Yeah, Micros~1 has great products.... except when they can't get their developers to code their way out of a shoebox... then they buy a competing product...
... then there's clustering, where even buying a competitor doesn't give them a usable product.
I'd suspect that any attempts to take the best parts of the interix posix subsystem and put them in Windows would just break all of the undocumented APIs that their apps supposedly don't use.
So what? I've had cygwin for a long time, but I really don't want unix tools under windows because there are too many fundamental limitations of windows.
fundametal limitation of windows:
-- inability to create/understand a symlink -- lack of any sort of real multiuser design, forethought, or planning (Sorry, but citrix & term svr. are HACKS!). -- lanman/CIFS -- NT Domain structure -- lack of a decent command shell (4dos/nt doesn't count, because it's not part of the OS. Micros~1: why isn't 4nt the default command shell???????????????) -- lack of an integrated xserver, integrated NFS, and telnet (not just an optional, buggy unix services add-on that sort of works.)
Umm... those are big limitations. Work on those first.
I just downloaded intlfonts-1.2, and it includes some nice free ttf fonts in the distro. Go search filewatcher for it. I've always said that the one thing that Micros~1 did well was fonts (must be their Mac group...), but their font license sucks rocks. Good thing we have free alternatives.
actually that would be a good free project to package and enhance 100% free ttf fonts that are hinted better than the Micros~1 fonts. Someone @ xfree86 is probably already on it...
Next dependency on Micros~1 that we can eliminate...?
That's the equalizer that keeps RedHat from becoming synonymous with Linux.
I'll tell you who can make that a reality -- SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS -- write to the LSB, state in your release notes that this software works on any linux machine of $ARCH architecture with $KERNEL_VER kernel or better that CONFORMS TO THE LINUX STANDARD BASE.
When the phrase "LSB Compliant" gains value, the distirbutions will want to ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H have to state that they conform to the LSB.
It's up to the software developers to actually comply to the LSB and demand that the distributions they develop on comply.
So... using history as a guide, this leaves Micros~1 with only a few (all undesirable?) options.
I can see the MS marketing strategists reviewing the ultra-secret plans from before to Kill netscape, kill Novell, Kill Apple, Kill Sun, Kill AOL, Kill Yahoo, Kill Oracle Kill Linus
1. Make Micros~1 Office free - they lose big $$$ 'cause people replace or upgrade Office more often than their OS - they kill commercial office software and stay in the desktop office suite game. - can we say service pack 7??
2. integrate Micros~1 Office with the OS ... and introduce even more bugs and security holes?? Actually, this wouldn't surprise me.
3. intergrate Micros~1 Office with the browser If #2 results in a lawsuit, then do #3. Problem is that this will hurt their OS sales. Why buy a new OS if the old one does everything you want?
The Micros~1 Trolls on Slashdot can't start an intellectual debate and are slowly fading into irrelevance. Good to see them sinking with their own ship.
if I were to guess, I'd think Micros~1 has some full time propaganda artists surfing slashdot and padding it with flamebait these days.
Too bad they can't write code to make their OS better....
KDE has a very well-integrated desktop
on
The Future of KDE
·
· Score: 2
NOTE: This is not flamebait -- it's my opinion on KDE's functionality
Okay, I'd been using KDE way back before the 1.0 releases, and I liked it. Then I got side-tracked trying to get gnome to compile (over and over and over). Finally GNOME is relatively stable, and... yeah, I've got cool themes and capplets out the wazoo.
... anyway, the other day I installed Caldera OpenLinux 2.2, and all I can say is that I was very impressed, and that's not something I say often. I would probably recommend a KDE-based desktop to a non-unix guru over GNOME at the moment for the following reasons:
1 - KDE doesn't suffer from the Desktop Environment / Windowmanager duality that GNOME does. -- yes, I know you can run differnt WM's with kde, too, but most people don't. Fact is that KDE is just plain a more cohesive desktop environemt - much similar to a newbie-friendly MacOS or Windows9X (which is what new linux users are familiar with...)
2 - while developers may still remember the stigma of the old qt license, end users don't care, and they probably don't know what a widget is, or what the difference between c++ and c is. So... for once, we finally get down to "which environment makes me more productive?". While I like gnome and use it at work on Solaris and linux, it does have a lot of funky bells and whistles, and it's arguably much slower than KDE
3 - stability. maybe it's just me, but living on the cutting edge of gnome development hurts. People tend to break fundamental pieces quite often (witness gnome-print - try getting it to work on Solaris or non-redhat 6.0) panel sometimes craps out, and combined with development versions of E, my dual xeon linux box sometimes hangs for a second or two. That's not good. My experience with the KDE cutting edge has been much more cross-platform friendly, and it seems to be a more focused and coordinated effort. Nobody comes out of left-field with a new method that only works on the latest RedHat, or worse yet, only compiles on their system.
I still use gnome at work, I prefer gtk toolkit for development projects, I prefer c to c++, and my gnome/e desktop looks really cool, but if I were setting up linux for my mom or sister, I'd probably give them a KDE desktop.
well, before start your lawsuits, (you must be American...), think about this: wouldn't you have rather been able to SOLVE your problem and not need to get lawyers involved?
Searching dejanews, I've been able to find answers to almost every linux question I've ever had.
So... how many times have *you* called Micros~1 support? How long did you wait? How much did you pay?.. and Did they solve your problem?
the following answers don't count as "solving your problem"
- you need to reboot - you need to reinstall all of your software - you need to upgrade to our beta version
check out the following for an interesting MS support story:
How about optimizing the code and getting it to really perform on older hardware? I know that the pace of CPUs make some people think that it's OK to require a 200+ mhz cpu... but reality is that many people have older systems. E on my sparc20 is a bit sluggish. I used WM up until recently for the sole reason that E (and gnome...) made my system too slow...
THEMING and CUSTOMIZING X
How about making E pick up it's theme from a GTK theme. It's really getting confusing to have a GTK theme, a gnome theme, an E theme, etc. Or... better yet, how about reviving.xresources and making that a MOTHER_OF_ALL_THEME_CONFIG repository?
also, how about shipping with a default theme that is completely stripped down and has all animation, funky cursors, tooltips, etc. turned off?
(We really need to come up with better standards for global and user prefs so that every app doesn't need it's own dotfile... also apps should be able to infer setting from the config files of other apps.)
SGI has to demonstrate that it can make money with linux. Heck, it has to demonstrate that it can just make money.
As to supporting linux, that's great. Linux this. Linux that. Yet another marketing press release. Check company stock price. Repeat. Ho-hum.
As to the next big thing... As long as it's unix-based or includes GNU sourcecode not only will I be happy, but I will have been involved in it. So if it's called embedix or hurd or floofloo, It doesn't really matter.
So... to get back to the main question. How will SGI fare as a whitebox (okay, purple/grey box) manufacturer???
Okay, we all wanted linux to grow, and now we're unhappy to see newbies join the linux ranks??
we can't have our cake and eat it too, you know... there was a time when just about everone on/. was either a programmer or a sysadmin or some type of engineer. Nowadays, I'd bet that the percentage of slashdotters who can use gcc and gdb has decreased dramatically.
We've gotten our noses out of joint because there are lots of people using linux who have different agendas, interests, and levels of knowledge.
The only options we have are: 1) tolearate a "dumbing down" of our favorite sites as the expand to serve a larger and larger community with large numbers of non-unix-gurus 2) ask site moderators to cater to a specific niche (like kernel developers, or hardcore computer geeks) 3) build a new niche site for insert-your-niche-here.
It's a little sad to see this happen, but it's inevitable. As linux (and the Internet, for that matter) mature, control of critical components will be wrested from the small fish and be given to the big fish.
How many marketroids are now reading slashdot looking for more such opportunities?
Okay, I've got to address this becuase I've been painfully building GNOME on Sparc Solaris in bits and pieces since the 0.2X releases.
So... it's 95% working on Solaris now, and I'm happy, but...
Do you know how many times I've found #include linux/*.h in gnome code?
or how many times I found that shell scripts with #!/bin/sh really meant #!/usr/local/bin/bash (sorry, linux users sh and bash are not the same!)
I'd seen some #define CFLAGS -m486 stuff in there as well or sound stuff hard coded to use/dev/dsp, too.
I can't blame linux developers for writing software to take advantage of linux features like glibc2.1 and linux headers, but be aware that the result is code that needs to be ported to other unices.
Yeah, it's a step in the right direction, but... they *assume* that the linux hacker community is interested in helping to secure Windows.
To a certain extent, the participation of the Opensource community is driven by intangibles, and that force hasn't been able to be successfully co-opted by any corporation yet. Look at some examples:
- Netscape fails to engage thousands of kernel hackers in redevolping their browser - Redhat starts becoming a "brick and mortar" business, and the linux community starts to diss them and fight for disto agnosticism - For every major corporate announcement of plans for a Linux port, there's an effort underway to develop a free replacement.
I don't think that many hackers are really interested in helping Micros~1 make better products -- since we don't use 'em, we don't promote 'em, and we stand to gain *NOTHING* by improving IIS 5.0 or Windows2001 - A Wasted Disk Space Odyssey.
There's no portable code being release for peer review. There's no public API. There's nothing of interest for the linux hacker other than saying, "look, I hacked another Windows box!"
I just meant that I (and I assume most of slashdot) prefer to have online, current, searchable content rather than bookcases full of old info.
I want just-published, up-to-the-minute content, and if I only need a few paragraphs of info, I see no reason to kill a tree for it.
Aside from classic literature and coffee-table pictorials, books today kinda suck.
1) the info in them is, by definition, out of date 2) hardbacks are really expensive 3) paperbacks are really cheap, quality-wise. Worth saving for 150 years? I think not. 4) books take too much space for too little knowledge. It's like comparing an old 45 rpm record to a CDROM full of mp3's. Nostalgia is one thing -- practicality is another.
The introduction of the cdrom and the ability to cheaply distribute mass quantities of data caused a shift in the value of information (US$50 for a 1.44M program that fits on a floppy disk suddenly seemed too expensive when you could get 640M of data for the same price.)
The vast amount of info on the web has caused the same effect for printed content. If I can get 90% of the book's info online from 10 different sources *for free*, why is the book worth $50, when I only need $5 or $10 worth of it?
Okay, just for the moment, let's say that the Old School, typewriter-using, book-reading, litigious, proprietary, work-20-years-at-the-same-company people are right and that it's wrong to link to content on another site.
First off, I need a definition of what is a "deep link" vs. a shallow link, but I digress.
So... all the benefits of the web and hyperlinking get categorically thrown out the door beucase linking directly to content "steals" the right of the website to throw garbage in your face.
Well, what about search engines, then? They're nothing but "deep links". They steal *everyone's* content and make money by forcing ads to be displayed while they hawk other people's stuff.
(so, by not having a robots.txt file, do you grant consent to have your content snatched up?)
I think that we're approaching a time when the old-school and new-school will have to come to some concessions about the way the world works. How do you enforce one country's law on international users and content that may originate from any country or no country?
And.... if search engines are guilty, then I'm 100% certain that ALL portals except for opensource-content ones are violating the same rules.
I'm sure things will get worse before they get better. Technology is much more advanced than the laws that govern it. Just look at how complex US law is, and then look at how little of that law relates to regulating modern technology.
Fear the US Lawyers who have free cycles to "port" all their progress-stifiling regulations to high-tech!
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for justice and rule of law, but when law gets so complex and obfuscated that nobody understands it and it takes months to interpret it, something's gone awary.
> At the rate we're going we're gonna have portals >that point to portals that point to more portals
we have them already -- the top lists of mp3s/warez/porn that link to endless pages of banner ads that promise to give you useful results if you just click through one more page of banner ads.
One thing that UNIX office suites all seem to have in common is that they include additional fonts and often fontserver due to the crummy lowest common denominator of fonts on UNIX boxes.
This is really sad, and yes, X has some limitations. I'd love to see anti-aliasing be part of xfs, and I'm happy to see standard font servers starting to support ttf, but it's got a ways to go. (ever try printing Chinese or Japanese web pages in unix?)
But... I must defend Micros~1 when it comes to Fonts. They have done an excellent job of bringing high quality, well designed fonts to browsers everywhere - even under unix;)
A lot of you are missing the point here. Sun needs Staroffice.
Here's why: The PC card for Sun servers never worked well, and Sun wants to sell their Ultra5 and 10 workstations into the Windows NT developer workstation market. In order to compete here, they need to read/write MSOffice doc formats.
Software emulation of Windows really sucks. Sorry, but soft-PC isn't a good solution.
Bundling a PC-on-card sucks, too because 1) Windows sucks 2) Who wants to flip back and forth between unix and a windows box 3) user still needs to buy Windows and MS Office 4) hardware compatibility issues
so, the only obvious solution is for them to bundle an Office suite with their servers (sure would be nice to get StarOffice with Solaris...)
Staroffice isn't perfect. IMNSHO, it tries too hard to be Windows95, and it was obviously ported from win32 with a porting kit, but it's high on usability and ability to convert document formats to standard html
It's grown on me, and I now find that a staroffice desktop can keep me from having to vnc to a windows machine.
I'd say it's a good move for Sun, and Microsoft should be scared of the spectre of SUN OFFICE!
slashdotters should be worried about future cross-platform support of Staroffice, licensing terms, and a staroffice re-written in Java.
Umm... your comment assumes that you made the mistake of using Micros~1's I'll fated Domain setup. (it's going away when the vapour clears from Windows 2001's inActive Directory)
Can't we all agree to us LDAP and get on with enterprise computing architecture? (forgot -- there's no MSLDAP, Visual LDAP, or DirectLDAP-DNS-for-datacenters yet;)
Oh, by the way, what about VNC? If an email attachment started a VNC server and set the password, would that make vnc a virus?
I couldn't live without VNC to tame Windows boxes. If anti-virus software started uninstalling VNC, I'd find new anti-virus software.
What if vnc development forked and one branch was driven by some teenagers who were branded as hackers? Does vnc become a bad tool?
We need to replace SMS with an opensource alternative that is cross-platform and can be administered from unix.
Is BO2k a good or bad tool? Hmm... Are crack, nmap, and saint good or bad? Depends on who uses them for what...
How much is an enterprise license for SMS and 10,000 users? What would be the impact on Micros~1 if fortune 1000 companies dumped SMS for free software?
Micros~1 doesn't want to buy into the idea that their loyal users could/would use opensource enterprise software for systems management.
I'm sure that some of these vulnerabilities in Win32 are there by design
"Hello, World!" May not be the most functional program ever written, but it is definitely the most portable and most widely ported. It may be the single most popular program considering the number of times it has been re-implemented from scratch by different programmers.
I'd venture to guess the almost every programmer has written hello world apps in more programming languages than any other program.
But, now that I start thinking about it, we really need an I18N version of hello_world and we need a manpage to hello_world. Better yet, we need sgml docs for it that can be converted to html, info, tex, and manpage.
I'm concerned about the license that hello world is distributed under, though. I'd hate to think that someone could take the free hello world, enhance it, and start selling it. Worse, yet... Imagine if some commercial company included "Hello, world" in their commercial software, and didn't redistribute the changes. I think hello world needs to be GPL'd to protect it.
Then we need a hello world daemon that when queried, responds with a "Hello, world" - hmm, could be a modified ping.
and... of course we need a hello_world gui so that we can welcome all of the non-unix gurus to linux. Please everyone, let's avoid the silly toolkit wars. I think it's good for linux to have both a khello and a ghello, and using corba, they should both be able to communicate "Hello, World" with each other.
and then we could have hello_world broadcasts from servers, and all clients on the network would respond with a storm of "Hello, World!" responses (no, wait, we already have that.. it's called Netware)
Since the iostream classes are so fundamental to standard C++, the Free Software Foundation has agreed to a special exception to its standard license, when you link programs with libio.a.
As a special exception, if you link this library with files compiled with a GNU compiler to produce an executable, this does not cause the resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the executable file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
The code is under the GNU General Public License (version 2) for all purposes other than linking with this library which means that you can modify and redistribute the code as usual; remember that, if you do, your modifications, and anything you link with the modified code, must be available to others on the same terms.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Micros~1 has great products.... except when they can't get their developers to code their way out of a shoebox... then they buy a competing product...
... then there's clustering, where even buying a competitor doesn't give them a usable product.
I'd suspect that any attempts to take the best parts of the interix posix subsystem and put them in Windows would just break all of the undocumented APIs that their apps supposedly don't use.
So what? I've had cygwin for a long time, but I really don't want unix tools under windows because there are too many fundamental limitations of windows.
fundametal limitation of windows:
-- inability to create/understand a symlink
-- lack of any sort of real multiuser design, forethought, or planning (Sorry, but citrix & term svr. are HACKS!).
-- lanman/CIFS
-- NT Domain structure
-- lack of a decent command shell
(4dos/nt doesn't count, because it's not part
of the OS. Micros~1: why isn't 4nt the
default command shell???????????????)
-- lack of an integrated xserver, integrated NFS, and telnet (not just an optional, buggy unix services add-on that sort of works.)
Umm... those are big limitations. Work on those first.
Yeah, the 80's sure were great. Remember Defender and Tempest... remember mohawks... remember Punk rock...
oh, yeah, and remember that guy who had some weird computer that wasn't an Apple or and IBM who got all religious about how great it was?
Whatever happend to that guy?
I just downloaded intlfonts-1.2, and it includes some nice free ttf fonts in the distro. Go search filewatcher for it. I've always said that the one thing that Micros~1 did well was fonts (must be their Mac group...), but their font license sucks rocks. Good thing we have free alternatives.
actually that would be a good free project to package and enhance 100% free ttf fonts that are hinted better than the Micros~1 fonts. Someone @ xfree86 is probably already on it...
Next dependency on Micros~1 that we can eliminate...?
Forget "based on Red Hat".
I want to see "based on Linux Standard Base"
That's the equalizer that keeps RedHat from becoming synonymous with Linux.
I'll tell you who can make that a reality -- SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS -- write to the LSB, state in your release notes that this software works on any linux machine of $ARCH architecture with $KERNEL_VER kernel or better that CONFORMS TO THE LINUX STANDARD BASE.
When the phrase "LSB Compliant" gains value, the distirbutions will want to ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H have to state that they conform to the LSB.
It's up to the software developers to actually comply to the LSB and demand that the distributions they develop on comply.
So... using history as a guide, this leaves Micros~1 with only a few (all undesirable?) options.
... and introduce even more bugs and security
I can see the MS marketing strategists reviewing the ultra-secret plans from before to Kill netscape, kill Novell, Kill Apple, Kill Sun, Kill AOL, Kill Yahoo, Kill Oracle Kill Linus
1. Make Micros~1 Office free
- they lose big $$$ 'cause people replace
or upgrade Office more often than their OS
- they kill commercial office software and
stay in the desktop office suite game.
- can we say service pack 7??
2. integrate Micros~1 Office with the OS
holes?? Actually, this wouldn't surprise me.
3. intergrate Micros~1 Office with the browser
If #2 results in a lawsuit, then do #3. Problem
is that this will hurt their OS sales. Why buy a
new OS if the old one does everything you want?
The Micros~1 Trolls on Slashdot can't start an intellectual debate and are slowly fading into irrelevance. Good to see them sinking with their own ship.
if I were to guess, I'd think Micros~1 has some full time propaganda artists surfing slashdot and padding it with flamebait these days.
Too bad they can't write code to make their OS better....
NOTE: This is not flamebait -- it's my opinion on KDE's functionality
Okay, I'd been using KDE way back before the 1.0 releases, and I liked it. Then I got side-tracked trying to get gnome to compile (over and over and over). Finally GNOME is relatively stable, and... yeah, I've got cool themes and capplets out the wazoo.
... anyway, the other day I installed Caldera OpenLinux 2.2, and all I can say is that I was very impressed, and that's not something I say often. I would probably recommend a KDE-based desktop to a non-unix guru over GNOME at the moment for the following reasons:
1 - KDE doesn't suffer from the Desktop Environment / Windowmanager duality that GNOME does. -- yes, I know you can run differnt WM's with kde, too, but most people don't. Fact is that KDE is just plain a more cohesive desktop environemt - much similar to a newbie-friendly MacOS or Windows9X (which is what new linux users are familiar with...)
2 - while developers may still remember the stigma of the old qt license, end users don't care, and they probably don't know what a widget is, or what the difference between c++ and c is. So... for once, we finally get down to "which environment makes me more productive?". While I like gnome and use it at work on Solaris and linux, it does have a lot of funky bells and whistles, and it's arguably much slower than KDE
3 - stability. maybe it's just me, but living on the cutting edge of gnome development hurts. People tend to break fundamental pieces quite often (witness gnome-print - try getting it to work on Solaris or non-redhat 6.0) panel sometimes craps out, and combined with development versions of E, my dual xeon linux box sometimes hangs for a second or two. That's not good. My experience with the KDE cutting edge has been much more cross-platform friendly, and it seems to be a more focused and coordinated effort. Nobody comes out of left-field with a new method that only works on the latest RedHat, or worse yet, only compiles on their system.
I still use gnome at work, I prefer gtk toolkit for development projects, I prefer c to c++, and my gnome/e desktop looks really cool, but if I were setting up linux for my mom or sister, I'd probably give them a KDE desktop.
well, before start your lawsuits, (you must be American...), think about this: wouldn't you have rather been able to SOLVE your problem and not need to get lawyers involved?
.. and Did they solve your problem?
p sychics.html
Searching dejanews, I've been able to find answers to almost every linux question I've ever had.
So... how many times have *you* called Micros~1 support? How long did you wait? How much did you pay?
the following answers don't count as "solving your problem"
- you need to reboot
- you need to reinstall all of your software
- you need to upgrade to our beta version
check out the following for an interesting MS support story:
http://epoch.cs.berkeley.edu:8000/~mct/funny/ms
PERFORMANCE and OPTIMIZATION:
.xresources and making that a MOTHER_OF_ALL_THEME_CONFIG repository?
How about optimizing the code and getting it to really perform on older hardware? I know that the pace of CPUs make some people think that it's OK to require a 200+ mhz cpu... but reality is that many people have older systems. E on my sparc20 is a bit sluggish. I used WM up until recently for the sole reason that E (and gnome...) made my system too slow...
THEMING and CUSTOMIZING X
How about making E pick up it's theme from a GTK theme. It's really getting confusing to have a GTK theme, a gnome theme, an E theme, etc. Or... better yet, how about reviving
also, how about shipping with a default theme that is completely stripped down and has all animation, funky cursors, tooltips, etc. turned off?
(We really need to come up with better standards for global and user prefs so that every app doesn't need it's own dotfile... also apps should be able to infer setting from the config files of other apps.)
SGI has to demonstrate that it can make money with linux. Heck, it has to demonstrate that it can just make money.
As to supporting linux, that's great. Linux this. Linux that. Yet another marketing press release. Check company stock price. Repeat. Ho-hum.
As to the next big thing... As long as it's unix-based or includes GNU sourcecode not only will I be happy, but I will have been involved in it. So if it's called embedix or hurd or floofloo, It doesn't really matter.
So... to get back to the main question. How will SGI fare as a whitebox (okay, purple/grey box) manufacturer???
Okay, we all wanted linux to grow, and now we're unhappy to see newbies join the linux ranks??
/. was either a programmer or a sysadmin or some type of engineer. Nowadays, I'd bet that the percentage of slashdotters who can use gcc and gdb has decreased dramatically.
we can't have our cake and eat it too, you know... there was a time when just about everone on
We've gotten our noses out of joint because there are lots of people using linux who have different agendas, interests, and levels of knowledge.
The only options we have are:
1) tolearate a "dumbing down" of our favorite sites as the expand to serve a larger and larger community with large numbers of non-unix-gurus
2) ask site moderators to cater to a specific niche (like kernel developers, or hardcore computer geeks)
3) build a new niche site for insert-your-niche-here.
It's a little sad to see this happen, but it's inevitable. As linux (and the Internet, for that matter) mature, control of critical components will be wrested from the small fish and be given to the big fish.
How many marketroids are now reading slashdot looking for more such opportunities?
Okay, I've got to address this becuase I've been painfully building GNOME on Sparc Solaris in bits and pieces since the 0.2X releases.
/dev/dsp, too.
So... it's 95% working on Solaris now, and I'm happy, but...
Do you know how many times I've found
#include linux/*.h
in gnome code?
or how many times I found that shell scripts with #!/bin/sh really meant #!/usr/local/bin/bash (sorry, linux users sh and bash are not the same!)
I'd seen some #define CFLAGS -m486 stuff in there as well or sound stuff hard coded to use
I can't blame linux developers for writing software to take advantage of linux features like glibc2.1 and linux headers, but be aware that the result is code that needs to be ported to other unices.
Yeah, it's a step in the right direction, but... they *assume* that the linux hacker community is interested in helping to secure Windows.
To a certain extent, the participation of the Opensource community is driven by intangibles, and that force hasn't been able to be successfully co-opted by any corporation yet. Look at some examples:
- Netscape fails to engage thousands of kernel hackers in redevolping their browser
- Redhat starts becoming a "brick and mortar" business, and the linux community starts to diss them and fight for disto agnosticism
- For every major corporate announcement of plans for a Linux port, there's an effort underway to develop a free replacement.
I don't think that many hackers are really interested in helping Micros~1 make better products -- since we don't use 'em, we don't promote 'em, and we stand to gain *NOTHING* by improving IIS 5.0 or Windows2001 - A Wasted Disk Space Odyssey.
There's no portable code being release for peer review. There's no public API. There's nothing of interest for the linux hacker other than saying, "look, I hacked another Windows box!"
I just meant that I (and I assume most of slashdot) prefer to have online, current, searchable content rather than bookcases full of old info.
I want just-published, up-to-the-minute content, and if I only need a few paragraphs of info, I see no reason to kill a tree for it.
Aside from classic literature and coffee-table pictorials, books today kinda suck.
1) the info in them is, by definition, out of date
2) hardbacks are really expensive
3) paperbacks are really cheap, quality-wise. Worth saving for 150 years? I think not.
4) books take too much space for too little knowledge. It's like comparing an old 45 rpm record to a CDROM full of mp3's. Nostalgia is one thing -- practicality is another.
The introduction of the cdrom and the ability to cheaply distribute mass quantities of data caused a shift in the value of information (US$50 for a 1.44M program that fits on a floppy disk suddenly seemed too expensive when you could get 640M of data for the same price.)
The vast amount of info on the web has caused the same effect for printed content. If I can get 90% of the book's info online from 10 different sources *for free*, why is the book worth $50, when I only need $5 or $10 worth of it?
Okay, just for the moment, let's say that the Old School, typewriter-using, book-reading, litigious, proprietary, work-20-years-at-the-same-company people are right and that it's wrong to link to content on another site.
First off, I need a definition of what is a "deep link" vs. a shallow link, but I digress.
So... all the benefits of the web and hyperlinking get categorically thrown out the door beucase linking directly to content "steals" the right of the website to throw garbage in your face.
Well, what about search engines, then? They're nothing but "deep links". They steal *everyone's* content and make money by forcing ads to be displayed while they hawk other people's stuff.
(so, by not having a robots.txt file, do you grant consent to have your content snatched up?)
I think that we're approaching a time when the old-school and new-school will have to come to some concessions about the way the world works. How do you enforce one country's law on international users and content that may originate from any country or no country?
And.... if search engines are guilty, then I'm 100% certain that ALL portals except for opensource-content ones are violating the same rules.
I'm sure things will get worse before they get better. Technology is much more advanced than the laws that govern it. Just look at how complex US law is, and then look at how little of that law relates to regulating modern technology.
Fear the US Lawyers who have free cycles to "port" all their progress-stifiling regulations to high-tech!
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for justice and rule of law, but when law gets so complex and obfuscated that nobody understands it and it takes months to interpret it, something's gone awary.
> At the rate we're going we're gonna have portals >that point to portals that point to more portals
we have them already -- the top lists of mp3s/warez/porn that link to endless pages of banner ads that promise to give you useful results if you just click through one more page of banner ads.
One thing that UNIX office suites all seem to have in common is that they include additional fonts and often fontserver due to the crummy lowest common denominator of fonts on UNIX boxes.
;)
This is really sad, and yes, X has some limitations. I'd love to see anti-aliasing be part of xfs, and I'm happy to see standard font servers starting to support ttf, but it's got a ways to go. (ever try printing Chinese or Japanese web pages in unix?)
But... I must defend Micros~1 when it comes to Fonts. They have done an excellent job of bringing high quality, well designed fonts to browsers everywhere - even under unix
A lot of you are missing the point here. Sun needs Staroffice.
Here's why: The PC card for Sun servers never worked well, and Sun wants to sell their Ultra5 and 10 workstations into the Windows NT developer workstation market. In order to compete here, they need to read/write MSOffice doc formats.
Software emulation of Windows really sucks. Sorry, but soft-PC isn't a good solution.
Bundling a PC-on-card sucks, too because
1) Windows sucks
2) Who wants to flip back and forth between unix and a windows box
3) user still needs to buy Windows and MS Office
4) hardware compatibility issues
so, the only obvious solution is for them to bundle an Office suite with their servers (sure would be nice to get StarOffice with Solaris...)
Staroffice isn't perfect. IMNSHO, it tries too hard to be Windows95, and it was obviously ported from win32 with a porting kit, but it's high on usability and ability to convert document formats to standard html
It's grown on me, and I now find that a staroffice desktop can keep me from having to vnc to a windows machine.
I'd say it's a good move for Sun, and Microsoft should be scared of the spectre of SUN OFFICE!
slashdotters should be worried about future cross-platform support of Staroffice, licensing terms, and a staroffice re-written in Java.
Umm... your comment assumes that you made the mistake of using Micros~1's I'll fated Domain setup. (it's going away when the vapour clears from Windows 2001's inActive Directory)
;)
Can't we all agree to us LDAP and get on with enterprise computing architecture? (forgot -- there's no MSLDAP, Visual LDAP, or DirectLDAP-DNS-for-datacenters yet
Oh, by the way, what about VNC? If an email attachment started a VNC server and set the password, would that make vnc a virus?
I couldn't live without VNC to tame Windows boxes. If anti-virus software started uninstalling VNC, I'd find new anti-virus software.
What if vnc development forked and one branch was driven by some teenagers who were branded as hackers? Does vnc become a bad tool?
We need to replace SMS with an opensource alternative that is cross-platform and can be administered from unix.
Is BO2k a good or bad tool? Hmm... Are crack, nmap, and saint good or bad? Depends on who uses them for what...
How much is an enterprise license for SMS and 10,000 users? What would be the impact on Micros~1 if fortune 1000 companies dumped SMS for free software?
Micros~1 doesn't want to buy into the idea that their loyal users could/would use opensource enterprise software for systems management.
I'm sure that some of these vulnerabilities in Win32 are there by design
"Hello, World!" May not be the most functional program ever written, but it is definitely the most portable and most widely ported. It may be the single most popular program considering the number of times it has been re-implemented from scratch by different programmers.
I'd venture to guess the almost every programmer has written hello world apps in more programming languages than any other program.
But, now that I start thinking about it, we really need an I18N version of hello_world and we need a manpage to hello_world. Better yet, we need sgml docs for it that can be converted to html, info, tex, and manpage.
I'm concerned about the license that hello world is distributed under, though. I'd hate to think that someone could take the free hello world, enhance it, and start selling it. Worse, yet... Imagine if some commercial company included "Hello, world" in their commercial software, and didn't redistribute the changes. I think hello world needs to be GPL'd to protect it.
Then we need a hello world daemon that when queried, responds with a "Hello, world" - hmm, could be a modified ping.
root@my_dumb_whitebox #> hello_world gatekeeper
gatekeeper responds "Hello, World!"
and... of course we need a hello_world gui so that we can welcome all of the non-unix gurus to linux. Please everyone, let's avoid the silly toolkit wars. I think it's good for linux to have both a khello and a ghello, and using corba, they should both be able to communicate "Hello, World" with each other.
and then we could have hello_world broadcasts from servers, and all clients on the network would respond with a storm of "Hello, World!" responses (no, wait, we already have that.. it's called Netware)
Basically this means that you can't make commercial software on linux that uses libio unless you use a GNU compiler.
G NU_C++_Iostream_Library/libioIntroduction_ to_Iostreams.html
-----------------------
http://www.cygnus.com/pubs/gnupro/4_libs/c_The_
Licensing terms for libio
Since the iostream classes are so fundamental to standard C++, the Free Software Foundation has agreed to a special exception to its
standard license, when you link programs with libio.a.
As a special exception, if you link this library with files compiled with a GNU compiler to produce an executable, this does not cause the
resulting executable to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why
the executable file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
The code is under the GNU General Public License (version 2) for all purposes other than linking with this library which means that you can
modify and redistribute the code as usual; remember that, if you do, your modifications, and anything you link with the modified code, must
be available to others on the same terms.