wp2000 uses WINE, not winelib. I wish it used winelib. But all you have to do is run "ps" to see it using WINE. 8 wine processes accompany it in the world.
Geez. I started three companies this year, raised Millions of dollars to finance them, hired their CEOs, and I have a 3-month-old baby. Just how much harder do I have to work?
OK, I stand corrected on the Quattro ownership. However, are you sure that Quattro isn't using Winelib while wp2000 is emulated? The difference in reliability is striking.
God forbid Corel gets an application for Linux out on time by using libraries which they helped develop.
Now, if only it worked! OK, it must work for someone, but not me. I tried the thing, I made a sincere effort to use it in my office. Wine wedges, the application crashes, dialog boxes flash rapidly, windows don't come to foreground.
Report from my administrator: it stops after you type 4 pages. This was paid-for software, not a demo.
What is really significant for Corel this week is not the sale of this little division, but the rumors that Sun will GPL StarOffice, which were repeated on CNET today sounding less like rumors and more like official news releases.
Corel's WordPerfect has been viewed as their unique advantage. However, WordPerfect isn't even really a Linux application! It's a Windows application running emulated under WINE. They don't say that on the box, either. Quattro, their other "advantage", runs excellently in native mode under Linux, but it's not Corel's any longer, since their merger with Borland/Inprise fell through.
How much of an advantage will Corel retain once other Linux distributions pick up StarOffice and when Free Software developers put real work into it?
It'll be nice if it really happens. Before we criticize StarOffice too much about its technical problems, let's keep in mind that the Free Software community could probably deal with those problems pretty well.
Isn't this really old news? I thought Eric's handling of the situation was heavy-handed too, but we're talking about something that happened 6 months ago.
I'm not happy about the totalitarian aspect of Chinese communism, but at the same time I don't want to confuse the P.R.C. government with the Chinese people.
Well, not a CD with a can of coke, but maybe a URL? Postulate a system that allows you to use free software remotely via X, for example. The vendor never distributes the software, and thus is never obligated to distribute their modifications. Sure, this is not what we created the GPL for, but it's a possible need for yet another Open Source license.
There are a lot of different applications where you can publicly perform software without distributing it. We need to have the source distribution requirement connected to public performance or making the software available for use rather than distribution.
In their web page they say they are using a "modified GPL" to allow the use of static libraries, but all I see with the sources is the GPL and the LGPL (which I guess counts as a modified GPL). Am I missing something? I didn't take a long time to look around the sources.
As far as I can tell the LGPL is fine for their purposes and poses no problem to commercial projects (which they seem to be a bit confused about in one of their README files).
I think what we should be saying here is that bad licenses don't hurt the community as much as you might expect them to do so, because we write around them, and we've proven that we are capable of writing around them. Products with bad licenses eventually lose their share to Open Source.
I like the hurricane metaphor someone else used. We can survive a hurricane and rebuild afterward, but we'd rather not have the hurricane in the first place.
An oft-overlooked characteristic of the U.S. patent office is that they gladly accept models to support a patent claim. So, I suggest that Slashdot readers fill out the form and send in a test-tube to support their claim. What to put in the tube is left as an exercise for the reader:-)
Yes. It's obvious to you that he's not me, but not to everyone. I don't like it, I don't think it's right, and CmdrTaco has hacked the membership system so that it won't happen again but he's not wiped out the old abusers. I wish Mr. Brucedot would just give up the silly Bruce mask and post with his own name. I've asked him politely.
It's nice that Ghostscript can both write and render PDF. It's too bad that PDF compression uses LZW and Ghostscript avoids compressing PDFs because of the Welch (Unisys) patent. So, your PDFs come out a lot bigger than with Acrobat. Alas.
Programmers are not the target audience for a user interface. However, you overstate the case. A spoken programming language (GREAT THESIS TOPIC ALERT) would need words for block structure but not for carriage-return and perhaps not even for statement termination. The "C beautifier" program seems to be able to synthesize line breaks on its own given a syntacticaly correct program.
There's a phone number in my perens.com host record, and you can use that to verify my Slashdot ID if you really want to be sure:-)
They're on the telephone now. Noise is not going to be a blocking factor for this, workstations and the office environment, and even mass transit will adapt to accomodate it.
Yes, that's part of what I was saying. What he is proposing fits in a filesystem whether the user knows the file names or not.
That fellow should write for Wired. Not for a technical journal. He reminds me of the Nanotechnology conference, where the theme is something like the future will be great, just as soon as we figure out how to do it.
Linux is the fulfillment of the GNU system, the bootstrapping event of Free Software. It is not meant to be an end-point in the development of computer operating systems or even the development of free software.
Of course it's obsolete and based on a 30-year-old system. The point is that the innovations in that 30-year-old system were largely being bypassed by the industry and we needed to fix that problem first.
The GUI itself is not an end-point of our work, and I believe that the verbal user interface will become the dominant way that people deal with computers in the future, at least until and unless there are really science-fictional things like direct neural interface.
Verbal user interface computing will use kernels and filesystems, but the user won't care about that. The paradigm is the computer as your invisible friend. The user will ask the computer for things like "Find me the hotel in Indiana that Joe emailed me about", and will be told about matches or asked questions that refine the query. The GUI will become almost output-only, with pointing done with the finger or eyes and the word "that" replacing the mouse-click. For example, the user points at something on the screen and says "magnify that".
Patrick Volkerdering seems to be that kind of purist. I'm not sure it's helped Slackware compete against other Linux distributions, but he has a passionate following of similar purists. There is room in the Linux world for both sorts to live in harmony.
I started on Unix in '81, at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, which was sort of the predecessor of Pixar. At the time we had a lot of PDP-11 systems that were still running V6 Unix. There was no fsck. We had to check and repair filesystems using icheck, dcheck, ncheck, clri, and once in a while we had to use adb to reconnect orphan directories. So, an operator really had to understand the filesystem. We had an application that was stuck on V6 and eventually I back-ported fsck from 2.8 BSD to V6, and I ported the segmentation-based overlay loader to V6 for the Images paint system after we lost the source for our overlay loader. A lot of things were done backwards there.
I'm quite happy that the Debian systems I run have developed a good bit since the 4BSD system I learned in '81 or so. I don't compile things that the Debian folks have built for me, and I really enjoy the fact that they do most of the system administration I used to have to do by myself.
I wonder if the old Unix purists also use Morse code on their ham radios?
The above comment is by the Bruce Perens impersonator, who is having a bad brain day or something, by the quality of that post. He usually writes something better, even if he's not yours truly.
You can tell his posts because he has that "." after his user name. Accept no substitutes for the real me.
The serious answer is that if you are writing programs to run in it, rather than to run in the underlying system, it's an environment.
Emacs is an environment. Actually, it's a whole ecosystem, isn't it? Complete with its own population of strange beings. Back in the VAX 780 days, it was bigger than the kernel, that's how we knew it was an environment, not just an editor. We just figured that 4BSD was the bootloader for Emacs.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Now, if only it worked! OK, it must work for someone, but not me. I tried the thing, I made a sincere effort to use it in my office. Wine wedges, the application crashes, dialog boxes flash rapidly, windows don't come to foreground.
Report from my administrator: it stops after you type 4 pages. This was paid-for software, not a demo.
Bruce
Corel's WordPerfect has been viewed as their unique advantage. However, WordPerfect isn't even really a Linux application! It's a Windows application running emulated under WINE. They don't say that on the box, either. Quattro, their other "advantage", runs excellently in native mode under Linux, but it's not Corel's any longer, since their merger with Borland/Inprise fell through.
How much of an advantage will Corel retain once other Linux distributions pick up StarOffice and when Free Software developers put real work into it?
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
I'm not happy about the totalitarian aspect of Chinese communism, but at the same time I don't want to confuse the P.R.C. government with the Chinese people.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
As far as I can tell the LGPL is fine for their purposes and poses no problem to commercial projects (which they seem to be a bit confused about in one of their README files).
Thanks
Bruce
I like the hurricane metaphor someone else used. We can survive a hurricane and rebuild afterward, but we'd rather not have the hurricane in the first place.
Bruce
Bruce
Yes. It's obvious to you that he's not me, but not to everyone. I don't like it, I don't think it's right, and CmdrTaco has hacked the membership system so that it won't happen again but he's not wiped out the old abusers. I wish Mr. Brucedot would just give up the silly Bruce mask and post with his own name. I've asked him politely.
Bruce
Bruce
There's a phone number in my perens.com host record, and you can use that to verify my Slashdot ID if you really want to be sure :-)
Bruce
Bruce
That fellow should write for Wired. Not for a technical journal. He reminds me of the Nanotechnology conference, where the theme is something like the future will be great, just as soon as we figure out how to do it.
Bruce
Of course it's obsolete and based on a 30-year-old system. The point is that the innovations in that 30-year-old system were largely being bypassed by the industry and we needed to fix that problem first.
The GUI itself is not an end-point of our work, and I believe that the verbal user interface will become the dominant way that people deal with computers in the future, at least until and unless there are really science-fictional things like direct neural interface.
Verbal user interface computing will use kernels and filesystems, but the user won't care about that. The paradigm is the computer as your invisible friend. The user will ask the computer for things like "Find me the hotel in Indiana that Joe emailed me about", and will be told about matches or asked questions that refine the query. The GUI will become almost output-only, with pointing done with the finger or eyes and the word "that" replacing the mouse-click. For example, the user points at something on the screen and says "magnify that".
Bruce
I started on Unix in '81, at the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, which was sort of the predecessor of Pixar. At the time we had a lot of PDP-11 systems that were still running V6 Unix. There was no fsck. We had to check and repair filesystems using icheck, dcheck, ncheck, clri, and once in a while we had to use adb to reconnect orphan directories. So, an operator really had to understand the filesystem. We had an application that was stuck on V6 and eventually I back-ported fsck from 2.8 BSD to V6, and I ported the segmentation-based overlay loader to V6 for the Images paint system after we lost the source for our overlay loader. A lot of things were done backwards there.
I'm quite happy that the Debian systems I run have developed a good bit since the 4BSD system I learned in '81 or so. I don't compile things that the Debian folks have built for me, and I really enjoy the fact that they do most of the system administration I used to have to do by myself.
I wonder if the old Unix purists also use Morse code on their ham radios?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
You can tell his posts because he has that "." after his user name. Accept no substitutes for the real me.
Bruce
Emacs is an environment. Actually, it's a whole ecosystem, isn't it? Complete with its own population of strange beings. Back in the VAX 780 days, it was bigger than the kernel, that's how we knew it was an environment, not just an editor. We just figured that 4BSD was the bootloader for Emacs. :-)
Bruce