Life's not fair. I personally believe that linux has been so successful because:
it invited in more new users than BSD
it has a smart, savvy figurehead/spokesperson in the form of Linus, where BSD doesn't really have a single spokesperson for the media to contact, quote or interview.
it has been marketed as something new, as opposed to yet another fragmented version of unix. (how many forms have a unix checkbox and a linux checkbox?)
the linux community is more helpful to newbies, where the BSD community is more guru focused - RTFM!
timing - linux timing was right for a unix renaissance
random chance
number of developers involved in linux kernel development and testing created a snowball effect with number of end users.
confusion over the difference between FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Maybe it would server BSD better (marketing-wise) to have a single name for their OS, and varying distributions
the mass quantity of resources that are mostly unix-generic that have linux in their name -- like the LDP and many unix apps that have linux in their name
I think ESR's calling the release of Q1 src a lump of coal in hacker's stockings is a bit extreme.
Even the ensuing debate over multi-user game/world security models is very significant for future development.
Now that Q1 src is opensourced, what's to stop those of us who are so unhappy with the network play model from re-implementing it??
If we can come up with a better, faster, tighter, cross-platform, secure model for network gameplay, I'm sure that many game developers would be interested in adopting it.
so, let's start designing and implementing the new protocols for networked online worlds!
Thanks to John Carmack for the Q1 src which has fueled so much thought about gaming, AI, virtual communities, new user interfaces.... and much more.
... and thanks for the linux port when all the other game companies were writing to Windows only.
I really don't think this is such a big deal... It's a game, for pete's sake! When people start earning salaries for their quake performance, then maybe we need to worry about this.
It's been my experience that cheating in these games really isn't much fun (unless your really stuck and about to give up on the whole game), and I don't think that others would want to play with cheaters unless they were cheating too, which would make the game fair again, I suppose.
With the source, it's pretty trivial to undo just about any protection and spoof any values the program expects to find, so why bother?
I fear that by putting in encryption and protection schemes, we'll be hindering potential development of new variations and play modes of quake and quake derivative games. If altered clients could be used to introduce a handicap factor into games, it might encourage gameplay between experienced and less experienced players.
Why not add a HANDIcAP FACTOR to the quake game, and have that be shown for each player when joining a new game? It's probably easier to deal with cheating by making it a defined feature than trying to protect against it ever happening.
Re:slashdot and cutting edge is about sourcecode!
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Mozilla M12 Released
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· Score: 2
I see your point, but many of us continue to visit slashdot because it reports news as it's happening or before anyone else noticed it happened.
Here's what it sounds like you're saying: Slashdot users are oveloading the ftp servers so that the developers can't get any work done. Please don't announce things before they're ready for to be consumed by the general public.
Does this mean that slashdot community is no longer the developer community?
maybe slashdot is now where all the journalists of the world come to get an interesting topic for their next article or news story.
slashdot and cutting edge is about sourcecode!
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Mozilla M12 Released
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· Score: 2
No. The announcement can't wait until there are binaries. *ANYONE* can generate binaries from the source.
Why wait for binaries to make an announcement?
What platforms do you think we should wait until binaries exist for before something is announced? If there's no unixware binary or no intel solaris binary or no sparc linux binary, should we wait?
Why wait for a webmaster to update a website when the files are on ftp?
here's how it works: - developers write code and check in changes to source control - interested parties check ftp sites or cvs and download snapshots. Read Changelog. Compile. Provide feedback. Repeat as often as time permits. - developers/testers know well in advance of any official announcement when a new milestone is near *BECAUSE THE DOCS SAY WHAT WILL BE IN NEXT MILESTONE* - developers announce on slashdot for the benefit of the testers who may not be able to build snapshots, but are interested. - slashdotters download src code and compile to get optimized binaries that take full advantage of their system libraries and architecture.
I would never prefer a binary for something that I could easily build from source. The only times I get a binary are when it's for an OS that I don't have a nice development machine, or for something hard to build like X11.
You silly US-centric computer execs... don't you realize that the growth potential for the internet is hardware and OS agnostic browsing devices with various CPUs, OSs, browsers, and capabilities?
why standardize on a format that only supports one platform?
... and why add video when it's not needed. We're still bandwidth poor to the end users. Let's focus on page load times before we start adding video.
for the record. quicktime and real for linux suck. they're virtually orphaned! If I have to view new video clips, I must now run windows in vmware to use windows media player. That's about all I still need windows for!
so, tell me, how will windows media content work over WAP, on cell phones, on realtime OS-based information kiosks, on PDAs, on webTV, over digital cable boxes, on dreamcast, on playstation2?
can't you freakin' lame computer marketing execs see that Windows Media format won't get your content to all of those places.
Everyone and their dog knows that Microsoft has no interest in really supporting any non-MS os. (except to throw off the DOJ - like with Apple)
We've gotta get an opensource video player that's really good, or we're going to be forever writing decoders for MS's ever-changing protocols that aren't supported on anything but windows.
It'll be like the word doc format fiasco all over again!
and to those of you whinig about Slashdot printing rumors, you obviously haven't been around here for long. Slashdot's got a pretty good track record for getting the scoop early.
If your employees are leaking your company's confidential information on slashdot, that's an internal problem, not a slashdot problem.
But of course your network engineers can track down who's accessing slashdot when and cross reference posting times, right?... or are those people the ones leaking the secrets?
Re:could it be they like the BSD license better?
on
Intel using FreeBSD
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· Score: 3
typo for horse
was an irc reference. to days gone by when IRC was the most interesting thing on the internet.
... family forum? You mean to tell me that whole families are reading slashdot?
son:"Gee mom, what did you think about the KRASH release of KDE?" mom:"I still haven't forgotten the old qt licenseing. Have you done your homework?" dad:"Yes, son, before you check your packet capture programs for our neighbor's ftp passwords, make sure you take the garbage out, or I'll revoke your root access!" mom:"and help your sister build abiword with a gnome front end so she can write her termpaper. If you do that... we'll increase your anonymous ftp quota by 500megs...!" dad:"Honey, I've been thinking... maybe we should be contributing more code to the mozilla project."
could it be they like the BSD license better?
on
Intel using FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
Why would INTEL choose FreeBSD when Linux has all of the (deserved or not) hype, momentum, and business interest?
To answer that question, get a room full of lawyers for computer company legal departments together and have them read the GPL.
.. ask them if they'd like their company's product to be involved with the GPL license.
I understand the GPL. You understand the GPL. Maybe 95+% of slashdot readers understand the GPL, but do you think that corporate lawyers for tech companies who make their money from intellectual property protection are eager to get involved with anything that might require disclosure of their intellectual property?
I'm betting that many companies have official policies (enforced or not) against opensource software due in part to fear of the GPL.
so... the decision comes down to linux+gpl_potential_legal_worries or *BSD+100%_FREE_No_strings_attached .
And the legal department chooses which one??
__ Despite how we try to ignore them, facts take their toll.
could it be they like the BSD license better?
on
Intel using FreeBSD
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· Score: 3
/me picks up dead horse /me beats hose
Why would INTEL choose FreeBSD when Linux has all of the (deserved or not) hype, momentum, and business interest?
To answer that question, get a room full of lawyers for computer company legal departments together and have them read the GPL.
.. ask them if they'd like their company's product to be involved with the GPL license.
I understand the GPL. You understand the GPL. Maybe 95+% of slashdot readers understand the GPL, but do you think that corporate lawyers for tech companies who make their money from intellectual property protection are eager to get involved with anything that might require disclosure of their intellectual property?
I'm betting that many companies have official policies (enforced or not) against opensource software due in part to fear of the GPL.
so... the decision comes down to linux+gpl_potential_legal_worries or *BSD+100%_FREE_No_strings_attached .
And the legal department chooses which one??
__ Despite how we try to ignore them, facts take their toll.
if I had my choice of supporting 1000 Sun ultra2's running solaris or linux, I'd still choose Solaris.
One of the main reasons is jumpstart. I can install or re-image systems to a number of different OS versions from a single server.... and I can script the entire install with pre and post-processing so that I don't need to do anything.
Try that with linux. Every version from every vendor has changed the nfs/http/ftp install rules somehow, and some of the cd's can't be mounted and nfs installed because of an improper directory structure ON THE CD for network installs (hello, redhat 6.1!). or lack of support for non-cdrom based installs (hello, Corel!)
This is a CRITICAL WEAKNESS OF LINUX. How freaking difficult is it for someone to fix this?
Maybe I'm jumping the gun... maybe only X86 linux can't support something like jumpstart becuase the X86 hardware carries around so much legacy baggage like the BIOS. Honestly, there are so many things about x86 hardware that really SUCK! It's too bad that it won't go away.
How can you change the bios settings on an x86 server when you're connected to a console server on the serial port?
How can you see any BIOS hardware error messages from a serial port connection during boot up?
When linux is being covered by Gartner reports and shows up favorably in the "magic quadrant", then it's big news. Many large corporate decisions are made based solely on a simple gartner square with some dots in it.
It sounds silly, but if you're in a big company, and you're pushing a solution or a product that isn't favored by Gartner research, Senior management's going to ask you to re-evaluate and see why $GARTNER_TOP_PICK wouldn't work for the company.
Nowadays, the senior execs have suddenly "DISCOVERED" linux, and now they're looking to form "Strategic Alliances" and establish "linux partnerships" (but the senior execs are still using Windows:()
anyway, on a related note, I head 3 non-technical women in the movie theater yesterday talking about investment (and the LNUX IPO) and one was trying to explain to the others what linux was. She said "now everybody is trying to learn linux - it's like windows NT but people say it's better and it's free." To me, overhearing that discussion meant more than placement on the gartner quadrant!
Have you noticed that nowadays hardly anyone mispronounces linux?
don't judge a Sun server by CDE login or dtlogin in general. CDE was, is, and probably always will be a resource pig.
If you want to compare, run the same window manager as you're used to under Linux and start comparing from there, as opposed to evaulating CDE performance.
Unfortunately for Sun, their customer base demands eternal binary compatibility, so they're more limited in what they can fundamentally fix in the OS and how fast they can allow an os version to be obsoleted.
Linux can break binary compatibility whenver someone finds a bug in glibc
ex: try to find a jdk2 for linux glibc2.0 or libc5 -- they don't exist. Now try finding jdk2 for Solaris 2.6 or 2.5.1 - they exist.
Linux distros are going to start facing the same corporate pressures for eternal binary compatibility. I hope that it doesn't slow down innovation (but it probably will!)
If VA threw a dozen developers behind mozilla development, that would get things up to speed rather quickly. This is so important to not only the linux community but the entire UNIX community. I wish Sun would do the same.
And, we need GOOD versions of all the major plugins. The only linux plugins that don't suck rocks are flash and acrobat reader. Real player for unix is pure schlock. If we want to push linux on the desktop, we need plugins for the major media formats.
If there's an audio/video link on CNN.COM, linux needs to be able to decode it with a plugin in the browser without building extra stuff and hacking plugins.
My short list of plugin wants for linux/unix
- good, recent decoder for all versions of RealAudio/Video with all codecs and compression supported - modern quicktime plugin support and support for all quicktime image formats. - macromedia shockwave support - windows media player - if people are posting content with it, we need to be able to view it.
C'mon, what's taken so long for the unix plugins? I can understand Micrsoft not porting their player in hopes of slowing their marketshare loss, but... c'mon Apple, Real, Macromedia??? No excuse.
SO, if the scientists succeed, they by definition become GOD, correct? Can they put that after their names like MD or PhD?
seriously, though. It's just a matter of time. If someone can almost do this today, then imagine what types of life they'll be creating when they have a 1000 node cluster of 10ghz cpu machines helping to do the computation (say in 10 years)
sometime in the future, it might be a grad student exercise to synthesize an organism based on stereoisomers of amino acids.
Read K. Eric Drexlers book - Engines of Creation
Religion isn't going to like this, but then traditional religions generally don't seem as relavent to 20th century folk as they might have hundreds of years ago. Most people don't really like the idea of appending a religious text the way we'd append a constitution or law, either, so traditional religions can't very well deal with things like genetic engineering that didn't exist until a few decades ago. They have to rely on some subjective interpretation...
Not a troll about religion. Just my opinion. If you love god, that's great, but if you feel like religion doesn't speak to you concerns, read the first few chapters of The Celestine Prophecy and see if you agree (good book, but it lost me towards the end)
So, religion aside, the real issue is: who's going to fund creation of new life? My guess is that the US won't support it for political reasons, but that some 3rd world country will. Same with genetic engineering - you know that eventually somebody is going to start cloning humans.... and people *will* pay money (hey perverts: want a 21-year old Pamela Andersen clone? How about a clone of famous dead people? How about cloning sports stars and genetically enhancing them to have more mass, muscle, how about genetically enhanced wrestlers? is there any money in any of these?)
So, a few top scientists will disappear from the face of the earth, and then one day... BOOM! some earth-shattering announcements about new synthesized life forms.
You know that every country has probably discussed the idea of GENETIC WARFARE (it is, of course, an extension of biological warfare which every country has done extensive research in)
... and wouldn't oil companies like to develop oil-eating phages to clean up after their alcoholic ship captains when they crash tankers?
... and wouldn't the seed companies like to have seed that would grow in broader climate ranges and bear larger fruit and be STERILE so that you had to buy more seed (oh, wait, we're already doing that)
... and wouldn't livestock growers like to ensure that their cows gave more milk and that their turkeys had larger breasts (oh, wait, we're already doing that).. how about if we could grow just a chicken breast with no head or feathers?
... and wouldn't parents like to ensure that their offspring were disease and genetic defect free? we can test for stuff today, but imagine if you could go through a menu much the way you configure a linux kernel and add and subtract genes from a lifeform you create?
Face it , after the web,e-commerce, internet thingy become commonplace, the next big boom will be in biotech again, and it will possibly *NOT* happen in the US.
sure I get it, but things are out of control - it's all too speculative, and all of the IPO daytraders who don't even know which way is up are just getting their news from equally misinformed financial analysts or tech journalists (read: non-techies) who spend all day reading slashdot to look for good tips to give to their customers/readers
Dell will have a hard time convincing anyone who's been in the computer industry for more than a few versions of linux that it has a committment to linux.
but then all they need to do is fool the investors, and then their stock price can go to 300 too.
If they changed their name to linuxdell that would be good. Or if they fired all their windows support staff and hired recent CS majors who only used linux, that would be good. Or if they pried all the windows keys off their keyboards and put linux keys on. or if they got logitech to create a mouse that said linux on it...
or if Michael Dell changed his name to Michael Linux... yeah that would be good for at least a doubling in stock price.
... and if Michael Dell called a press conference to announce that "windows sucks!" - that would work too.
or if Dell started shipping servers with hardware RAID controllers that had GOOD driver support for linux and other intel unices.
heh - none of those are going to happen (maybe the linux keys on the keyboard...)
US stock market nowadays is like some slimy scam! I'm happy that people are getting rich, but it's all insane. People like us aren't the ones that are driving the stock prices crazy, it's the fund managers that are trying to hold on to their jobs, it's everyone and their grandma who is daytrading.
Here's my main beef: there's no opportunity for anyone to profit from these stocks. They gap open to a price that is WAAAY overvalued, and then the corporate investors take their profits, and the stocks dip by the end of the second day. There is no opportunity for average not-well connected people to "get in" on anything anymore.
Stocks are priced, but never go on sale for that price. Why not just start pricing IPOs at $300/share???????
This is not a sustainable model.
I can see it now: Fund manager to fund manager: "we're getting out of Microsoft and getting into linux - Buy every company that does anything with linux and continue to accumulate all stock that you can get your hands on AT ANY PRICE"
I'm sorry I missed out on the VA IPO, but jeez... this is just insane!
Oh well, at least I'm glad that I'm not a not a financial consultant or work for a brick-and-mortar investment firm. Their days are numbered.
I guess this is good news for opensource... there'll be plenty of linux millionaires that can devote their life to creating 32-bit color icons or ultra-cool widgets, or whatever turns them on without having to worry about making a profit from it.... (or needing to prostiture themselves by writing windows code)
I've been a staroffice user since the 4.X versions. I still have the ability to boot windows NT in vmware and run MSOffice, but staroffice and xlHtml and wvHtml pretty much take care of my basic needs to decrypt email attachments.
Sun needs to fix the following issues with staroffice IMHO:
1) release the stardivision windows -> unix/win/os2 porting kit under GPL. It could have been used by so many projects already to bring more windows software to unix. I believe it's only used for StarOffice currently, and Sun wants to re-do staroffice as a portal... Sun PLEASE GIVE THIS BACK TO THE COMMUNITY AS GPL. Give it to WINE!
2) make staroffice a true multiuser app. Ever try to install SO on an nfs server and have a few dozen people access it? Too hard. SO should *automatically* create a.staroffice dir under ~ if it doesn't exist. There shouldn't be a need for running "setup/net" for multiuser install. Make staroffice understand symlinks.
3) make staroffice able to import powerpoint 95 and excel spreadsheets generated from excel 95 with Excel 97 compat patch installed.
4) release frequently. Re-build binaries when necessary to support newer kernels. Build for lots of different platforms.
5) make the "staroffice takes over your unix desktop and makes it look like win95" an option that is not enabled by default
6) make it possible to do a non-graphical install.
7) prove your committment to the unix community by making staroffice a true competitor to MSOffice, not just "the only game in town"
Where I work, the most skilled technical resources are always dedicated to UNIX. We have experienced Windows sysadmins, too, but (in my view) the average Windows sysadmin is a skilled user, while the average UNIX sysadmin is a skilled programmer.
So, my staff can take a cryptic, unfriendly, (buggy?) UNIX software package and write scripts, wrappers, and web-based front ends to make it work like a dream in the enterprise.
On the windows side, things are different. Run installshield. Configure all the options. Test. If the software doesn't work exactly as required, then submit bug or feature request and wait for next version. Spin. repeat.
Unix users are used to customizing things to get exactly what they want. They accept cryptic, difficult installs of commercial unix software because they can customize it and make it do exactly what they want and it works.
Imagine windows software that required hand-editing of the registry or using edit to open config files and batch files. Image buying a windows program that had no GUI! Users would go nuts and slam the software into the ground as backwards, unfriendly, counter-intuitive, impossible-to-install, etc...
unix users just RTFM, install, configure, and run it. (and then start re-writing the scripts and customizing the solution).
And all management would hear is that the unix software upgrade/install was working great and went as planned and now we have this great web-based view of the data (hacked in perl by $SYSADMIN)... or... $WINDOWS_PACKAGE didn't have the promised functionality so we can't get it to work right, but it should be in the next beta version which we're getting next month.
Which of the above statements would you rather report to your manager?
MORAL: There's no substiture for experienced IT staff.
I always thought that the Apple lowercase hack was pretty brilliant.
The early computers didn't do much, and they were all more of a 'hack' for hackers than a productivity tool.
The Apple ][+ default text display was 40X24 and there was NO LOWERCASE. You had to buy a special aftermarket PROM to support display of lowercase characters. Moreover, the *&%!# SHIFT KEY DIDN'T WORK ON LETTERS! So... some wordprocessing companies came up with the brilliant idea of wiring the paddle button from the connector to the shift key and using the 'paddle button' as a shift key!
Imagine trying to sell a computer today that didn't have lowercase!
While I agree with the statement that opensource FRAGMENTS generally don't encourage the participation of outside developers and doesn't contribute back USEFUL NEW REUSABLE CODE, it is nice nonetheless because it allows us to fix, optimize, extend, and enhance UT.
Do you remember how much work everyone went through to reverse-engineer the doom wad formats? and then to write the various frontends? How many doom players *didn't* use some 3rd party frontend, level editor, etc...
Having the linux parts opensourced *DOES* give developers a lot more info FOR DEVELOPING ENHANCEMENTS TO UT . It doesn't give much to people who are trying to rip off UT and use it's game engine all that much tho.
The developers do have a right to profit from and protect their coding efforts. I don't deny them that at all. I'm happy that they're allowing us to tinker with the linux parts so that eventually we'll all have lots of great enhancements for UT that don't run under Windows.
When epic sees development and enhancement being driven by LINUX users of UT, they'll have a harder time justifying not fully supporting it (including training their support staff in linux!)
>I wonder why the GUIs in linux look ugly when compared to win98 GUI
X-windows doesn't have anti-aliasing, so fonts may not appear to have such rounded edges. You probably would benefit from installing a Truetype xfs server (newer distros come with them) and a variety of truetype fonts (and the intlfonts package as well). That makes a surprising difference.
Other than that, the "beauty" of any GUI is pretty subjective. Some people here really like CDE. How many windows users would be praising Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.1 user interface? They're out there... believe it or not.
Unix doesn't requrie a gui. This takes a while to sink in. unix doesn't need a gui to be installed/run/manage/administer. That's a major strenght (and conversely a major weakness of Windows)
Unix and x-windows has developed over time much the vay that opensource projects work. I personally think that gnome and kde are pretty fantastic. I think they both look and function a lot better than windows98.
I could also show you some pretty lame-looking window managers for unix, but then I could show you situations where a lame-looking window manager works exceptionally well for certain people.
example: twm - ever seen a sysadmin with hundreds of minimized xterms in gnome? it works and looks pretty functional in twm.
Also, since there's no single company that is forcing users to follow a single user interface path. There are other user interfaces for windows. Look for litestep...
developers for windows are basically strongarmed into developing these "consistent" GUIs. I read somewhere about what developers have to agree to with Micros~1 in order to be "windows 2000 certified". that takes away a lot of the programmer's freedom to explore new toolkits. Imagine if everyone had been forced to use motif -- we'd never have gotten all the great gtk and qt toolkits and apps.
I'll be the first to admit that x-windows has it's limitations and design flaws and that there are some pretty far-out, non-intuitive themes for some window managers. But you can choose what works best for you.
... and if you don't like linux, you're free to keep using windows. I'm more interested in getting all of the developers to switch to linux first. When we've finished coding all of the fantastic apps that you value more than OS stability, free code, and cross-platform-ness, we'll be ready for you with everything you want already built into linux. Keep checking back with us.
Developers want to develop for linux and now they can make money doing it. It's just a matter of time before end users and upper management realizes that their important apps are as good or better under linux, and that linux gives them more choices.
If you work with people who are unix operators as opposed to unix hackers, they may be much more comfortable with a look and feel that they already are comfortable with.
(how many of us had to hand-hold users through a DOS -> Win 3.0 migration? , then Win 3.1 -> Win 95 migration? Or wp5.1 DOS/lotus 123 -> any-windows-office-suite)
Is this flashback relavent? Yes, CDE/motif was designed to be visually competetive with Windows 3.1 and much to UNIX and CDE's testament, it has lived on far longer than Windows 3.1.
I don't personally use CDE, but I expect it to be available on all (non-linux) boxes. Maybe CDE sucks, but at least I know exactly how it sucks and I can count on it to continue to suck in exactly the same ways on each major UNIX. It's a STANDARD.
anyway, It's fast, GNOME-aware, and familiar. If you work in a big Solaris shop, your users will probably require less retraining with XFCE than kde or GNOME (even though they're much cooler)
I hope the distros realize this, and include XFCE as a default WM for "LEGACY" unix operators.
Choice is a great thing!
I do think XFCE needs a beter name, though. Maybe GNU CDE or GDE?
Hey! Thanks for pointing this out! I was still burned from hotjava 1.0 that came with Solaris 2.6, and I wouldn't have thought of ever checking it out again.
If you feel the same way, give hotjava a second chance. It's still java, but out of all the alternate browsers around for unix, it's actually quite good at rendering html that other non-netscape, unix browsers choke on.
of course, nothing can replace lynx, but sometimes I like to see the pretty pictures without the annoying core dumps that kill my mail and browser in one fell swoop.
Slashdot Mirror
I think ESR's calling the release of Q1 src a lump of coal in hacker's stockings is a bit extreme.
Even the ensuing debate over multi-user game/world security models is very significant for future development.
Now that Q1 src is opensourced, what's to stop those of us who are so unhappy with the network play model from re-implementing it??
If we can come up with a better, faster, tighter, cross-platform, secure model for network gameplay, I'm sure that many game developers would be interested in adopting it.
so, let's start designing and implementing the new protocols for networked online worlds!
Thanks to John Carmack for the Q1 src which has fueled so much thought about gaming, AI, virtual communities, new user interfaces.... and much more.
... and thanks for the linux port when all the other game companies were writing to Windows only.
I really don't think this is such a big deal... It's a game, for pete's sake! When people start earning salaries for their quake performance, then maybe we need to worry about this.
It's been my experience that cheating in these games really isn't much fun (unless your really stuck and about to give up on the whole game), and I don't think that others would want to play with cheaters unless they were cheating too, which would make the game fair again, I suppose.
With the source, it's pretty trivial to undo just about any protection and spoof any values the program expects to find, so why bother?
I fear that by putting in encryption and protection schemes, we'll be hindering potential development of new variations and play modes of quake and quake derivative games. If altered clients could be used to introduce a handicap factor into games, it might encourage gameplay between experienced and less experienced players.
Why not add a HANDIcAP FACTOR to the quake game, and have that be shown for each player when joining a new game? It's probably easier to deal with cheating by making it a defined feature than trying to protect against it ever happening.
I see your point, but many of us continue to visit slashdot because it reports news as it's happening or before anyone else noticed it happened.
Here's what it sounds like you're saying: Slashdot users are oveloading the ftp servers so that the developers can't get any work done. Please don't announce things before they're ready for to be consumed by the general public.
Does this mean that slashdot community is no longer the developer community?
maybe slashdot is now where all the journalists of the world come to get an interesting topic for their next article or news story.
No. The announcement can't wait until there are binaries. *ANYONE* can generate binaries from the source.
Why wait for binaries to make an announcement?
What platforms do you think we should wait until binaries exist for before something is announced? If there's no unixware binary or no intel solaris binary or no sparc linux binary, should we wait?
Why wait for a webmaster to update a website when the files are on ftp?
here's how it works:
- developers write code and check in changes to source control
- interested parties check ftp sites or cvs and download snapshots. Read Changelog. Compile. Provide feedback. Repeat as often as time permits.
- developers/testers know well in advance of any official announcement when a new milestone is near *BECAUSE THE DOCS SAY WHAT WILL BE IN NEXT MILESTONE*
- developers announce on slashdot for the benefit of the testers who may not be able to build snapshots, but are interested.
- slashdotters download src code and compile to get optimized binaries that take full advantage of their system libraries and architecture.
I would never prefer a binary for something that I could easily build from source. The only times I get a binary are when it's for an OS that I don't have a nice development machine, or for something hard to build like X11.
You silly US-centric computer execs... don't you realize that the growth potential for the internet is hardware and OS agnostic browsing devices with various CPUs, OSs, browsers, and capabilities?
... or are those people the ones leaking the secrets?
why standardize on a format that only supports one platform?
... and why add video when it's not needed. We're still bandwidth poor to the end users. Let's focus on page load times before we start adding video.
for the record. quicktime and real for linux suck. they're virtually orphaned! If I have to view new video clips, I must now run windows in vmware to use windows media player. That's about all I still need windows for!
so, tell me, how will windows media content work over WAP, on cell phones, on realtime OS-based information kiosks, on PDAs, on webTV, over digital cable boxes, on dreamcast, on playstation2?
can't you freakin' lame computer marketing execs see that Windows Media format won't get your content to all of those places.
Everyone and their dog knows that Microsoft has no interest in really supporting any non-MS os. (except to throw off the DOJ - like with Apple)
We've gotta get an opensource video player that's really good, or we're going to be forever writing decoders for MS's ever-changing protocols that aren't supported on anything but windows.
It'll be like the word doc format fiasco all over again!
and to those of you whinig about Slashdot printing rumors, you obviously haven't been around here for long. Slashdot's got a pretty good track record for getting the scoop early.
If your employees are leaking your company's confidential information on slashdot, that's an internal problem, not a slashdot problem.
But of course your network engineers can track down who's accessing slashdot when and cross reference posting times, right?
typo for horse
... family forum?
was an irc reference. to days gone by when IRC was the most interesting thing on the internet.
You mean to tell me that whole families are reading slashdot?
son:"Gee mom, what did you think about the KRASH release of KDE?"
mom:"I still haven't forgotten the old qt licenseing. Have you done your homework?"
dad:"Yes, son, before you check your packet capture programs for our neighbor's ftp passwords, make sure you take the garbage out, or I'll revoke your root access!"
mom:"and help your sister build abiword with a gnome front end so she can write her termpaper. If you do that... we'll increase your anonymous ftp quota by 500megs...!"
dad:"Honey, I've been thinking... maybe we should be contributing more code to the mozilla project."
Why would INTEL choose FreeBSD when Linux has all of the (deserved or not) hype, momentum, and business interest?
To answer that question, get a room full of lawyers for computer company legal departments together and have them read the GPL.
.. ask them if they'd like their company's product to be involved with the GPL license.
I understand the GPL. You understand the GPL. Maybe 95+% of slashdot readers understand the GPL, but do you think that corporate lawyers for tech companies who make their money from intellectual property protection are eager to get involved with anything that might require disclosure of their intellectual property?
I'm betting that many companies have official policies (enforced or not) against opensource software due in part to fear of the GPL.
so... the decision comes down to linux+gpl_potential_legal_worries or *BSD+100%_FREE_No_strings_attached .
And the legal department chooses which one??
__
Despite how we try to ignore them, facts take their toll.
/me picks up dead horse
/me beats hose
Why would INTEL choose FreeBSD when Linux has all of the (deserved or not) hype, momentum, and business interest?
To answer that question, get a room full of lawyers for computer company legal departments together and have them read the GPL.
.. ask them if they'd like their company's product to be involved with the GPL license.
I understand the GPL. You understand the GPL. Maybe 95+% of slashdot readers understand the GPL, but do you think that corporate lawyers for tech companies who make their money from intellectual property protection are eager to get involved with anything that might require disclosure of their intellectual property?
I'm betting that many companies have official policies (enforced or not) against opensource software due in part to fear of the GPL.
so... the decision comes down to linux+gpl_potential_legal_worries or *BSD+100%_FREE_No_strings_attached .
And the legal department chooses which one??
__
Despite how we try to ignore them, facts take their toll.
if I had my choice of supporting 1000 Sun ultra2's running solaris or linux, I'd still choose Solaris.
... and I can script the entire install with pre and post-processing so that I don't need to do anything.
One of the main reasons is jumpstart. I can install or re-image systems to a number of different OS versions from a single server.
Try that with linux. Every version from every vendor has changed the nfs/http/ftp install rules somehow, and some of the cd's can't be mounted and nfs installed because of an improper directory structure ON THE CD for network installs (hello, redhat 6.1!). or lack of support for non-cdrom based installs (hello, Corel!)
This is a CRITICAL WEAKNESS OF LINUX. How freaking difficult is it for someone to fix this?
Maybe I'm jumping the gun... maybe only X86 linux can't support something like jumpstart becuase the X86 hardware carries around so much legacy baggage like the BIOS. Honestly, there are so many things about x86 hardware that really SUCK! It's too bad that it won't go away.
How can you change the bios settings on an x86 server when you're connected to a console server on the serial port?
How can you see any BIOS hardware error messages from a serial port connection during boot up?
When linux is being covered by Gartner reports and shows up favorably in the "magic quadrant", then it's big news. Many large corporate decisions are made based solely on a simple gartner square with some dots in it.
:()
It sounds silly, but if you're in a big company, and you're pushing a solution or a product that isn't favored by Gartner research, Senior management's going to ask you to re-evaluate and see why $GARTNER_TOP_PICK wouldn't work for the company.
Nowadays, the senior execs have suddenly "DISCOVERED" linux, and now they're looking to form "Strategic Alliances" and establish "linux partnerships" (but the senior execs are still using Windows
anyway, on a related note, I head 3 non-technical women in the movie theater yesterday talking about investment (and the LNUX IPO) and one was trying to explain to the others what linux was. She said "now everybody is trying to learn linux - it's like windows NT but people say it's better and it's free." To me, overhearing that discussion meant more than placement on the gartner quadrant!
Have you noticed that nowadays hardly anyone mispronounces linux?
don't judge a Sun server by CDE login or dtlogin in general. CDE was, is, and probably always will be a resource pig.
If you want to compare, run the same window manager as you're used to under Linux and start comparing from there, as opposed to evaulating CDE performance.
Unfortunately for Sun, their customer base demands eternal binary compatibility, so they're more limited in what they can fundamentally fix in the OS and how fast they can allow an os version to be obsoleted.
Linux can break binary compatibility whenver someone finds a bug in glibc
ex: try to find a jdk2 for linux glibc2.0 or libc5 -- they don't exist. Now try finding jdk2 for Solaris 2.6 or 2.5.1 - they exist.
Linux distros are going to start facing the same corporate pressures for eternal binary compatibility. I hope that it doesn't slow down innovation (but it probably will!)
If VA threw a dozen developers behind mozilla development, that would get things up to speed rather quickly. This is so important to not only the linux community but the entire UNIX community. I wish Sun would do the same.
... c'mon Apple, Real, Macromedia??? No excuse.
And, we need GOOD versions of all the major plugins. The only linux plugins that don't suck rocks are flash and acrobat reader. Real player for unix is pure schlock. If we want to push linux on the desktop, we need plugins for the major media formats.
If there's an audio/video link on CNN.COM, linux needs to be able to decode it with a plugin in the browser without building extra stuff and hacking plugins.
My short list of plugin wants for linux/unix
- good, recent decoder for all versions of RealAudio/Video with all codecs and compression supported
- modern quicktime plugin support and support for all quicktime image formats.
- macromedia shockwave support
- windows media player - if people are posting content with it, we need to be able to view it.
C'mon, what's taken so long for the unix plugins? I can understand Micrsoft not porting their player in hopes of slowing their marketshare loss, but
Fix it!
SO, if the scientists succeed, they by definition become GOD, correct? Can they put that after their names like MD or PhD?
seriously, though. It's just a matter of time. If someone can almost do this today, then imagine what types of life they'll be creating when they have a 1000 node cluster of 10ghz cpu machines helping to do the computation (say in 10 years)
sometime in the future, it might be a grad student exercise to synthesize an organism based on stereoisomers of amino acids.
Read K. Eric Drexlers book - Engines of Creation
Religion isn't going to like this, but then traditional religions generally don't seem as relavent to 20th century folk as they might have hundreds of years ago. Most people don't really like the idea of appending a religious text the way we'd append a constitution or law, either, so traditional religions can't very well deal with things like genetic engineering that didn't exist until a few decades ago. They have to rely on some subjective interpretation...
Not a troll about religion. Just my opinion. If you love god, that's great, but if you feel like religion doesn't speak to you concerns, read the first few chapters of The Celestine Prophecy and see if you agree (good book, but it lost me towards the end)
So, religion aside, the real issue is: who's going to fund creation of new life? My guess is that the US won't support it for political reasons, but that some 3rd world country will. Same with genetic engineering - you know that eventually somebody is going to start cloning humans.... and people *will* pay money (hey perverts: want a 21-year old Pamela Andersen clone? How about a clone of famous dead people? How about cloning sports stars and genetically enhancing them to have more mass, muscle, how about genetically enhanced wrestlers? is there any money in any of these?)
So, a few top scientists will disappear from the face of the earth, and then one day... BOOM! some earth-shattering announcements about new synthesized life forms.
You know that every country has probably discussed the idea of GENETIC WARFARE (it is, of course, an extension of biological warfare which every country has done extensive research in)
... and wouldn't oil companies like to develop oil-eating phages to clean up after their alcoholic ship captains when they crash tankers?
... and wouldn't the seed companies like to have seed that would grow in broader climate ranges and bear larger fruit and be STERILE so that you had to buy more seed (oh, wait, we're already doing that)
... and wouldn't livestock growers like to ensure that their cows gave more milk and that their turkeys had larger breasts (oh, wait, we're already doing that).. how about if we could grow just a chicken breast with no head or feathers?
... and wouldn't parents like to ensure that their offspring were disease and genetic defect free? we can test for stuff today, but imagine if you could go through a menu much the way you configure a linux kernel and add and subtract genes from a lifeform you create?
Face it , after the web,e-commerce, internet thingy become commonplace, the next big boom will be in biotech again, and it will possibly *NOT* happen in the US.
Hold on for a wild ride!
sure I get it, but things are out of control - it's all too speculative, and all of the IPO daytraders who don't even know which way is up are just getting their news from equally misinformed financial analysts or tech journalists (read: non-techies) who spend all day reading slashdot to look for good tips to give to their customers/readers
Dell will have a hard time convincing anyone who's been in the computer industry for more than a few versions of linux that it has a committment to linux.
but then all they need to do is fool the investors, and then their stock price can go to 300 too.
If they changed their name to linuxdell that would be good. Or if they fired all their windows support staff and hired recent CS majors who only used linux, that would be good. Or if they pried all the windows keys off their keyboards and put linux keys on. or if they got logitech to create a mouse that said linux on it...
or if Michael Dell changed his name to Michael Linux... yeah that would be good for at least a doubling in stock price.
... and if Michael Dell called a press conference to announce that "windows sucks!" - that would work too.
or if Dell started shipping servers with hardware RAID controllers that had GOOD driver support for linux and other intel unices.
heh - none of those are going to happen (maybe the linux keys on the keyboard...)
Bah!
US stock market nowadays is like some slimy scam! I'm happy that people are getting rich, but it's all insane. People like us aren't the ones that are driving the stock prices crazy, it's the fund managers that are trying to hold on to their jobs, it's everyone and their grandma who is daytrading.
Here's my main beef: there's no opportunity for anyone to profit from these stocks. They gap open to a price that is WAAAY overvalued, and then the corporate investors take their profits, and the stocks dip by the end of the second day. There is no opportunity for average not-well connected people to "get in" on anything anymore.
Stocks are priced, but never go on sale for that price. Why not just start pricing IPOs at $300/share???????
This is not a sustainable model.
I can see it now: Fund manager to fund manager: "we're getting out of Microsoft and getting into linux - Buy every company that does anything with linux and continue to accumulate all stock that you can get your hands on AT ANY PRICE"
I'm sorry I missed out on the VA IPO, but jeez... this is just insane!
Oh well, at least I'm glad that I'm not a not a financial consultant or work for a brick-and-mortar investment firm. Their days are numbered.
I guess this is good news for opensource... there'll be plenty of linux millionaires that can devote their life to creating 32-bit color icons or ultra-cool widgets, or whatever turns them on without having to worry about making a profit from it.... (or needing to prostiture themselves by writing windows code)
I've been a staroffice user since the 4.X versions. I still have the ability to boot windows NT in vmware and run MSOffice, but staroffice and xlHtml and wvHtml pretty much take care of my basic needs to decrypt email attachments.
.staroffice dir under ~ if it doesn't exist. There shouldn't be a need for running "setup /net" for multiuser install. Make staroffice understand symlinks.
Sun needs to fix the following issues with staroffice IMHO:
1) release the stardivision windows -> unix/win/os2 porting kit under GPL. It could have been used by so many projects already to bring more windows software to unix. I believe it's only used for StarOffice currently, and Sun wants to re-do staroffice as a portal... Sun PLEASE GIVE THIS BACK TO THE COMMUNITY AS GPL. Give it to WINE!
2) make staroffice a true multiuser app. Ever try to install SO on an nfs server and have a few dozen people access it? Too hard. SO should *automatically* create a
3) make staroffice able to import powerpoint 95 and excel spreadsheets generated from excel 95 with Excel 97 compat patch installed.
4) release frequently. Re-build binaries when necessary to support newer kernels. Build for lots of different platforms.
5) make the "staroffice takes over your unix desktop and makes it look like win95" an option that is not enabled by default
6) make it possible to do a non-graphical install.
7) prove your committment to the unix community by making staroffice a true competitor to MSOffice, not just "the only game in town"
Where I work, the most skilled technical resources are always dedicated to UNIX. We have experienced Windows sysadmins, too, but (in my view) the average Windows sysadmin is a skilled user, while the average UNIX sysadmin is a skilled programmer.
... or ... $WINDOWS_PACKAGE didn't have the promised functionality so we can't get it to work right, but it should be in the next beta version which we're getting next month.
So, my staff can take a cryptic, unfriendly, (buggy?) UNIX software package and write scripts, wrappers, and web-based front ends to make it work like a dream in the enterprise.
On the windows side, things are different. Run installshield. Configure all the options. Test. If the software doesn't work exactly as required, then submit bug or feature request and wait for next version. Spin. repeat.
Unix users are used to customizing things to get exactly what they want. They accept cryptic, difficult installs of commercial unix software because they can customize it and make it do exactly what they want and it works.
Imagine windows software that required hand-editing of the registry or using edit to open config files and batch files. Image buying a windows program that had no GUI! Users would go nuts and slam the software into the ground as backwards, unfriendly, counter-intuitive, impossible-to-install, etc...
unix users just RTFM, install, configure, and run it. (and then start re-writing the scripts and customizing the solution).
And all management would hear is that the unix software upgrade/install was working great and went as planned and now we have this great web-based view of the data (hacked in perl by $SYSADMIN)
Which of the above statements would you rather report to your manager?
MORAL: There's no substiture for experienced IT staff.
I always thought that the Apple lowercase hack was pretty brilliant.
The early computers didn't do much, and they were all more of a 'hack' for hackers than a productivity tool.
The Apple ][+ default text display was 40X24 and there was NO LOWERCASE. You had to buy a special aftermarket PROM to support display of lowercase characters. Moreover, the *&%!# SHIFT KEY DIDN'T WORK ON LETTERS! So... some wordprocessing companies came up with the brilliant idea of wiring the paddle button from the connector to the shift key and using the 'paddle button' as a shift key!
Imagine trying to sell a computer today that didn't have lowercase!
pr#6
While I agree with the statement that opensource FRAGMENTS generally don't encourage the participation of outside developers and doesn't contribute back USEFUL NEW REUSABLE CODE, it is nice nonetheless because it allows us to fix, optimize, extend, and enhance UT.
Do you remember how much work everyone went through to reverse-engineer the doom wad formats? and then to write the various frontends? How many doom players *didn't* use some 3rd party frontend, level editor, etc...
Having the linux parts opensourced *DOES* give developers a lot more info FOR DEVELOPING ENHANCEMENTS TO UT . It doesn't give much to people who are trying to rip off UT and use it's game engine all that much tho.
The developers do have a right to profit from and protect their coding efforts. I don't deny them that at all. I'm happy that they're allowing us to tinker with the linux parts so that eventually we'll all have lots of great enhancements for UT that don't run under Windows.
When epic sees development and enhancement being driven by LINUX users of UT, they'll have a harder time justifying not fully supporting it (including training their support staff in linux!)
>I wonder why the GUIs in linux look ugly when compared to win98 GUI
X-windows doesn't have anti-aliasing, so fonts may not appear to have such rounded edges. You probably would benefit from installing a Truetype xfs server (newer distros come with them) and a variety of truetype fonts (and the intlfonts package as well). That makes a surprising difference.
Other than that, the "beauty" of any GUI is pretty subjective. Some people here really like CDE. How many windows users would be praising Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.1 user interface? They're out there... believe it or not.
Unix doesn't requrie a gui. This takes a while to sink in. unix doesn't need a gui to be installed/run/manage/administer. That's a major strenght (and conversely a major weakness of Windows)
Unix and x-windows has developed over time much the vay that opensource projects work. I personally think that gnome and kde are pretty fantastic. I think they both look and function a lot better than windows98.
I could also show you some pretty lame-looking window managers for unix, but then I could show you situations where a lame-looking window manager works exceptionally well for certain people.
example: twm - ever seen a sysadmin with hundreds of minimized xterms in gnome? it works and looks pretty functional in twm.
Also, since there's no single company that is forcing users to follow a single user interface path. There are other user interfaces for windows. Look for litestep...
developers for windows are basically strongarmed into developing these "consistent" GUIs. I read somewhere about what developers have to agree to with Micros~1 in order to be "windows 2000 certified". that takes away a lot of the programmer's freedom to explore new toolkits. Imagine if everyone had been forced to use motif -- we'd never have gotten all the great gtk and qt toolkits and apps.
I'll be the first to admit that x-windows has it's limitations and design flaws and that there are some pretty far-out, non-intuitive themes for some window managers. But you can choose what works best for you.
... and if you don't like linux, you're free to keep using windows. I'm more interested in getting all of the developers to switch to linux first. When we've finished coding all of the fantastic apps that you value more than OS stability, free code, and cross-platform-ness, we'll be ready for you with everything you want already built into linux. Keep checking back with us.
Developers want to develop for linux and now they can make money doing it. It's just a matter of time before end users and upper management realizes that their important apps are as good or better under linux, and that linux gives them more choices.
... actually Linux was originally called "Freax" (some sort of play on Free X , or Freak-something I believe...)
it got the name Linux later, and Linus didn't name it that if my memory serves me correctly.
If I'm wrong (don't have time to dig up all the specifics at work), please correct me.
If you work with people who are unix operators as opposed to unix hackers, they may be much more comfortable with a look and feel that they already are comfortable with.
(how many of us had to hand-hold users through a DOS -> Win 3.0 migration? , then Win 3.1 -> Win 95 migration? Or wp5.1 DOS/lotus 123 -> any-windows-office-suite)
Is this flashback relavent? Yes, CDE/motif was designed to be visually competetive with Windows 3.1 and much to UNIX and CDE's testament, it has lived on far longer than Windows 3.1.
I don't personally use CDE, but I expect it to be available on all (non-linux) boxes. Maybe CDE sucks, but at least I know exactly how it sucks and I can count on it to continue to suck in exactly the same ways on each major UNIX. It's a STANDARD.
anyway, It's fast, GNOME-aware, and familiar. If you work in a big Solaris shop, your users will probably require less retraining with XFCE than kde or GNOME (even though they're much cooler)
I hope the distros realize this, and include XFCE as a default WM for "LEGACY" unix operators.
Choice is a great thing!
I do think XFCE needs a beter name, though. Maybe GNU CDE or GDE?
Hey! Thanks for pointing this out! I was still burned from hotjava 1.0 that came with Solaris 2.6, and I wouldn't have thought of ever checking it out again.
If you feel the same way, give hotjava a second chance. It's still java, but out of all the alternate browsers around for unix, it's actually quite good at rendering html that other non-netscape, unix browsers choke on.
of course, nothing can replace lynx, but sometimes I like to see the pretty pictures without the annoying core dumps that kill my mail and browser in one fell swoop.