1999. I hope that Google can restore them to their former glory.
If you claim that a given probe is supposed to land on the target celestial body, and it crashes, then you look really dumb and everyone questions your ability.
But if you claim that you're trying to crash, and then you "manage" to land it perfectly, then suddenly everyone is impressed with your genuis...
I've sent in many rebates over the years. Never have I bought something *because* of the rebate; but when I'm offered a few dollars back on something I was purchasing anyways, I usually go for it.
Well, so far, I've only ever once received the money back. To be specific, it was Circuit City, a $30 rebate on the delivery of my $1000+ refrigerator.
All the others, around a dozen total, never came.
In a nutshell, I simply don't believe rebates.
Here's the standard "font fix" I apply to Red Hat.
/etc/X11/fs/config and make all of the lines have ":unscaled" versions first, at the top.
First, install the 100dpi fonts, included on the CD but not automatically installed.
Next, go into the font server config
Next, grab Win32 fonts (if you have access to them) and drop them in a directory somewhere. Add this directory to the font server config.
Go to www.gimp.org and go to Resources, then Fonts. Download sharefont and freefont and install them using the type1inst script. Do similar things with the ":unscaled" in the font server config file.
Finally, adjust any apps you're using to have fonts you like. Netscape can usually be fixed pretty easily by turning off the "allow font scaling" boxes in the preferences. If you're using high resolution and 100dpi fonts, you may want to scale up the fonts in some apps, such as your xterm program.
Finally - use KDE2! The KDE team has done a really good job of only using nice fonts in all of their apps. In particular, browsing the web with Konquerer (especially 2.1beta2) looks great. In fact, I've long since forgotten my days of X-font-suckiness, but I remember them sometimes when I make the mistake of loading up Netscape...
Finally, there *is* antialiased font servers available, both for Gnome and KDE. Personally I don't think KDE really needs it, but it certainly is nice looking. Presumably this feature will be rolled into upcoming releases for both of these packages.
Now, my question is this: since it's obviously quite possible to make X fonts not suck, WHY THE HELL DO DISTROS NOT DO THIS BY DEFAULT? It boggles my mind. Isn't this the sort of thing they should be worried about, especially desktop-oriented distros like Mandrake?
Ah well. Hopefully soon enough we'll have a fully anti-aliased kernel 2.4/XFree 4.0/KDE 2.1-based distro with nice fonts preinstalled. It certainly is about time.
Funny, my company has been using Linux (and other free software) for mission-critical application in the enterprise for years. That includes all the stuff they mentioned - database, financial, CRM, and more. Linux does have a journaling filesystem as of 2.4.1, and it's actually had them for quite a while if you don't mind doing some kernel patching.
In fact, I would say that the only other platform that is as capable (and probably more so) that Linux in this regard is Solaris on Sparc hardware. Solaris has its own set of problems (mostly that it feels like an "old" UNIX to me, making it hard to develop on), but certainly is quite capable.
I guess these journalists (and the people they interview) just insist on handing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars over to Sun and Oracle. That's fine, since the products they sell are good. But for young companies with a limited cashflow (as we were just a few short years ago), that's not an option.
In that case, Linux (or one of the free *BSDs) is your only choice.