I have to agree with this to a point, but it has to do with the way PHP is designed.
Things like register_globals and magic_quotes (issues which any PHP developer has probably noticed when the core PHP developers make a policy change) seem to be focused around trying to force developers to adopt good security practices. I think this is an *awful* idea. People will write awful code, complete with SQL injection vulnerabilities, passing unchecked variables to shells, etc, no matter how sugar-coated their language is.
I'm sure there are just as many awful Java coders are there are PHP coders... and it's arguably easier to write crap Java code that OOMs or has buffer problems than it is in PHP, where a lot of those things are automatically checked. But then again, I'm sure many people would believe the exact opposite. So which is better, being a Catholic or Protestant?
Java's "everything is an object" concept is okay, but can simply be overkill for certain things. On the other hand, PHP isn't just a language for doing simple web-scripts. There are a fair number of very complex "enterprise grade" applications which have been designed in PHP. It's simply ignorant to categorize one as being a scripting language, when it has the *ability* to be a scripting language, but can also perform fairly complex object oriented tasks.
<soapbox>
All of this language fervor is a moot point, anyways. Applications should be speaking common dialects (SOAP, XML-RPC, etc) so that applications written in multiple languages can collaborate, instead of stranding a developer with a single platform. In a way, proprietary protocols and lack of documentation are the things that seem to be going out of style, not the languages themselves.
</soapbox>
Although they rarely get this kind of press, there are quite a few other large-scale open source medical records and practice management packages out there.
VistA was/is a great effort from the Veterans' Administration to produce something capable of dealing with the volume of records that they had to deal with in a pretty efficient sort of way; I can't really say whether the same methodology works in smaller settings, but there are a great deal of other packages "competing" in a friendly, open source way with VistA, not just a single package, as other posters might have you think.:(
FreeMED is one of those packages, which has been around for about six years (since 1999), back before VistA was looking at producing a version of their software that was geared towards anything other than VA hospitals. Paired with REMITT, an opensource medical billing package, it doesn't take playing around with something like MUMPS to be able to run a practice efficiently, and in an open source sort of way.
I'm still amazed that this is news, as VistA and the Hardhats group have been doing the same thing for quite a few years now, and haven't had any press like this that I can remember.
Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of both the pieces of software mentioned in this article besides VistA. Take that as you will. If you're looking for relatively unbiased reporting on opensource medical software, go to LinuxMedNews.
You mentioned that you had to use apt-get on the command line to install software when using kubuntu; this simply isn't the case. There is a nice frontend to apt in the form of kynaptic, which is installed by default on new kubuntu systems.
Out of all the Linux desktop distributions, I've found k/ubuntu to be the one distribution which seems to really "get it" when it comes to the desktop. Even people who have had issues in the past with systems like Linux-Mandrake and Fedora Core seem to like it. Even some hardcore Windows users that I know are seriously considering using it (partially due to software packages like Mozilla Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, GAIM, etc).
You *can* use the command line to do things with k/ubuntu. The nice part is that if you're an ex-Windows user, you don't have to... there are nice guis for just about every important part of system administration, unless something goes extremely south. But then again, if it did, you'd be doing regedits on your Windows box, which are arguably more cryptic in many cases than the Linux command line could *ever* be...
Unfortunately, IE is updated with the Automatic Windows Updates, while Firefox is only updated by us when a new Windows template is rolled out on all the computers every 6 months or so.
Have you considered using MSI? It allows for batched/remote updates of software packages under Windows. Nice if you don't have apt, urpmi, yum, etc on your platform of choice.
I think it's time more people in congress suffered to violent crime.
Please speak directly into the flower-pot.
(I do agree with the sentiments, if not the manner in which they were presented. As it has been pointed out, you're much less likely to want to go to war if your children will be fighting it.)
The software that is available currently is utterly unacceptable for any type of music recording.
Before the knee-jerk reaction, try looking around a little. Agnula has both Debian and Redhat based live CDs loaded with professional audio applications, which work out of the box.
Also, the results you get using JACK + Ardour + Hydrogen + Jamin are comperable, if not superior, to available commercial solutions. (Well, assuming that you're using professional hardware... )
not having your entire plugin system crash on you is another.
It sounds like you had a sour experience. I have never had a LADSPA plugin crash anything on my studio box.
In a nutshell: The features are not there, the stability is not there, the usability is not there, and the overall effectiveness of the applications is just not there.
Grab a copy of the DeMuDi Live CD and try saying any of those things.
I had a friend who bought an original XBOX (v1.0), and after using it for a few years found that the DVD drive would only sporadically read discs.
Upon taking the case apart and starting the box, I found that the top plate of the DVD drive had warped over time, and was no longer pushing the top spindle down on the disc. This was causing the disc to fail to spin with the motor. It was fixed by removing the top plate of the DVD drive and bending it back into place, then using some foam to sit between the top of the XBOX case and the top plate of the DVD drive. As hacky as this sounds, it actually works, and his XBOX hasn't given him any problems of that nature since.
I wish I had bothered to remember the brand of drive. In their defense, I don't think he ever left the XBOX off...
Just install Mozilla ActiveX support. May not be the most secure thing in the world, but at least it works. There's some information on securing it on the download page. I'm guessing it's probably a bit more secure than the default IE ActiveX implementation.
If you want a simple, relatively small and quiet, two channel recording rig, with equivalent sound quality to this, I highly suggest buying a fucking Minidisc or DAT deck, a decent mixer, and a couple good mics. Then you can dump it to a machine with decent editing tools later.
And the best part? It is silent.
What the hell advantage does this system have over a DAT deck and a computer with editing software worth using? None, because its a two-track system using a consumer-level sound card. Any gains you might make in reducing hard drive chatter will be totally overwhelmed by the crap quality of your A/D subsystem.
This thing is barely suitable for use as a two-track tracking machine, and there's no reason to edit on this thing as opposed to a decent PC which won't run into disk space or flash write limitations.
But with something like an RME Hammerfall in it, using something like ardour, it does have some value. Though I think that the 7 MB/s might not be enough for the throughput from a Hammerfall.
FOr small companies that use Outlook only as an email client perhaps. Thunderbird is no substitute for Outlook when you start talking about company wide contacts sharing, resource scheduling, shared calendars, meeting invites, voting buttons and all the other things organisations are used to using on a day to day basis.
You might argue that an email client isn't the place for such features but no-one's going to drop their client that offers them in favour of Thunderbird when no other app is available to offer the missing feature set.
Like it or loath it, until there's a real Outlook replacement linux lacks the groupware companies are used to and desktop adoption will be restricted.
I hate to always be the one bringing it up, but there are several solutions in terms of Linux groupware. The lacking part seems to be client connectivity with the servers.
eGroupware has an excellent XML-RPC and SOAP interface, Kolab already has several Outlook connectors available, but the native clients (Kontact for KDE, which has eGroupware and Kolab support as well as Exchange Server 2000 support) are not out yet. It would be great if someone were to integrate client capabilities for those suites into Mozilla (or something similarly cross-platform).
Most organizations I know are tied to Windows because of Outlook, not because of Office (most can't even tell the difference between OpenOffice and MS Office).
At least the outlook (no pun intended, really) is better than it was a year ago.
Well, I'm a knowledgeable professional. In fact, I could almost boast you'd be hard pressed to find someone with more knowledge and experience with Photoshop. I say this with pride and arrogance because frankly I can. (though I know, there's always someone better than you out there...).
Now, having said this...The Gimp is "getting there". No, it doesn't have CMYK yet...yet. And it doesn't have color profiles, but those are in the works.
You're right. Stinks that there are no color management or CMYK plugins for GIMP.
Five seconds and a little googling go a long way. Many "problems" that are reported with opensource software (such as the difficulty of a Debian install) are just a lack of five minutes and some google.
No, he mentioned Ghostbusters because Xul (actually Zuul, according to the Wikipedia) is the name of a character in Ghostbusters, not necessarily because he understood that the Mozilla developers intentionally used that reference. That is the reason why I felt the need to clarify that both "gatekeeper" and "keymaster" (obviously references to Ghostbusters) are in the URL.
Head off to Kuro5hin if you're so quick to call someone a moron.
I don't know much about the hack, other than than the information regarding the camera at http://earth.prohosting.com/puredig/. What I'm curious about is why no one has posted or is interested in a USB hack similar to the Ritz one. A smartmedia reader, as some have pointed out, is much more expensive than a USB cable. I know that I would not spend 10$ on a single use camera, then spend an additional 30-50$ on parts to make it arguably equivalent to a 60$ cheapie digital.
Of course, Bruce Campbell was in the classic Army of Darkness too!!
We'll all just pretend that this is sarcasm, and that the poster actually knows that Army of Darkness is Evil Dead 3. Not that someone else won't point that out between "hail to the king, baby", "this is my boomstick" and "shop smart, shop S-Mart" comments...
Windows Port (was Re:Windows version? Huh?)
on
Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 1
Did anyone else ever notice the "UNUSABLE FOR WINDOWS!" message next to the win32codecs in the downloads section? That seems to imply mplayer actually has a windows version, probably confusing for some people.
I'm really amazed that no one brought up the X-Box Media Player. Honestly, it's the *only* reason I have considered purchasing an X-Box. At 150 USD for a used one (or less; I haven't been shopping recently), it's the cheapest VCD/SVCD/MP3/DivX/DVD/etc player I could get (since Mini-ITX boards with nice setups are still more money than that). I wonder who is going to be the first to modify the loader for it...
Do you really want your server component for this to run in PHP? That's not going to be very efficient as compared to a daemon written in, say, C.
The issue isn't speed; it's that there is a server already developed that runs using PHP. Even though everyone says it would only take a little bit of effort to write a good server in C, I really haven't seen any open-source ones.
Writing a plugin to use an already existing server would save developers from having to reinvent the wheel. (Also, with a performance caching system (bware, apc, zend), PHP isn't really that slow.)
Even before Kroupware entered the game, phpGroupware had an XML-RPC calendar, contacts, todo, and email server available with a widely available API, and no one seems to want to write the few routines for it.
Since Chandler is wxPython/Python, it could easily use xmlrpclib to do the dirty work, yet I see nothing on their site or roadmap about this. I wonder why.
Why is everyone obsessed with clients?
on
Chandler 0.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This is *not* flamebait, but why in the world is everyone obsessed with writing clients, but no one wants to either write a server, or interface with an existing groupware server?
phpGroupware exposed their API through both SOAP and XML-RPC, and I have yet to see *anything* use their backend, other than an old Delphi frontend for WinXX which was yanked from their site. I'm sure there are other web-based groupware suites that also have web-services available, and yet no one wants to build interfaces to them?
Don't get me wrong, Evolution is a nice toy, but only that in the realm of business until someone decides that they want to interface it with an existing groupware server (other than Exchange, which is quite closed-source...), since otherwise there is no open solution to doing this.
I contacted the Evolution people at least a year ago about interfacing with phpGroupware, to get a reply of "if you can reverse-engineer our calendar API, which isn't documented anywhere, you can write it yourself...". (No disrespect to the developers of Evolution intended, but I'm trying to make a point about the little emphasis any of the major groups seem to place on enterprise adoption.)
If by `Reverse Engineer' you mean `Read the source code that is provided as part of the Open Source/Free Software Evolution', then yes;-)
No, I mean reverse-engineer, as in having to decipher a plugin architecture with no apparent API, and having to write a drop in replacement for a miniature server simply to achieve simple connectivity with another service, which should be easily accomplished, considering the nature of the application (how difficult is it to expose a plugin architecture with callbacks for different calendaring functions?).
The argument that anyone with sufficient time could do anything with the source code works for those with an unlimited amount of time and resources. For example, Mozilla does not require full comprehension of the entire Mozilla/Netscape architecture to build a plugin; they have an available API and assorted plugin development headers, which has led to a wide variety of plugins being available for it. Evolution, on the other hand, has no plugin API (or at least, no visible one), which makes it exponentially more difficult to produce plugins for.
Well, as a Unix admin/programmer in a Windows-based workplace, I can't help but applaud Ximian for releasing the Connector. I've started the ball rolling on trying to get approval for this, or at least permission to use it myself. I can understand why you're a little mad, but we don't have the option of switching 20k+ users to a Unix based setup. This product, free or not, will make using Exchange much better - I may be able to get rid of the PC under my desk (used mostly for Outlook) altogether!:)
I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree.
The better solution (in keeping with my previous post) would be to build an Outlook plugin to handle the open server, instead of building an Evolution plugin to keep the dependency on the closed server.
I worked at a University for a while, and we were forced to have an extra server running to provide groupware services, running Windows NT, because no one thought it important enough to develop a server that would run on anything else (Notes and OpenMail weren't options, as the campus wasn't ready to migrate to them yet). I even tried helping out an open calendar server project to replace Netscape Calendar, but extensions to the protocol proved a little too difficult, so we used Netscape Calendar for all three platforms (since Outlook for Mac and Outlook for PC tended to annihilate each others' calendars). Simply a pain.
This whole discussion is sort of like the Wine argument. I'd prefer that people develop native *NIX applications and port them, as opposed to building native Windows applications and porting them, the difference being a dependency on the server instead of the client side).
I remember a little while back I had contacted the Ximian evolution developers on their mailing list, asking for a plugin API or some direction to go about implementing a phpGroupware connection plugin (via their exposed XML-RPC methods). They told me that I would basically have to reverse engineer the PCS (personal calendar server) component to do something like that.
Then this "connector" software comes out as a plugin to to just that for Evolution. I smell a rat. Why are they so gung-ho about promoting connectivity with MS Exchange servers (granted, there are a *lot* of Exchange servers), when they could be making the first usable GUI client for phpGroupware? One promotes dependance, the other promotes independance.
Slashdot Mirror
Things like register_globals and magic_quotes (issues which any PHP developer has probably noticed when the core PHP developers make a policy change) seem to be focused around trying to force developers to adopt good security practices. I think this is an *awful* idea. People will write awful code, complete with SQL injection vulnerabilities, passing unchecked variables to shells, etc, no matter how sugar-coated their language is.
I'm sure there are just as many awful Java coders are there are PHP coders... and it's arguably easier to write crap Java code that OOMs or has buffer problems than it is in PHP, where a lot of those things are automatically checked. But then again, I'm sure many people would believe the exact opposite. So which is better, being a Catholic or Protestant?
Java's "everything is an object" concept is okay, but can simply be overkill for certain things. On the other hand, PHP isn't just a language for doing simple web-scripts. There are a fair number of very complex "enterprise grade" applications which have been designed in PHP. It's simply ignorant to categorize one as being a scripting language, when it has the *ability* to be a scripting language, but can also perform fairly complex object oriented tasks.
<soapbox> All of this language fervor is a moot point, anyways. Applications should be speaking common dialects (SOAP, XML-RPC, etc) so that applications written in multiple languages can collaborate, instead of stranding a developer with a single platform. In a way, proprietary protocols and lack of documentation are the things that seem to be going out of style, not the languages themselves. </soapbox>
VistA was/is a great effort from the Veterans' Administration to produce something capable of dealing with the volume of records that they had to deal with in a pretty efficient sort of way; I can't really say whether the same methodology works in smaller settings, but there are a great deal of other packages "competing" in a friendly, open source way with VistA, not just a single package, as other posters might have you think. :(
FreeMED is one of those packages, which has been around for about six years (since 1999), back before VistA was looking at producing a version of their software that was geared towards anything other than VA hospitals. Paired with REMITT, an opensource medical billing package, it doesn't take playing around with something like MUMPS to be able to run a practice efficiently, and in an open source sort of way.
I'm still amazed that this is news, as VistA and the Hardhats group have been doing the same thing for quite a few years now, and haven't had any press like this that I can remember.
Disclaimer: I'm the primary author of both the pieces of software mentioned in this article besides VistA. Take that as you will. If you're looking for relatively unbiased reporting on opensource medical software, go to LinuxMedNews.
Out of all the Linux desktop distributions, I've found k/ubuntu to be the one distribution which seems to really "get it" when it comes to the desktop. Even people who have had issues in the past with systems like Linux-Mandrake and Fedora Core seem to like it. Even some hardcore Windows users that I know are seriously considering using it (partially due to software packages like Mozilla Firefox, GIMP, Inkscape, GAIM, etc).
You *can* use the command line to do things with k/ubuntu. The nice part is that if you're an ex-Windows user, you don't have to ... there are nice guis for just about every important part of system administration, unless something goes extremely south. But then again, if it did, you'd be doing regedits on your Windows box, which are arguably more cryptic in many cases than the Linux command line could *ever* be ...
Some Firefox MSIs are available:
(I do agree with the sentiments, if not the manner in which they were presented. As it has been pointed out, you're much less likely to want to go to war if your children will be fighting it.)
Also, the results you get using JACK + Ardour + Hydrogen + Jamin are comperable, if not superior, to available commercial solutions. (Well, assuming that you're using professional hardware ... )
It sounds like you had a sour experience. I have never had a LADSPA plugin crash anything on my studio box. Grab a copy of the DeMuDi Live CD and try saying any of those things.Upon taking the case apart and starting the box, I found that the top plate of the DVD drive had warped over time, and was no longer pushing the top spindle down on the disc. This was causing the disc to fail to spin with the motor. It was fixed by removing the top plate of the DVD drive and bending it back into place, then using some foam to sit between the top of the XBOX case and the top plate of the DVD drive. As hacky as this sounds, it actually works, and his XBOX hasn't given him any problems of that nature since.
I wish I had bothered to remember the brand of drive. In their defense, I don't think he ever left the XBOX off ...
Just install Mozilla ActiveX support. May not be the most secure thing in the world, but at least it works. There's some information on securing it on the download page. I'm guessing it's probably a bit more secure than the default IE ActiveX implementation.
eGroupware has an excellent XML-RPC and SOAP interface, Kolab already has several Outlook connectors available, but the native clients (Kontact for KDE, which has eGroupware and Kolab support as well as Exchange Server 2000 support) are not out yet. It would be great if someone were to integrate client capabilities for those suites into Mozilla (or something similarly cross-platform).
Most organizations I know are tied to Windows because of Outlook, not because of Office (most can't even tell the difference between OpenOffice and MS Office).
At least the outlook (no pun intended, really) is better than it was a year ago.
What would we all do without the superior searching power of The Google?
Five seconds and a little googling go a long way. Many "problems" that are reported with opensource software (such as the difficulty of a Debian install) are just a lack of five minutes and some google.
No, he mentioned Ghostbusters because Xul (actually Zuul, according to the Wikipedia) is the name of a character in Ghostbusters, not necessarily because he understood that the Mozilla developers intentionally used that reference. That is the reason why I felt the need to clarify that both "gatekeeper" and "keymaster" (obviously references to Ghostbusters) are in the URL.
Head off to Kuro5hin if you're so quick to call someone a moron.
Check the XUL specification. It uses http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there. is.only.xul
which is a Ghostbusters reference.
I don't know much about the hack, other than than the information regarding the camera at http://earth.prohosting.com/puredig/. What I'm curious about is why no one has posted or is interested in a USB hack similar to the Ritz one. A smartmedia reader, as some have pointed out, is much more expensive than a USB cable. I know that I would not spend 10$ on a single use camera, then spend an additional 30-50$ on parts to make it arguably equivalent to a 60$ cheapie digital.
We'll all just pretend that this is sarcasm, and that the poster actually knows that Army of Darkness is Evil Dead 3. Not that someone else won't point that out between "hail to the king, baby", "this is my boomstick" and "shop smart, shop S-Mart" comments...
That's because there *is* a Windows port of it, and it's located on their server. Try ftp://ftp.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/win32-beta .
I'm really amazed that no one brought up the X-Box Media Player. Honestly, it's the *only* reason I have considered purchasing an X-Box. At 150 USD for a used one (or less; I haven't been shopping recently), it's the cheapest VCD/SVCD/MP3/DivX/DVD/etc player I could get (since Mini-ITX boards with nice setups are still more money than that). I wonder who is going to be the first to modify the loader for it...
Writing a plugin to use an already existing server would save developers from having to reinvent the wheel. (Also, with a performance caching system (bware, apc, zend), PHP isn't really that slow.)
Since Chandler is wxPython/Python, it could easily use xmlrpclib to do the dirty work, yet I see nothing on their site or roadmap about this. I wonder why.
phpGroupware exposed their API through both SOAP and XML-RPC, and I have yet to see *anything* use their backend, other than an old Delphi frontend for WinXX which was yanked from their site. I'm sure there are other web-based groupware suites that also have web-services available, and yet no one wants to build interfaces to them?
Don't get me wrong, Evolution is a nice toy, but only that in the realm of business until someone decides that they want to interface it with an existing groupware server (other than Exchange, which is quite closed-source...), since otherwise there is no open solution to doing this.
I contacted the Evolution people at least a year ago about interfacing with phpGroupware, to get a reply of "if you can reverse-engineer our calendar API, which isn't documented anywhere, you can write it yourself...". (No disrespect to the developers of Evolution intended, but I'm trying to make a point about the little emphasis any of the major groups seem to place on enterprise adoption.)
The argument that anyone with sufficient time could do anything with the source code works for those with an unlimited amount of time and resources. For example, Mozilla does not require full comprehension of the entire Mozilla/Netscape architecture to build a plugin; they have an available API and assorted plugin development headers, which has led to a wide variety of plugins being available for it. Evolution, on the other hand, has no plugin API (or at least, no visible one), which makes it exponentially more difficult to produce plugins for.
The better solution (in keeping with my previous post) would be to build an Outlook plugin to handle the open server, instead of building an Evolution plugin to keep the dependency on the closed server.
I worked at a University for a while, and we were forced to have an extra server running to provide groupware services, running Windows NT, because no one thought it important enough to develop a server that would run on anything else (Notes and OpenMail weren't options, as the campus wasn't ready to migrate to them yet). I even tried helping out an open calendar server project to replace Netscape Calendar, but extensions to the protocol proved a little too difficult, so we used Netscape Calendar for all three platforms (since Outlook for Mac and Outlook for PC tended to annihilate each others' calendars). Simply a pain.
This whole discussion is sort of like the Wine argument. I'd prefer that people develop native *NIX applications and port them, as opposed to building native Windows applications and porting them, the difference being a dependency on the server instead of the client side).
Then this "connector" software comes out as a plugin to to just that for Evolution. I smell a rat. Why are they so gung-ho about promoting connectivity with MS Exchange servers (granted, there are a *lot* of Exchange servers), when they could be making the first usable GUI client for phpGroupware? One promotes dependance, the other promotes independance.