Only the most formal of communications (usually CC'd to others) go to my boss via email or paper. The spoken conversations with my boss are usually the most productive and communicative.
I think it's different in the software world than in the pure Web world. In software, you're usually doing much less trouble-shooting, so email can be a better mechanism. On the Web, you've got a user having a problem, and you're expected to fix it in real-time, so email is just a little too slow.
I have yet to take the plunge and use IM for everthing. Jabber may change that for me....
This is not as suprising as you might think
on
GTK+ without X!
·
· Score: 5
Gtk+ is a very well designed piece of software. Moving it to xyz platform is actually quite easy compared to most windowing toolkits.
This is because of a thing called gdk. gdk is the abstraction layer that gtk+ uses to talk to a windowing system. It feels a lot like Xlib, but isn't. The most important differences are: it uses glib's more advanced data structures; it provides more robust error handling and it also permutes the XEvent system into glib/gtk's thread-safe "signal" system (not to be confused with POSIX signals).
There are limitations, however. gdk must get its fonts from somewhere, so I suspect that this code still requires an X font server. That's not so bad, as xfs is pretty light-weight compared to the X server.
Personally, I just wish more of the code out there would start using glib and Gnome for things like error handling, internationalization and configuration preservation. Even non-graphical programs can benefit from complying with the Gnome application standards.
I am not being a Troll, I am just tired of this constant whining from the community every time something does not go their way. Suck it up and find a way around it that doesn't involve badgering software companies...
Ok, now that we know this was a hoax, this is only a hypothetical conversation, but a neccessary one, I think.
The concern is not that a company made an Open Source group do the right thing. It's the fact that more and more companies (even the ones that benefit greatly from Open Source) are using software patents to put the breaks on alternate implimentations of common standards.
Apple went out of their way to produce a standard for resizable outline fonts, and then grabbed a patent on the technology. This is questionable, but not unreasonable (as Oracle points out, as a business with investors, you MUST get software patents as long as they're available). What's unreasonable would be going after free implimentations of your published standard for violation of the patents.
Examples: MPEG2 Layer 3 (MP3) encoding, Microsoft's various IETF fiascos, GIF/LZW and so on.
If these companies wrote and distributed a product which used patents to protect it, many people would complain about the patent system, but when you lure the industry into using your patents by publishing standards and then spring your patent on them, that hurts the industry and in the case of Open Source, it hurts those who contributed their time and effort to a cause that is now essentially dead.
WE HAVE TO FUCKING GET PAID TOO!
And so do I. However, if you get paid as a result of sending spam, I'll fight against you. If you get paid as a result of bait-and-switching the industry with the stadard/patent swindle, I'll fight against you. These are just underhanded practices which should not be tollerated.
Of course, the long-term solution is to fix the patent system so that software patents last for the period of time that it takes to bring a product to market (about 6 months) plus the time it takes to achieve market penetration (about 6 months to a year). Many people have proposed 2 years, and I think this is too generous, but I could sign on. The other thing that needs to be done is the process needs to be stream-lined so that you never have the 1970s patent on hyperlinks showing up just in time to throw a shadow over a brand new international industry in the late 90s.
These things just seem to make basic sense to me, and are not intended to prevent people from making money. I'm a great believer in capitolism, and feel quite strongly about Open Source as a positive force in the continued evolution of capitolism-oriented free markets. I want to make a million dollars and buy myself a small condo in a bad part of Boston just like everyone else, but I won't just stand back and watch abuse of the trust that we place in systems like the USPTO and protocol standardization.
How realistic the screen they show is, is usually up to the director. However, as the previous post said, the FX people who are in charge of providing the computer that does what the script says it does will invariablly use a Mac running something like Director (a sort of Power Point for more dynamic displays and cut-n-paste movies). The actors will have to interact with this machine the same way over and over through many reshoots of the same sceene, so you want something very... well, scripted... on the screen.
Let's take a solid example. Let's say that the person working on the screen is supposed to click on a link and then go to a shell window and run a command.
Take 1: Click on the link. Browser is sluggish for no obvious reason, ruins shot.
Take 2: Click on the link. Page comes up, click on text window to bring it to foregroud, but actor misses and brings wrong text window up. Ruins shot.
Take 3: Launch PC running GNOME out window and install Mac (with PC-like keyboard and monitor) running Director. Actor screws up line.
Takes 4-10: Actors get it right, but director want's additional coverage.
Oh, I agree, and I'll not trust Slashdot's source so much again for a very long time, but my comment was a reasonable one, given the story as posted by Slashdot. I was not trolling in any sense of the word.
That's OK, meta-moderation should take care of the bad mod in the long run, and being a long-term, good contributor to /., I'm still at a karma level well in excess of the "maximum". Bad moderation is just annoying because I'm one of the people who would never knowingly troll.
I understand the moderation down, but "Troll"? I was trying to direct people's energies toward useful ways to respond. I assumed the link was just bogus because of a typo, not that it was a hoax, but either way, joining the Freetype project by contributing work, documentation or money is still a very good idea.
Apple has really screwed the pooch, here. Talk of boycotts will surely ensue, but here's what I suggest. First, if you have any Macs on order at your company, call up your distributor and ask if the lawsuit will affect your ability to run X with Freetype under Linux on the boxes. If the distributor does not know, ask them to escalate the call to their Apple contacts. Second, if you currently have Macs that are under support, call Apple and ask if your license for MacOS covers your use of Freetype under Linux (or BSD or whatever you prefer).
The goal here is to make Apple, internally, aware of the PR impact of it's choices. Often, the majority of the company is NOT aware of what the legal dept is doing, and may not be aware even of what Freetype is.
If you really feel like going out on a limb, try joining the Freetype project and contributing work, documentation or legal fees (I'm sure someone will post a legal defense fund address once it's available).
To summarize, he lavishes praise on the director, costumers, actors, effects people, etc. and says that the only down side was a bit of bad food that he got one day. This is Harry, and he's prone to hyperbole (espcially when he wants to like something), but he's very specific in these artciles, and I'm at least impressed with the apparent attention to detail for Gandolf (the Gray/White).
Here's hoping, but of course, there's no way I can be as pleased with it as I was with The Matrix. Not because The Matrix was a better film (we'll see), but because that was the one movie that was furthest from my expectations. No matter what happens, the best Jackson can do is bring The Lord of the Rings as I've already read it, to life. That's a tall order, but in general I'm more impressed when someone starts with a blank slate and suprises me.
Anyway. Go read, download the trailer and start your countdown timers!
XML is a rotten format for programming languages. Anyone who's worked with XSLT knows what I mean. XSLT (related to XSL) is, essentially, a programming language that converts XML documents into other XML documents and XSLT itself is (drum roll please) an XML document. Why? 'Cause XML documents are sooooo late 90's
This is incorrect. XSLT is to XML as C pre-processor macros are to C. With C, you write your code in C and use the pre-processor to glue certain syntactic chunks together. In XML/XSLT you write your documents in XML and use XSLT to glue certain syntactic chunks together. If you want anything more complex than simple syntactic glue you should be writing that in your pet programming language like Java, Perl, Python, Visual Basic, COctothorpe, etc.
XSLT is a great boon to Web developers and designers because it gives you a layer between what designers can touch and what developers can touch that acts as a sort of neutral zone. It also allows you to port your site between content management systems with fairly little pain.
For info on where this goes in the real world, check out XSP from Cocoon. This is a Java-based system, but there are XSP-based equivalents for other languages, namely Perl's AxKit.
Both of these technologies are Apache-specific, and in their early stages. I think for AxKit, the database interaction is the weakest link, but there's enough good mod_perl/DBI code out there that I don't see that as a big deal.
Do we really want our government defining and enforcing protocols and standards for operating systems, desktop software and networking protocols?
Nope. What we want is the gubmint to require MS to publish complete specifications for THEIR protocols and formats.
Let me take a simple example. If the complete specification for Word's file format were published would anyone have any reason not to use Word Perfect other than the quality of the software? Not if WP's implimentation were 100% compatible. Then the choice would be based on WP's features vs. Word's features.
The key is enforcing publication, not enforcing particular standards.
The part about low caloric intake is quite old. I remember, back when the Extropians were hot, at TV show chronicled a bunch of their antics. One of the more interesting bits was a couple that was planning on extending thier life-spans by eating less.
They had a very regimented set of diet and excersise that involved having to eat some really out-of-the-way foods to get the right mix of nutrients in such a small diet. It seemed like the kind of life-style that would make me long for a cheeseburger and fries, even if it meant I had to die 10 years younger.
If the gene-manipulation route works out, does anyone know if we'll still have the same problem, or will your body be polite and take less nutrients from what you eat, but from all the right nutritional cross-sections? Sounds unlikely.
The best use I've had for them (and I'm suprised they haven't built a business around it) is for looking up things about companies that their Web site wouldn't say. For example I once found out that an organization that our company was going to deal with was just a Microsoft front-end. Of course, you have to wade through the rumors and lies, but getting people's impression is often quite important too.
The other key thing I look for is the competition for a given software product.
The problem is that fandom.com has no more right to the name than fandom.tv. The word fandom has been in use since at least the 70s (when I first heard it) by a community of folks who have been holding multi-thousand participant conventions around the world for decades.
Fandom.com is just trying to "own the space", and since it's not their space to own, I really hope they end up paying fandom.tv's legal fees.
There's some pretty clear problems with the GIMP (to me) that point out one of the greatest weaknesses of open software development. Before I go on, thought I should say that I have contributed to the GIMP, and I think it's a great effort that should keep going.
Ok, let's say you're developing an OS. You have a clear mandate for what an OS does based on decades of examples.
On the other hand, if you're developing a photo-manipulation program, you don't have so clear a map. Once you've "done Photoshop", what else should photo-manipulation be? How does that apply to the extant (and future) UNIX(-like) desktops? How important is performance? How important is non-interactive use? How important is any new feature?
Here's where I think the GIMP should go in the next 2-3 years, but others will disagree....
The UI and the photo-editing parts should be separated from eachother. The editing engine should be a library with a well-defined API between it and the UI so that others can slap a GNOME UI on it or a KDE UI or another Gtk+-only UI which uses a single window, etc.
All plugins should be re-catagorized and many re-written to fit smoothly into the new catagories. Perl, C, Scheme... it should not matter to the user.
Non-interactive use needs an overhaul. One of the most powerful features of the GIMP is being able to script your interaction with it, but most of what people want to do with this will require a single, stateful GIMP that can accept lots of requests at once (call it World Wide GIMP, if you will). This is not really what GIMP was designed for, so most people settle for using a library-based interaction with ImageMagick.
I know that this list of wants is 180 degrees off of what a lot of people want, but that's sort of my point. It's really hard to figure out what community to serve in the Open Source world....
I wish the folks at GIMP the best. If I ever have any more spare time, I'll go back to helping them out.
There's a nice infalamatory statement for a Wednesday morning, I suppose I should back it up.
First, the companies running the cable (New England Telephone, er, NYNEX, er, Bell Atlantic, er, Verizon in my area) are doing roughly the same thing with DSL that they did to discourage ISDN: they under-train their people, don't hire enough people to move on install dates and don't allow "moving" a DSL line once it's installed (which has resulted in at least one friend having to settle for a new, lesser service because he moved to an area that was BETTER located for CO-connectivity).
Second, most of the high-end providers of DSL service and Internet connectivity are looking to new technologies to allow them to do more and thus charge more, so they're not emphasising DSL internally in about the same way as DSL.
What we need is a new generation of DSL providers that a) consider high-speed access to be a general-consumer item, and market, manage and train with that in mind b) provide higher-end services through their DSL service (such as wireless ethernet from the DSL modem so you don't have to have extra cabling in your house; bulk subscriptions to a number of for-pay Internet services, etc).
Anyone hearing rumblings in the industry that this is going to happen?
I liked this a lot. I liked the original movie because I saw it before I read the book. I liked the book even more, and this movie really brings the book across. I love that they at least touched on what's really going on. The whole idea that humanity has a race conciousness is very powerful to me and though they did not exactly say that (as it was just a realization that Paul had in the book) they did at least put some of the spirit of it into the converstation between Paul and Jessica.
Good miniseries and a great use of SciFi dollars. It does not make up for their making Lexx instead of picking up Crusade, but it's a damn good start.
The free software/hardware, as long as you take the adds model has failed. Every company that tried it either had to adopt a different model or went out of business. See ZapMe for an example. The problem is that in order for this to make sense one of two things has to happen: advertisers need to trust your medium (e.g. TV) or you need to have millions of viewers (which is how TV got where it is).
(1) A typical linux install doesnt install the sources at all.
Install? Not by default, of course. However, every Linux distribution I know of comes with sources (except the ones that specialize in being tiny like the one-floppy distros). Red Hat and Debian both have very sophisticated (Debian slightly more so) ways of managing these sources.
(2) Even if it did, the sources would come from 10 different places and be installed in 10 different locations.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and just assume you're misinformed. Red Hat, for example:
Now all of my sources live under/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES, and to build any one of them, I type the same command (modulo the name of the package): rpm -bb/usr/src/redhat/SPECS/<package>.spec This deposits the binary packages into/usr/src/redhat/RPMS/<arch>
If you just wanted the sources unpacked, and any local patches applied, change -bb to -bp. Type rpm --help if you want a full list of all available options (you might want to pipe that through a pager, since RPM has about as many uses as any 10 swiss-army knives including post-install verification, signature checking, many forms of package query on installed or pending packages, etc.
Of course, if by "from 10 different locations" you meant that the development teams were in 10 different locations, then you're right (though under-stating the case) for every free UNIX and UNIX-like system I've ever seen. XFree86 is maintained by their development team, not BSD, not Red Hat, not VA/Linux. Red Hat maintains patches against XFree86 and contributes to the development, but so does NetBSD. However both Red Hat and NetBSD have their own version of XFree86, configured, patched and tuned for their platforms that get released with their software. That version has sources which can be acquired from their respective organizations in the same place that all other sources for that distribution are maintained. There is no difference in approach here.
(3) not even the damn kernel is under cvs.
Re-read that as: "the kernel is one of the very, very few things that is not maintained under CVS", and even that's wrong as most Linux distribution vendors maintain their own source countrol over their distributions (which is, after all, what happens in the BSD world... it's just that no one thinks of BSDi, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and all of the commercial applications of BSD as distributions). Linus maintains the Kernel sources in the way that he sees fit, and it seems to work quite well. I don't see the problem here.
Keep in mind that a lot of the software we're talking about here (X, Emacs, browsers, gcc) is the same anyway. The differences between your average Linux distribution and your average BSD distribution really should be shrinking as time goes on. Of course, this is not true because everyone is in their own camp and wants to do their own thing.
The Red Hat and Debian systems work well, and accomplish what people generally want. If there's something specific that you want and those don't do it, you can always submit a bug report to your distribution vendor. Include a patch, and it's that much more likely to be dealt with quickly.
BSD, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX... it's all the same. Good software poorly managed by factions of semi-religous cults (not trolling here, just summing up what I've observed over the last 12 years). I really hope someone, someday can see past all of the crap and reach into this stew of open source code and pull out a single set of internally-consistent, well documented tools for getting work done.
Slashdot Mirror
Only the most formal of communications (usually CC'd to others) go to my boss via email or paper. The spoken conversations with my boss are usually the most productive and communicative.
I think it's different in the software world than in the pure Web world. In software, you're usually doing much less trouble-shooting, so email can be a better mechanism. On the Web, you've got a user having a problem, and you're expected to fix it in real-time, so email is just a little too slow.
I have yet to take the plunge and use IM for everthing. Jabber may change that for me....
Gtk+ is a very well designed piece of software. Moving it to xyz platform is actually quite easy compared to most windowing toolkits.
This is because of a thing called gdk. gdk is the abstraction layer that gtk+ uses to talk to a windowing system. It feels a lot like Xlib, but isn't. The most important differences are: it uses glib's more advanced data structures; it provides more robust error handling and it also permutes the XEvent system into glib/gtk's thread-safe "signal" system (not to be confused with POSIX signals).
There are limitations, however. gdk must get its fonts from somewhere, so I suspect that this code still requires an X font server. That's not so bad, as xfs is pretty light-weight compared to the X server.
Personally, I just wish more of the code out there would start using glib and Gnome for things like error handling, internationalization and configuration preservation. Even non-graphical programs can benefit from complying with the Gnome application standards.
Ok, now that we know this was a hoax, this is only a hypothetical conversation, but a neccessary one, I think.
The concern is not that a company made an Open Source group do the right thing. It's the fact that more and more companies (even the ones that benefit greatly from Open Source) are using software patents to put the breaks on alternate implimentations of common standards.
Apple went out of their way to produce a standard for resizable outline fonts, and then grabbed a patent on the technology. This is questionable, but not unreasonable (as Oracle points out, as a business with investors, you MUST get software patents as long as they're available). What's unreasonable would be going after free implimentations of your published standard for violation of the patents.
Examples: MPEG2 Layer 3 (MP3) encoding, Microsoft's various IETF fiascos, GIF/LZW and so on.
If these companies wrote and distributed a product which used patents to protect it, many people would complain about the patent system, but when you lure the industry into using your patents by publishing standards and then spring your patent on them, that hurts the industry and in the case of Open Source, it hurts those who contributed their time and effort to a cause that is now essentially dead.
And so do I. However, if you get paid as a result of sending spam, I'll fight against you. If you get paid as a result of bait-and-switching the industry with the stadard/patent swindle, I'll fight against you. These are just underhanded practices which should not be tollerated.
Of course, the long-term solution is to fix the patent system so that software patents last for the period of time that it takes to bring a product to market (about 6 months) plus the time it takes to achieve market penetration (about 6 months to a year). Many people have proposed 2 years, and I think this is too generous, but I could sign on. The other thing that needs to be done is the process needs to be stream-lined so that you never have the 1970s patent on hyperlinks showing up just in time to throw a shadow over a brand new international industry in the late 90s.
These things just seem to make basic sense to me, and are not intended to prevent people from making money. I'm a great believer in capitolism, and feel quite strongly about Open Source as a positive force in the continued evolution of capitolism-oriented free markets. I want to make a million dollars and buy myself a small condo in a bad part of Boston just like everyone else, but I won't just stand back and watch abuse of the trust that we place in systems like the USPTO and protocol standardization.
How realistic the screen they show is, is usually up to the director. However, as the previous post said, the FX people who are in charge of providing the computer that does what the script says it does will invariablly use a Mac running something like Director (a sort of Power Point for more dynamic displays and cut-n-paste movies). The actors will have to interact with this machine the same way over and over through many reshoots of the same sceene, so you want something very... well, scripted... on the screen.
Let's take a solid example. Let's say that the person working on the screen is supposed to click on a link and then go to a shell window and run a command.
Take 1: Click on the link. Browser is sluggish for no obvious reason, ruins shot.
Take 2: Click on the link. Page comes up, click on text window to bring it to foregroud, but actor misses and brings wrong text window up. Ruins shot.
Take 3: Launch PC running GNOME out window and install Mac (with PC-like keyboard and monitor) running Director. Actor screws up line.
Takes 4-10: Actors get it right, but director want's additional coverage.
I hope this clears it up....
Oh, I agree, and I'll not trust Slashdot's source so much again for a very long time, but my comment was a reasonable one, given the story as posted by Slashdot. I was not trolling in any sense of the word.
/. , I'm still at a karma level well in excess of the "maximum". Bad moderation is just annoying because I'm one of the people who would never knowingly troll.
That's OK, meta-moderation should take care of the bad mod in the long run, and being a long-term, good contributor to
It's a point of pride more than anything else.
When I posted, there was not, as yet, an update. The update came about 1/2 hour after I posted.
I understand the moderation down, but "Troll"? I was trying to direct people's energies toward useful ways to respond. I assumed the link was just bogus because of a typo, not that it was a hoax, but either way, joining the Freetype project by contributing work, documentation or money is still a very good idea.
Troll indeed.
Is the LinuxToday link bad, or is the story a hoax?
I've seen no data either way. I'd alreay known about the bad link, but assumed that that's all it was.
Apple has really screwed the pooch, here. Talk of boycotts will surely ensue, but here's what I suggest. First, if you have any Macs on order at your company, call up your distributor and ask if the lawsuit will affect your ability to run X with Freetype under Linux on the boxes. If the distributor does not know, ask them to escalate the call to their Apple contacts. Second, if you currently have Macs that are under support, call Apple and ask if your license for MacOS covers your use of Freetype under Linux (or BSD or whatever you prefer).
The goal here is to make Apple, internally, aware of the PR impact of it's choices. Often, the majority of the company is NOT aware of what the legal dept is doing, and may not be aware even of what Freetype is.
If you really feel like going out on a limb, try joining the Freetype project and contributing work, documentation or legal fees (I'm sure someone will post a legal defense fund address once it's available).
AICN has a great piece covering Harry's trip to the set in New Zealand. This link is to the index, which has a conclusion, and then a link to each of the ten other articles that he wrote.
To summarize, he lavishes praise on the director, costumers, actors, effects people, etc. and says that the only down side was a bit of bad food that he got one day. This is Harry, and he's prone to hyperbole (espcially when he wants to like something), but he's very specific in these artciles, and I'm at least impressed with the apparent attention to detail for Gandolf (the Gray/White).
Here's hoping, but of course, there's no way I can be as pleased with it as I was with The Matrix. Not because The Matrix was a better film (we'll see), but because that was the one movie that was furthest from my expectations. No matter what happens, the best Jackson can do is bring The Lord of the Rings as I've already read it, to life. That's a tall order, but in general I'm more impressed when someone starts with a blank slate and suprises me.
Anyway. Go read, download the trailer and start your countdown timers!
Here are some links for people suffering behind such censorware. Hopefully not all of them are blocked.
http://www.anonymizer.com/
http://www.idzap.com/
http://www.stas.net/xtcdraqon/space.htm
XSLT is a great boon to Web developers and designers because it gives you a layer between what designers can touch and what developers can touch that acts as a sort of neutral zone. It also allows you to port your site between content management systems with fairly little pain.
For info on where this goes in the real world, check out XSP from Cocoon. This is a Java-based system, but there are XSP-based equivalents for other languages, namely Perl's AxKit.
Both of these technologies are Apache-specific, and in their early stages. I think for AxKit, the database interaction is the weakest link, but there's enough good mod_perl/DBI code out there that I don't see that as a big deal.
Let me take a simple example. If the complete specification for Word's file format were published would anyone have any reason not to use Word Perfect other than the quality of the software? Not if WP's implimentation were 100% compatible. Then the choice would be based on WP's features vs. Word's features.
The key is enforcing publication, not enforcing particular standards.
I found this on Yahoo! before seeing the CNN reference here.
Interesting that there's no update...
Seriously, I got:
The part about low caloric intake is quite old. I remember, back when the Extropians were hot, at TV show chronicled a bunch of their antics. One of the more interesting bits was a couple that was planning on extending thier life-spans by eating less.
They had a very regimented set of diet and excersise that involved having to eat some really out-of-the-way foods to get the right mix of nutrients in such a small diet. It seemed like the kind of life-style that would make me long for a cheeseburger and fries, even if it meant I had to die 10 years younger.
If the gene-manipulation route works out, does anyone know if we'll still have the same problem, or will your body be polite and take less nutrients from what you eat, but from all the right nutritional cross-sections? Sounds unlikely.
The best use I've had for them (and I'm suprised they haven't built a business around it) is for looking up things about companies that their Web site wouldn't say. For example I once found out that an organization that our company was going to deal with was just a Microsoft front-end. Of course, you have to wade through the rumors and lies, but getting people's impression is often quite important too.
The other key thing I look for is the competition for a given software product.
The problem is that fandom.com has no more right to the name than fandom.tv. The word fandom has been in use since at least the 70s (when I first heard it) by a community of folks who have been holding multi-thousand participant conventions around the world for decades.
Fandom.com is just trying to "own the space", and since it's not their space to own, I really hope they end up paying fandom.tv's legal fees.
Ok, let's say you're developing an OS. You have a clear mandate for what an OS does based on decades of examples.
On the other hand, if you're developing a photo-manipulation program, you don't have so clear a map. Once you've "done Photoshop", what else should photo-manipulation be? How does that apply to the extant (and future) UNIX(-like) desktops? How important is performance? How important is non-interactive use? How important is any new feature?
Here's where I think the GIMP should go in the next 2-3 years, but others will disagree....
- The UI and the photo-editing parts should be separated from eachother. The editing engine should be a library with a well-defined API between it and the UI so that others can slap a GNOME UI on it or a KDE UI or another Gtk+-only UI which uses a single window, etc.
- All plugins should be re-catagorized and many re-written to fit smoothly into the new catagories. Perl, C, Scheme... it should not matter to the user.
- Non-interactive use needs an overhaul. One of the most powerful features of the GIMP is being able to script your interaction with it, but most of what people want to do with this will require a single, stateful GIMP that can accept lots of requests at once (call it World Wide GIMP, if you will). This is not really what GIMP was designed for, so most people settle for using a library-based interaction with ImageMagick.
I know that this list of wants is 180 degrees off of what a lot of people want, but that's sort of my point. It's really hard to figure out what community to serve in the Open Source world....I wish the folks at GIMP the best. If I ever have any more spare time, I'll go back to helping them out.
DSL in the US is being sabatoged.
There's a nice infalamatory statement for a Wednesday morning, I suppose I should back it up.
First, the companies running the cable (New England Telephone, er, NYNEX, er, Bell Atlantic, er, Verizon in my area) are doing roughly the same thing with DSL that they did to discourage ISDN: they under-train their people, don't hire enough people to move on install dates and don't allow "moving" a DSL line once it's installed (which has resulted in at least one friend having to settle for a new, lesser service because he moved to an area that was BETTER located for CO-connectivity).
Second, most of the high-end providers of DSL service and Internet connectivity are looking to new technologies to allow them to do more and thus charge more, so they're not emphasising DSL internally in about the same way as DSL.
What we need is a new generation of DSL providers that a) consider high-speed access to be a general-consumer item, and market, manage and train with that in mind b) provide higher-end services through their DSL service (such as wireless ethernet from the DSL modem so you don't have to have extra cabling in your house; bulk subscriptions to a number of for-pay Internet services, etc).
Anyone hearing rumblings in the industry that this is going to happen?
The announcement points people to the nightly builds directory. Someone on the mozilla site should change that!
Thanks for the info, and perhaps someone should moderate your comment up so that it shows up right under mine for people who are threading.
The site doesn't do a good job of telling you WHAT to download (it just points you to the uber-confusing nightly download directory).
Here's what I know. The build comments page points you to a Linux, Mac and a Windows version. These all live in the same download directory from 12/6/2000.
Hope that helps people out.
I liked this a lot. I liked the original movie because I saw it before I read the book. I liked the book even more, and this movie really brings the book across. I love that they at least touched on what's really going on. The whole idea that humanity has a race conciousness is very powerful to me and though they did not exactly say that (as it was just a realization that Paul had in the book) they did at least put some of the spirit of it into the converstation between Paul and Jessica.
Good miniseries and a great use of SciFi dollars. It does not make up for their making Lexx instead of picking up Crusade, but it's a damn good start.
The free software/hardware, as long as you take the adds model has failed. Every company that tried it either had to adopt a different model or went out of business. See ZapMe for an example. The problem is that in order for this to make sense one of two things has to happen: advertisers need to trust your medium (e.g. TV) or you need to have millions of viewers (which is how TV got where it is).
Opera has neither.
- mount
/mnt/cdrom /mnt/cdrom/SRPMS
Now all of my sources live undercd
rpm -i *.src.rpm
If you just wanted the sources unpacked, and any local patches applied, change -bb to -bp. Type rpm --help if you want a full list of all available options (you might want to pipe that through a pager, since RPM has about as many uses as any 10 swiss-army knives including post-install verification, signature checking, many forms of package query on installed or pending packages, etc.
Of course, if by "from 10 different locations" you meant that the development teams were in 10 different locations, then you're right (though under-stating the case) for every free UNIX and UNIX-like system I've ever seen. XFree86 is maintained by their development team, not BSD, not Red Hat, not VA/Linux. Red Hat maintains patches against XFree86 and contributes to the development, but so does NetBSD. However both Red Hat and NetBSD have their own version of XFree86, configured, patched and tuned for their platforms that get released with their software. That version has sources which can be acquired from their respective organizations in the same place that all other sources for that distribution are maintained. There is no difference in approach here.
Re-read that as: "the kernel is one of the very, very few things that is not maintained under CVS", and even that's wrong as most Linux distribution vendors maintain their own source countrol over their distributions (which is, after all, what happens in the BSD world... it's just that no one thinks of BSDi, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and all of the commercial applications of BSD as distributions). Linus maintains the Kernel sources in the way that he sees fit, and it seems to work quite well. I don't see the problem here.Keep in mind that a lot of the software we're talking about here (X, Emacs, browsers, gcc) is the same anyway. The differences between your average Linux distribution and your average BSD distribution really should be shrinking as time goes on. Of course, this is not true because everyone is in their own camp and wants to do their own thing.
The Red Hat and Debian systems work well, and accomplish what people generally want. If there's something specific that you want and those don't do it, you can always submit a bug report to your distribution vendor. Include a patch, and it's that much more likely to be dealt with quickly.
BSD, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX... it's all the same. Good software poorly managed by factions of semi-religous cults (not trolling here, just summing up what I've observed over the last 12 years). I really hope someone, someday can see past all of the crap and reach into this stew of open source code and pull out a single set of internally-consistent, well documented tools for getting work done.