That's pretty sizable donation from our buddy Jim. I know it said to be only used for biotech, but will it only be used for biotech like this? Don't get me wrong, any donation back to your school is nice, but I can see $150 million going down the drain fast on less-than-urgent biotech on things like fingernail-cell regeration techniques, or a bioengineered gopher that will run MAME:)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
How could he *possibly* be a non-techie? All of the little industry jokes and -- heck, all of the jokes period, revolve around tech. Except, possibly, for the ones where they just make fun of people calling tech-support. He's a techie in my book.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I love Java - really, I do. It's a wonderful language. But 3rd out of programming languages? I think I've seen one serious application that was written in Java (Shiva NetManager) and that was just a utility. I always thought people were avoiding Java because of speed/platform issues, but am I wrong? Is there a mass of Java programmers out there with an equally large collection of programs?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Why doesn't it block out Altavista or Google, or AllTheWeb, or WebCrawler, or About, or... well, you get the idea. That's kind of strange, if you ask me.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
That's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Okay, not the stupidest, but pretty close. They're actually getting in the way of your search. There must be a hundred legitimate reasons to do a search for the word "excite" (although not intelligently), so why would they do this? Bah! I never use Lycos anyway - AltaVista and Deja are all I need.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Who cares how much VC++ costs? It's the toolkit that's so much money. You can download EGCS for windows at no charge. It's just as good as VC++, I assure you. The only drawback is that some of the newer APIs don't have headers written for them yet. In any case, you'll never see me paying serious money for a compiler OR a toolkit, unless the programs write themselves (and no, I'm not interested in VB, thanks)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
A surge of software could help Linux to become the perfect desktop environment that we're striving for. On the other hand, it might not make a difference at all. Any existing software would need to be ported to Qt before we'd get it, though new software would do just fine. Except for one thing:
Linux/xBSD users (and people of the open source inclination) don't tend to pay for their software. You need only look at some of the threads about Opera vs. Mozilla to know their heated opinions on the matter. Linux shareware might just be a doomed failure. Anyway, if someone really wants to develop shareware for Linux, there are certainly more toolkits than just Qt. Not KDE compatible toolkits, but good ones nonetheless.
Moreover, I don't think that the KDE people should necessarily have to change their toolkit just to suit the needs of other people. They've got a wonderful product and it's built upon Qt. They don't care about the license, because they develop it for free anyway. I personally agree with them but, of course, you may beg to differ.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
When KDE 2.0 comes out, we will be able to really start themeing our look and feel, something the GTK has been much better at in the past. With KDE theming, we can finally make GTK and KDE apps *look* the same, and that's pretty cool in my book. Right now, the only themes that they both can do are Motif/Notif and Win95/Redmond. That's not much to work with.
On a related topic - would it be possible to rework the Lesstif libraries in such a way that they would support a different look and feel? That would make UI integration almost perfect (except for statically linked binaries).
Anyway, just my US$0.02
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Well unless someone stole his login, that is Alan Cox (he's posted before). Anyway, I guess that's probably the case: I thought that they already had a feature freeze. Guess I was wrong:)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Well okay, fine - we all know that Linux 2.4 will be out next sometime next month (hopefully) but that doesn't mean/. won't run a few stories on it, and it's features. Just because you know something is going to happen doesn't make it less newsworthy when it does. Intel plays a huge part in the Linux Desktop market and the fact that they just went.18 is pretty damned interesting to some (not you, but then there's no accounting for taste).
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
How could the tree continually produce the fertilizer that powers it? And, assuming that it can, wouldn't it be hampered by the fact that someone cut it down and shoved it into their living room?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Ah, but that crazy neon-tree isn't just going to glow on it's own -- no no, that would be too easy. Fireflies don't just glow. They have to produce an enormous amount of energy (relative to their size) in order to glow, and even then they don't glow 24 hours a day. A tree could presumably do the same thing, I guess, but it would need a very constant supply of energy, and if you cut it down in order to bring it into your house, you'd be cutting of it's power supply.
So, you have to power the tree somehow - Electricity or expensive fertilizer: you make the choice.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Well I'm a ersthile VC++ developer too and yes, I agree that Windows does need to reboot more than just about any other OS out there. That said, I don't think that I lose 2-10 hours a week because of it.
I'm not a Windows apologist, but I do think that the OS has it's uses. Anyway, this goes without saying but: Your mileage may vary:)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Not all large companies are bulky, unmaneuverable beasts. Well, most HUGE companies are, but I don't think these guys cut it as "huge", in the MS sense:)
Look at Corel and their response to Bruce Perens dealings with them over the past GPL fiasco. They managed to nip that problem in the bud pretty quickly. No "Oh, we need to check with Legal on that one, do I have your number?"
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Dell's systems are consistently of a higher quality than Compaqs (at least, home-systems are). In my experience, Compaq tends to use more "all-in-one" solutions, particularly on the low end with integrated peripherals on the motherboard. When those peripherals are cheap, the whole systems suffers and they're hard to upgrade. Dell's Dimension series are seriously a joy to use, and I'd recommend them to any potential buyer.
Of course, both companies are Linux-supporters, so it's sad they can't both come out on top:(
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
You are right, actually, Win9x crashes less than people at Slashdot care to accept. I was actually a happy Win95 users until I came across Linux in 1995 and now I'm a happier Linux user. I still find the occasional use for Win98 (DVDs mostly), and I don't run around knocking it for all it's fault. Simply speaking though, it is a lot less architechturally stable than Linux.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Ok, blah blah blah. Yeah, sure, there are exceptions to the rule - especially among people who are used to CLIs and other Unix ways of life. Get serious though - MacOS is a simple interface. Simpler is easier for people who don't want complex systems that they have to learn. It's not about preference, it's about learning-curve.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Yeah, I give Sun a lot of credit for this, but it's not really going to do them a lot of good. Well, I imagine that people with time and money invested into Solaris will appreciate this a great deal, but new buyers will look at Solaris and then at Linux and see which one is really more open. Of course, some people like Solaris better anyway, but go figure -- there's no accounting for taste:)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Absolutely - most Linux users are hobbyists. They don't give a damn that the source code to the kernel is available to them. But is that the question? Not really.
If the source weren't available from the get-go, people like Alan Cox and DaveM (along with thousands of other developers) would never have jumped into kernel development. Without that kernel development, Linux would be one sorry-ass OS right now and no one in their right minds would use it.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
No, but then again you didn't build the operating system did you? Here's my point: If Linux wasn't Open Source, who'd develop for it? Linus? A company like Sun? If it was just one man, it wouldn't be nearly as robust and usuable now, I don't care who that man is. If it were a company, then they probably wouldn't give it away for free. And yes, that is the reason that a lot of people like Linux - it's free.
You're right, users don't care about the source code - but developers do, and to make an OS you need developers, not users.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
What are you saying? That you think Linux will become closed-source? I don't know what to tell you, but Linux (and most of the software distributed with it) is licensed under the GPL. It can't be "closed sourced". Well, future releases (made by the copyrighter) can be released under a different license (possibly closed), so in that sense, yes it could be closed, but older code would still be permanently open.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Partially correct. Yes, NT, OS/2, MacOS, and Win9x all have features that Linux lacks. But the features that they carry over Linux are not always present in the other OSes. For example (there's always an example): MacOS is about a billion times easier to install and use than Linux. Unless you enjoy the obscure, this is blatently true. While that may be, Linux is inarguably more stable than MacOS. NT, on the other hand, isn't really any easier to use or install than Linux and some say these tasks are actually harder. It is, however, possibly more scalable and certainly has a wider array of hardware support. Win9x, in contrast, is a lot less scalable and performs more-or-less horribly in comparison to Linux.
So, while Linux isn't the hands-down best OS out there, it certainly has a number of things going for it
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
This is much along the same lines as "What if Solaris *was* Open Source". A lot of people said that they'd stick with Linux, but I think that's probably because they've invested time and energy into it. Moreover, if Linux wasn't Open Source, not nearly as many people would have invested their time into it (at least, not freely), so the answer is:
If Linux wasn't Open Source, it wouldn't be Linux. Period
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Slashdot Mirror
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Linux/xBSD users (and people of the open source inclination) don't tend to pay for their software. You need only look at some of the threads about Opera vs. Mozilla to know their heated opinions on the matter. Linux shareware might just be a doomed failure. Anyway, if someone really wants to develop shareware for Linux, there are certainly more toolkits than just Qt. Not KDE compatible toolkits, but good ones nonetheless.
Moreover, I don't think that the KDE people should necessarily have to change their toolkit just to suit the needs of other people. They've got a wonderful product and it's built upon Qt. They don't care about the license, because they develop it for free anyway. I personally agree with them but, of course, you may beg to differ.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
On a related topic - would it be possible to rework the Lesstif libraries in such a way that they would support a different look and feel? That would make UI integration almost perfect (except for statically linked binaries).
Anyway, just my US$0.02
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
No, I'm kidding. But seriously - what kind of processing power is behind one of these? Would the emulation run well?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
So, you have to power the tree somehow - Electricity or expensive fertilizer: you make the choice.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
I'm not a Windows apologist, but I do think that the OS has it's uses. Anyway, this goes without saying but: Your mileage may vary :)
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Look at Corel and their response to Bruce Perens dealings with them over the past GPL fiasco. They managed to nip that problem in the bud pretty quickly. No "Oh, we need to check with Legal on that one, do I have your number?"
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Of course, both companies are Linux-supporters, so it's sad they can't both come out on top :(
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If the source weren't available from the get-go, people like Alan Cox and DaveM (along with thousands of other developers) would never have jumped into kernel development. Without that kernel development, Linux would be one sorry-ass OS right now and no one in their right minds would use it.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
You're right, users don't care about the source code - but developers do, and to make an OS you need developers, not users.
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
So, while Linux isn't the hands-down best OS out there, it certainly has a number of things going for it
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
If Linux wasn't Open Source, it wouldn't be Linux. Period
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."