No, 2 or three years ago, there wasn't going to be anything after 1.4, but things had to be pushed back because Firefox and Thunderbird too longer than expected to reach version 1.0. However, it was stated publicly that Seamonkey would be discontinued after the stand-alone apps were complete. IIRC, there were rumblings at the time that 1.7 was designated the new stable branch that it would probably be final.
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Because, somehow, I was aware of this without being a Mozilla developer, by only reading public statements and the development roadmap. So is the problem that developers don't read the roadmap and don't read the Mozilla Foundation's public statements?
I think where we're getting hung up is that you're saying that developers/users should have known that "the end of suite development was coming" and suggesting that people didn't realize this (obvious) fact. I think they did know that, and thus the question of "why didn't they realize it" already has an answer - they did. I think it's fair to say that most people did realize that, one day, Mozilla would no longer actively develop the suite.
What bothered many people (including me, particularly) is that the 1.8 release cycle mislead many people into thinking there would be a 1.8 release. In other words, that this wasn't *yet* the end of the suite. What people saw up until a few weeks ago was the normal alpha/beta/release cycle that Mozilla has done for years. They had no real evidence from Mozilla to show that this was in fact *not* such a normal cycle, or that they should react any differently than they did in the past. (i.e. bug test, tweak, update translations, etc. for the new release and prepare it for official release) There was no concrete evidence showing that 1.7 was the end of the suite.
Furthermore, this form of decision making projects the image that the Mozilla project simply makes decisions like this out of the blue. Everyone just got together one day and said "okay, let's stop developing this now". To businesses, that looks *very* reactionary, and it suggests that Mozilla doesn't have a plan. It would make them think - do we want an organization like that being part of our infrastructure? Are they preparing for the future, or just taking it day by day?
What could have been done to smooth things out considerably and avoid wasted effort was simply to make an official statement at the start of the 1.8 development cycle that there would be no 1.8 public release and that the 1.8 testing cycle was specifically for testing Mozilla's backend technologies. No confusion, no fuss, the future of Mozilla is laid out right after 1.7, the perfect time to do so. The core question, in my mind, is why didn't this happen? IMHO, that's the real question that ought to be asked.
Why do you think this caught people so off-guard, given that the Mozilla Foundation announced its intention to do so several years ago, and it has been clearly stated on the development roadmap for 2 or 3 years? What could you have done to be more clear?
If it was stated on the roadmap 2 or 3 years ago that there would be no Mozilla 1.8, then why was it a discussion issue just a month or so back? It certainly seems like someone in the Mozilla dev crew didn't know as an absolute fact that there'd be no Mozilla 1.8, and if their own developers didn't know, how can you fault average users for not realizing it?
Yeah, people knew it would stop being supported, but I think they just thought they'd get a little warning beforehand. After all, what were all those people testing, then? The "backend" of Mozilla? Was this made clear to them? Did they realize they were testing software that would never be officially released? If they DID realize it, would they have still spent time testing it? I read about one poor guy who actually went through and updated language translations for Mozilla 1.8, only to find it was pointless of him to do so. A little communication earlier on in the process would have avoided all this.
Criticize all you want, but big organizations would be eaten alive by their customers if they pulled something like this. Microsoft has trouble discontinuing Win98 support YEARS in advance. Mozilla is growing, and open source is a give and take strategy. If the project wants the support of the community, they've got to be willing to accomodate the needs and concerns of the community as well. I don't think it's fair to simply bash Mozilla for their mistakes, but I believe they could have dealt with the situation better than they did, and it would benefit the project if they learned how to handle these situations better, especially now that they're getting the attention of the public in general.
I'm one of the core developers on wxMozilla, and for some time I've been wondering how exactly the GRE / Gecko SDK fits into the overall Mozilla framework and roadmap. I have two questions that center around that issue.
First, the current Mozilla communication issues are especially confusing for embedders, because, for example, the GRE has traditionally used the same numbering scheme as the Mozilla Suite. (i.e. there's not going to be a Mozilla 1.8, but what does that mean for GRE 1.8?) Furthermore, there's no roadmap for the GRE, so it's hard to tell where it's going or what the priorities are. So could you comment on what you see as the future of the GRE and Gecko SDK as Mozilla products?
I have one more related question, because I'm a Mac user.;-) I noticed the hiring of Josh Aas to the Mozilla Foundation and a commitment to improving Mac support, which I was very excited to hear about, and I was wondering if this includes improving the embedding libraries on Mac? (Modern Mac apps have significant troubles with the current embedding libs, which are geared towards OS 8/9 apps.) I realize this is open source, and I'm certainly willing to help in any efforts towards this end (and have already made headway towards some patches), but I would need some help and support from the Mozilla project to make this real.
Thanks for taking some time out to read and respond to these issues!
Open source is a philosophy as much as it is a development methodology. The less people who are exposed to it, the less people who are comforatble with accepting open source solutions. A large number of PHBs are still very nervous towards open source, and to be honest, it's hard to blame them. In terms of high-quality GUI desktop application software, open source only has a few shining success stories. (Mozilla, OpenOffice, and sort of GIMP.)
Now, there very well could be some great Linux/KDE apps out there, but the fact is a vast majority of computer users never see nor use them. So, they turn to their commercial Windows alternatives instead, and the status quo is re-enforced.
Moving to Linux to get these apps is a bit like learning how to swim in the deep end of the pool. The OS is unfamiliar, the apps are unfamiliar, the "package management system" is completely new and different from Windows (and while efficient, is not very intuitive); in short, everything is unfamiliar. I can't think of any killer app that could offset all these disadvantages.
So while the KDE developers may *want* users to move to Linux for those 'killer apps', if no one even knows these killer apps exist, and moving takes a huge committment (and a decent amount of technical expertise), realistically, who will want to move?
In fact, having apps like Mozilla and OpenOffice work on Windows means that if people do choose Linux, they'll feel more at home on the OS with apps they're familiar with. Yes, yes, I know people would cite the whole OS/2 fiasco, but I don't think Windows compatibility killed them - it was their inability to differentiate themselves from Windows that did it. After all, if someone says "well then, why not just get Windows", then obviously OS/2 doesn't offer much above and beyond Windows, does it?
With Linux, it will need not only to be like Windows, but better than it, and not just in terms of security. It needs to be easier and more productive. I'm talking about things at the OS level, like system configuration and package management, not just at the application level. I think it's telling that the two main differentiating factors between Linux distros is their package management system and their system configuration tools. Hmmm... Maybe distros are trying to differentiate themselves because these things are the 'killer apps' of an OS?
But IMHO, these tools do not yet measure up to their Windows counterparts in terms of intuitiveness and simplicity. And that's the main thing that keeps me off Linux. Unfortunately, there's nothing to lead me to think this will be resolved on any distro soon. In the meantime, if app developers would like me to use their app, they should consider porting it.:-)
For those who didn't bother to sign up for the clue, the question was mostly rhetorical, and was an example of the diff between CLI and GUI.
How do you know it was rhetorical? He even says "Think", challenging the reader as to if they know an answer. (Suggesting that he thought they couldn't quickly come up with one.) A rather silly challenge if 1000s of people can give the answer in one breath. (Which *many* authors, 'knowledge workers', students, and others could.) If I said "Think: How can you find files from the commnad line?", how would *you* have responded? Would you have defended my "rhetorical" question, or laughed me off as someone who doesn't know the basics of CLI?
In any case, you seem bothered by the fact that several people are quite happy with the GUI solution, or even have pointed out deficiencies in wc. To me, it's not about what's better, CLI or GUI - it's silly to argue about it. The right tool for the right job for that particular user is the "correct" answer, be it CLI or GUI. If it works, and the user likes it, what's the problem? That they could be 12% more efficient? What if they don't care? What if they use the command once every 3 months and spending 1 minute finding it is acceptable? Maybe if open source developers could get over some of their detest for GUIs, they could build better GUIs and get more people using their tools.
On second though, nah, that's a silly idea...;-) On with the reasons why CLIs do everything better and GUIs are so annoying!
Strangely, I thought those were the fault of the terrorists. Silly me.
What he was referring to, albeit rather poorly, is this odd idea called "cause and effect." That is, actions cause reactions, and thus that terrorists' actions are in part (if not majorly) determined by the world in which they live. The more injustice seen by muslims around the world, the more they will consider becoming terrorists, and the more resources a terrorist organization will have. More resources mean more likelihood of a successful attack. Is this not logical?
Of course, there's the definition of 'injustice', which is somewhat relative, but I'll get to that later.
Draft? Hate to tell you this, but the draft was the democrats idea, and now it's certainly not going to come to pass.
This is a mindless jab at the Democrats. Kerry also refuted a draft, so your contention here is just as justified as the one you're responding to (that GWB/Rep = draft).
The middle east has been propetually in conflict. We've now established two democracies (well, probably 1.5 so far). The region used to only have death. Now it has both death and hope.
And what if China thought the US becoming communist would significantly reduce the amount of conflict in the world, and thus invaded us - and won? Would that be 'just' or an 'injustice'? It certainly would have been a justified war in the eyes of the supporters of communism, just as installing democracies around the world is seen as justified by - surprise - democracies! But I have a feeling Americans would feel that it was actually an injustice done to them. So what you see as a 'just' and necessary overthrowing of a tyrant government, most other people see as empire trying to expand it's own reach and violently forcing its ways upon people who never even asked for help. So for you America is spreading 'hope', but to the people who feel they're being occupied, it's spreading 'oppresion'. Or, as someone in that region might say, 'more of the same'.
Forcing your ideologies on other people is based on a belief that your ideology is right for everyone - including those who you don't understand or identify with. You talk like you're intimately familiar with matters of the Middle East, and know what's best for everyone there, yet if you're like most people I've talked to, you've never been there and know little more than what you read in the papers. I'd be happy for you to prove me wrong, of course. And the ironic part is that you later go on to say that the rest of the world doesn't know what's right for America! (But we do, in fact, know what's right for the rest of the world, right?)
Ummm.... it's the dems that like to play funny games with the constitution. They don't like the fact that conservative judges actually look to what the constitution says, and what the founders meant when they wrote it. The dems think it needs to be "interpretted dynamically" (i.e. mean whatever the judge says it means).
The Old Testament says an eye for an eye, but the New Testiment says turn the other cheek. By your logic, if rules as serious at those in the Constitution are not meant to be 'dynamic', Jesus had no place challenging the "eye for an eye" law, and we should be using it as the basis of our legal system as well. But the world changes, and the law needs to change too. And spare me your response about eroding the Constitution, no one is intending to do that. (The Patriot Act and DMCA probably come closer to that than most of the things you're actually responding to anyways.)
In any case, your statement ignores the fact that *interpretation* is as a matter of fact a dynamic process that depends on the individual interpreting. If it needs to be interpreted at all, there was in fact some ambiguity in it. Possibly the Framers of the Constitution left a little ambiguity in there for a reason? Democracy thrives when there are many different interpretations being debated, not when the only people being heard are all on the same side. I don't believe th
Sounds a bit childish and I think the candidates could easily find something good to say about each other. They don't because they're trying to differentiate themselves, not show what a great guy their candidate is.
Not to mention the "when" in that question really should be "if".;-)
How about this instead?
"I am getting very frustrated and disappointed by the continued use of negative advertising in political advertising campaigns. I also feel that a campaign ad cannot truly explain a candidate's position on social security, health care, the environment, or terrorism in the course of 30-60 seconds. Yet this is probably the form of advertising that reaches the most voters. How effective do you think media advertising is in conveying your message, and what if anything do you think needs to be reformed about political advertising campaigns?"
A second question, either for the candidates or for anyone here who may know the answer: "Also, is there any independent source where I can find comparisons of your various stances on issues to objectively weigh the differences from an objective viewpoint?"
SuSE, RedHat/Fedora, Debian, Yoper, Linspire, Lycoris, Xandros, Yoper, Slackware, Mandrake, Arklinux... Oops, that's 11, and I'm sure I'm missing some. I've completely ignored embedded distros, firewall distros, "server-oriented" distros and just went for the distros that are popular and "desktop friendly", most of which are specifically targetted towards the desktop.
Name the different target market each one attempts to target. Also, name three features that makes each distro unique among its competitors. Maybe for 3 or 4 of the distros you'll be able to do that, but for the rest the answer is basically "It's just another Linux, just with different package options/versions".
I'm all for "clear choices" and products optimized for a particular market segment. But I think this strong defense of choice ignores the fact that such choice is basically dividing the volunteer resources of the OSS community over a bunch of only slightly different distros.
I mean, think about it. Is it really better to create a whole new distro and make it fast than to take an existing system (say, RedHat and Mandrake) and provide the same optimizations to *those* products? As a "Linux experimenter", I've given myself headaches trying to figure out what distro out of the above list I should use. It's not a clear-cut decision, and each time a new distro comes out, I think - gee, does this mean I should switch my desktop just to get nice feature X or Y?
I congratulate Yoper on their innovations, but the first thing I want to know is when these innovations are going to make it into other distros so that the Linux community as a whole can get a speed boost, rather than the Yoper community.
I realize this project isn't at the "released" stage yet, but the web site and even the article linked here don't really provide much info on what makes UserLinux "special". Not only is there little to market specifically to suit types, but to me as a geek there's no info on the site that shouts "here's why we're different!" Specifically, information like: how does it intend to improve the Linux "desktop" initiative? This really needs to be fixed, IMHO, if people are to take a serious interest in UserLinux. To me, it's looking like "yet another distro" which is more upsetting then anything, because I'm getting tired of having more and more similar but slightly different choices that leave me wondering why so many distros are considered to be a good thing. Maybe if everyone decided to work together, rather than all start their own distros, the Linux platform would be in better shape than it is on the desktop.
So, why will UserLinux not be just another one of the pack?
If you can point me to one, just one serious application (not a testing suite or one where python simply acts as a glue mechanism) written *entirely* using Python, I'll change my mind.
To me, a "serious" application simply defines it's capabilities and usefulness. I mean, after all, the question any developer must ask themselves is "can I use this tool to do what I need?" I guess to you a "serious application" needs to be purely coded in one language. Most apps in the world today would fail that test, including just about any GUI-based C# Mono apps, which also would rely on C/C++ for much of their code. Python obviously fails your test, but that doesn't bother me much because your test doesn't have any impact on Python's usefulness to me (or many others).
It would be practically impossible to get a truly representative sample of 100+ million people around the globe (that's a really rough estimate of number of PC users). There are a ton of other dependent variables at play here that would affect the sample - age, gender, education, social and economic status, living conditions, etc., etc.. To be "representative", people from all major data points should be accounted for, to ensure that the data isn't skewed towards a particular segment of the population - in this case, he'd have to make sure he collected samples from all over the world, and from all walks of life. His results are based off of about 3,000 lines of text taken from MSN, PC Magazine web sites, and 3,000 lines from the Macintouch web site (yes, one web site!). And of course, he knows nothing about ANYONE from whom he collected data. There isn't even any guarantee that all the data comes from PC and Mac users! (A PC user on a Mac forum? No way!) There's so little data here that it's a joke to even suggest anything based on this data alone.
I know (I hope?) this was done to be a bit silly, but really it's a bit insulting, I think. That's why I don't even understand why this was posted.
I mean, come on people! I'm a Mac user and I think this is about the stupidest thing one could spend time on. The author is comparing 2-3% of the computing world with 97-98% of the rest of the computing world. It should have occurred to him that results will vary HIGHLY depending on which portions of the population are used for the sample. The result is that such a comparison is useless, pointless, and elitest.
The sad part is that this made it to the/. front page. If you need to post something that bad, just post a dupe. We're used to it by now, and who knows, there may be someone who missed the original post!
No, that would clearly be an apples to oranges comparison. Actually, what I was reacting to was some comments in the article suggesting that Mono+GTK# is some long-awaited alternative to Java for developing cross platform GUI applications. The conclusion certainly seems to imply that Java was the only real "cross platform" language+toolkit out there before Mono+GTK#, and the author(s) sound almost ecstatic that there is now a way other than Java to develop cross-platform GUI apps without going with "low level" languages like C/C++. Hence my response of "uhm, I've been doing this for years already".;-)
I've actually programmed with.NET, though not extensively, and I do understand why this is useful to some people. But I would dispute the point that this is the first "non-Java" way to really get cross-platform, and in some cases it may not even be the best one.
I probably shouldn't respond to an obviously stereotypical comment, really, but I'll bite as many people don't realize that you can do a lot with "interpreted" languages...
One of my wxPython apps does trivial little things like provides WYSIWYG HTML editing (via embedded Mozilla), lets you preview pages in IE/Mozilla at the click of a tab, exports files and in fact entire sites from HTML to PDF, lets you create online, self-grading quizzes, maintain your site structure using a treeview, including clipboard copy/paste, creates full-text indexes of all your HTML content, and lets you create your own themes or content editors very quickly via extensible plugins. Sure, a good portion of the guts are coded in C/C++, but as I didn't code most of those C/C++ sections, I don't really care. They just work from Python and I can build interfaces and "glue" the C/C++ pieces together very quickly. Furthermore, if I had to write all this in C/C++... Well, as a one man project it just never would have happened. Those who are interested can check it out at http://www.eclass.net.
If there were more interest in a Linux/Mac version, I could make packages for those platforms, but it does run from source as is. (Mozilla embedding doesn't work from Mac well yet, but that's because of issues with the Mozilla codebase, not with wxPython/Python.)
But this probably isn't a serious app, except maybe to the people who use it to do their work. =)
And how is this better than wxWidgets/wxPython?
on
Ars Technica Tours Mono
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I've already been doing this sort of cross-platform programming for years with wxWidgets/wxPython. I'm not waiting on Mac support - I'm already using it (and improving it!). What amazes me is that the authors act like Mono is breaking new ground by having a portable programming language that can do GUIs but is easier than Java. Hello? Apparently no one ever told them about Python/wxPython?
And not only can I use it today, I get better results than I would with GTK# or Java in terms of cross-platform interfaces. If you've ever seen the GIMP on Windows, you'd know that GTK apps don't quite look like professional Windows apps. Emulated interfaces will always look out of place, particularly as themes get more common.
I'd encourage anyone who is interested in cross-platform programming to download Python and wxPython, then run the wxPython demo on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, and then explain to me exactly how it is that Mono is breaking new ground. (Note also that the wxPython 2.5.2 release on Mac will sport a number of nice improvements and is due out soon.)
The only new and unique thing that I see about Mono is that it uses and is compatible with APIs designed by Microsoft. As a compatibility layer, that has some value, but they will always be two steps behind Microsoft and MS will always ensure that the best.NET experience comes from using Windows. And as the Ars Technica article shows, it's going to be a while before anyone can really write sophisticated cross-platform GUI apps using this toolkit. (And will it be GTK# on Mac? Does that mean X11 is needed there? Ugh.)
Anyways, time to go back to making my native, cross-platform apps.;-)
I think that Ken Brown has been pretty much proven to be some combination of an idio, a shill, deluded and/or a psychopath. I'd think that nothing that anybody says is going to change his mind, and anybody who looks at the currently existing rebuttal's is likely to take him seriously.
First, I'm not trying to make him change his mind. He made up his mind before he started, which means he's only interested in information which helps prove his (false) argument.
Second, you're right that anyone in the free/open source community knows he's full of it, but you'd be surprised how people who are told only one side of a story are likely to agree with that side. Those people will see two things: he makes an argument (which they will assume he has proof of), and we are not (officially) responding. (These people don't read Slashdot.) Our "brushing it off" looks to them like we have something to hide, just as KB is suggesting.
Sure, some people won't take the bait - but some will, and it may have a direct effect on government and military adoption of "free" source technologies. The best way to get elected officials to support your positions are to make your positions clear and refute opposing positions with solid information. With a few exceptions, most of the elected officials and incumbents really are not tuned into open/free source software.
No, we don't need a formal group response to this. Are you the one being accused of code theft? Is he putting words in your mouth? Are you being interviewed with false motives and then being quoted out of context with wrong interpretation? No? Neither am I.
Maybe you didn't notice, but he was using Linus/Linux's imaginary "code theft" as an example of what he sees as the "hybrid source" community's attitude towards IP. In other words, he's saying that if you develop or promote GPL software, you probably think stealing IP from others is OK, and you're going to try and drain resources from the economy for your own benefit. (In other words: Look, Linus did it and he's revered by the community!) So yes, he is accusing not only Linus, but the entire free software commmunity of callous attitudes towards IP rights. This isn't about Linus - it's about GPL software, "hybrid source", and make no mistake, he's trying to kill adoption and funding of it by painting its promoters as immoral.
I think it's about time everyone got together and created one polished and solid response to Ken Brown's lies and insinuations. We've heard from Andrew Tanenbaum, ESR, RMS, Linus, etc., but what I would like to see is a formal and official response to the AdTI book that is being published, tearing up its insinuations point-for-point, in a way that his own target audience (i.e. "decision makers") couldn't ignore. Particularly, I think it needs to be made clear that even his *own* research on how Minix influenced Linux code showed no code "theft".
The people that KB is targetting just aren't going to "stay tuned" for the latest back and forth between KB and OSS advocate X. They need to have all the evidence presented to them clearly and concisely, and I think it needs to be from all the major players in the OSS community. I think this will *strongly* discourage people like KB from spouting lies and deception, as they know they will be called on it, at the expense of any journalistic integrity they may have had. And the more obvious it becomes that this is (likely solicited) FUD, the more the whole exercise will backfire on those that hoped to benefit from it.
"power user" is another word for "geek" for me. I don't see how that would help out of the current situation.
Not for me. A "geek" is someone who learns technology for th fun of it, or as their full-time job. This is the group of people that Linux (somewhat) has.
A "power user" is someone who doesn't have a computer networking/programming job and whose primary interest is not in computers, but this person may maintain a small home network or do things like change their theme, etc. Someone who learned the workings of Windows enough so that they can configure it however they want, but not so much that they qualify as a "geek". A geek is a whole other level of technical competency to me.
They aren't going to make cross-platform easy, unless they want you to buy your machines from Dell. (Or they can get you to pay $500+ for their cross-platform development kit.;-)
If you want cross-platform, check out wxWidgets. It works. Apple *definitely* isn't going to go through all the work to get GNUStep synched with Cocoa and working with native APIs on Windows AND Linux.
I agree that Apple could make money porting more than iTunes to Windows, but they won't, and you're right that Linux has not matched the Apple apps and OS features people want most. Not for lack of trying, either.
But here's the point I was trying to make, though I probably didn't express it very well. Although Linux has been "trying very hard", unlike Apple, the Linux community doesn't seem to have a concrete idea of who to target and who *not* to target. That's why I, a former Windows user, find KDE's "Explorer" harder to use than "Windows Explorer", despite the fact that the Windows interface was always a major influence on their development. They copied the easy, visual, stuff, but when they started making decisions on their own, true usability gave way to "by developer for developer" features and poor UI paradigms which are hard for new users to understand. GNOME is my preferred desktop, and IMHO it's much better, but it still shows the developer focus in some places. (Some things I really don't understand, like, why do I have a quick access icon for the terminal up top, but not for my Home folder? I'd hope I would use the latter more than the former. =) And as I'll explain a bit more below, I think these issues are pretty petty to what I consider to be major issues with Linux - mostly maintenance-related issues, like installing software and configuring the computer.
But if GNOME, say, were to set off in a "let's clone OS X and its killer apps" direction, they *still* would not raise the migration rate on PCs from Windows much.
Nor do I want them to clone Apple's apps. Heck, for me, it's not the apps I have problems with on Linux - it's the system design, and complexity of maintenance! I wish *someone* would make it as easy to install programs as it is on Windows, or even better, on Mac. I wish someone would clean up the filesystem so that conceptually it's more desktop, rather than mainframe/client-server, oriented. We don't need 3 letter folder names now that we can click on the folder instead of type it in. It's the little things like this that ruin Linux for me. A number of apps work fine for me on Linux if I can get them up and running! (Which leads to dependence on the vendor for a proper package, or someone who makes a *working* package for your distro...) I really feel that this whole Linux packaging system is an over-engineered solution which tries to work around, rather than address, problems with the design of Linux's filesystem and software installation/maintenance procedures.
I'd be happy as a lark if I started seeing things like self-contained app bundles on Linux and a cleaner filesystem; I think it would make life so much easier for the not-a-newbie-but-not-a-*nix-geek crowd. And to be honest, I think that crowd is a huge market. But even with all the vendors, and all the movement going on in the Linux space, I get the impression that the issues that matter to people like me aren't even on their radar. Which, IMHO, is a real shame. I've even gotten so frustrated that in my darkest hours I've thought about making a Linux distro to fix all this... But it's too much to do by myself and I don't even know enough to get started at this point.:-/
BTW, no Mozilla leader has proposed cloning XAML, so don't worry about us wasting time on that.
Good, as I got a strong impression of this from those discussion notes and it had me worried. =)
Unfortunately, studies I've seen say that Linux desktops do not have lower TCO. And not for want of consistent user interface among apps, or fancy desktop GUIs.
IMHO it's because Linux users and developers are just too used to the complexity inherent in the OS, where everything is exposed to you, and so they don't even realize that complexity is a problem for other users. It's hard to solve a problem you can't see. Some people can't even fathom why someone would like the Windows/Mac way of doing things.
Personally, I think if Linux vendors want to gain some "mind share" and make in
Not unless you're sitting in-front of a Unix system for the first time. Want to figure out how to configure XFree86? Type an x, and hit tab twice... Bingo. You can also figure that out by discovering which folders are part of your path (easy) and doing an 'ls' there.
But as I've said all along, I'm talking about people sitting in front of a UNIX box for the first time! People without a trainer, and without a manual. Maybe they downloaded an ISO from a web site. That's how I got Linux.
Nope... How to get help is the main thing the reference teaches them.
Interesting. So when they want to find a program on their box for, say, system configuration and they don't have the manual, how do they do that? help system config?
No, there are big reasons not to compile for classic. People aren't happy if their program has to run under emulation, uses up a big chunk of extra memory, or doesn't have a remotely similar interface as everything else on the system.
I didn't say Classic, I said CFM. CFM apps don't run under emulation.
Name one program made for OS X that will work on OS 9.
I'll name 3, off-hand. Dreamweaver MX, Fetch (my FTP client), and BBEdit. These are just apps I use every day. And honestly, I don't check to see if all my apps run in OS 9 simply because I don't care.
Most have an installer, however.
Under OS 9 they did. Under OS X, the bundle format lets people write and distribute self-contained apps, that have shared libraries, resources, etc in them. The bundles even work on OS 9 if you build using CFM, or you can even provide a Mach and CFM build in the same bundle if you want to take advantage of OS X but still run on OS 9.
I can tell you that I drag and drop about every app I download these days. The main exclusions I can think of are Macromedia apps, and wxPython (because it installs files in UNIX). Some apps which install Frameworks may need an installer too, but that's a rarety except for Apple's own apps. You can of course refuse to believe me if you like, but it is true.
I know exactly what the compatibility issues are... In detail. I know all about Cocoa, Carbon, Aqua, Classic and all that. From your comment above, I get the feeling you are a bit fuzzy on it.
LOL! I develop using many of these technologies. You obviously aren't even clear on the differences between CFM/Classic.
Which is why you have to beg for support from companies every time the slightest thing about Mac OS changes. You say there's great backwards compatibility, but tell that to anybody who has to use PageMaker on OS X.
Huh? I don't know the situation with PageMaker (except that Adobe has been dragging their feet on OS X support), but otherwise I can't tell what you're talking about as someone who uses Mac OS X every single day.
First off, Mach is not the FreeBSD kernel. You don't seem to know this. OS X has select few FreeBSD programs, but none of them are the core programs. They are only the userland programs included in the base system, and not all of them at that. You run sysctl on OSX and see what you get. Run kldstat and see what you get. You do not have a system that even remotely resembles FreeBSD. I've used Darwin, I know EXACTLY what you've got running under that interface.
To be honest, I don't know what those commands do nor do I care. I don't need them. But it's UNIX for me in this sense - I can download a UNIX app, and most times it just builds and runs. So I can run all my UNIX/Linux software on Mac. That's all I need and care about. =) Yes, it does sometimes require modifications, and that does suck, but actually the OSS community really comes through here and these days I don't see many compatibility issues at all because of it.
Don't use the word "we". You are obviously a whiner, and a troll it seems, making spurious arguements, not knowing what you are talking about while accusing me of the same. You complain about everything Linux does because you want it to do everything the way OS
First, I wanted to say thanks for taking the time out to read and respond to my comment.
Good point about Apple, but only half the truth is told here. Apple is not targeting commodity PC hardware. It has its own boutique hardware that people want in addition to the boutique software Apple purveys. This is a huge advantage, although of limited growth potential, and an advantage that is not transferable to Linux.
That's true to an extent, but many people buy Apple for the software. The hardware integration is nice, but not the core 'switching' feature for people, at least for me. I'd buy OS X if it was available for PC, though for the reasons you mentioned they won't do that, and I can't blame them. If Linux were anywhere close to that, I'd buy it, but that's getting a bit off-topic.;-) The point is that it really doesn't matter what Microsoft does if you have your own target market that they haven't targeted yet, or you can provide a better out-of-box solution for some particular problem than they can. And since Mozilla runs on Windows, you can still target Windows users for your solutions.
Embedding is hardly a growth market. There are at most a handful of apps that might embed Gecko on Linux, and Mozilla would get little or no funding or user-agent market share from them.
First, I should say I meant growth as in marketshare, which I got the (possibly mistaken) impression was high on your list of goals. So I understand it's not a huge money maker, I saw it more as a back door to get the GRE on peoples' machines, which would eventually lead to easier deployment of Mozilla-based solutions.
But on a related note, as an application developer, I've been writing apps for years and I have yet to find a *good* HTML editor that I can put in my app. Would I pay money for it? Yes, without a doubt. Heck, I've put countless hours into the development of wxMozilla just so I could finally get a decent cross-platform HTML editor for my app. (Some people would say I'm a bit stubborn... =)
Another thing I'd pay for (or hopefully could convince my boss to subsidize), would be some priority bug and feature resolution for Mozilla. At $500 (say) for some priority support tickets (so many hours, or so many incidents) I think I could get it past my boss. For example, I really, really wish someone would just allow me to static link NSPR!! It was allowed at one point, then turned off for some reason, but the fact is that on Windows, in most cases apps cannot share the NSPR libraries anyways, defeating the purpose of using shared libraries. It would make embedding much easier on Windows, and I'd certainly pay to get some attention paid to it. Maybe I'm the only one who'd want a service like this, but I'm not so sure I'm alone here.
This may be heresy to open-source true believers, but maintaining and extending Gecko requires a minimum number of paid, full-time hackers, managers, and QA and release staff, in addition to the wide and deep volunteer community from which those staff were hired. Currently Sun, IBM, Red Hat, and the Mozilla Foundation, at least, employ such people.
I'm not a OSS purist by any means, and I believe that you've every right to make money off this! In fact, I want you to so that Mozilla can continue.:-)
Mozilla already has "killer app" strategies in place funding the browser and, more recently, Thunderbird.... browsers are still killer apps, mainly because they are sufficient front ends to web apps, which have displaced fat/proprietary/vertical client/server apps.
No disrespect, but I disagree with you that browsers are killer apps, even for web apps. In my experience, they're commodity apps now. I use Safari on Mac, for example, for only one reason - it's faster. I use web-based apps for my schooling, for my work, and for my home web site, and Safari handles them all pretty well. So although Firefox is pretty slick on Mac, it's not slick enough to displace Safari for me. Also, when I
You keep mentioning HOWTOs, but I don't know why. In all of my experience with Unix systems, I've read maybe 3 howtos, and they were all quite short. I didn't need to take any classes to learn what I know.
Then how did you learn? Exploration? IRC? Reading books? (in other words, HOWTOs you paid for)
1. How is learning a few command-line tools worse than learning how to use Photoshop, Office, etc? Frankly, command-line tools are much easier.
Except that Photoshop, Office, etc. has toolbars and menus that let you explore their functionality. For Linux, you need to be told the command that helps you perform task X before you can go anywhere.
2. There's very little learning to do. Once you've figured out that --help shows the options, you've learned how to use any command-line program Unix has.
So, say I want to edit some text and I've got a command line staring at me. I don't have a UNIX book, nor an instructor. How do I find out what to do? --help edit text? On Windows, I can browse Start->Programs until I find this thing called "Notepad". Hmmm... Maybe I can use that? Ditto for Mac, except it's/Applications and TextEdit. The point is that GUIs allow visual exploration. People who've already mastered the command line see no use for it, but that's only because they don't need it.
As with your MS-DOS class example, take away their MS-DOS book after 30 mins and see how well they've mastered it. =) As soon as they need to do something outside of what they read, they just have to raise their hand. Sure, it's fine if you're willing to pay for a class to learn Linux or MS-DOS, but for people who have options that *don't* include paying for a class (Windows, Mac), Linux falls short.
That's been my point all along. Windows/Mac can't do most of the things that Unix systems can. Windows and Mac do not give you those things... Windows and Mac give you a bare minimum of system functionality, and don't let you do anything more than that.
And my point (all along) has been that its perfectly fine with me, and most people. Remember this discussion started about problems with Linux in terms of marketing it to non-geeks, as GNOME and Mozilla are trying to go in that direction.
Yes, and so do Mac programs. Good luck installing an OS X program on OS9.
Thanks, but I don't need it. If Mac apps are built using CFM, they'll install and run on both OS 9 and OS X. Typically the only reason to NOT compile for the CFM libraries is for UNIX-based apps, or apps that take advantage of Mac OS X capabilities, and it is reasonable that it would not install on OS 9 as OS 9 does not have the capabilities needed to run the program. And forward compatibility is even better. My OS 9 apps install and run on OS X, even despite it being a totally different system from the ground up. In contrast, I've found that a "Mandrake 9" package may not work with Mandrake 10, or same with Red Hat and other distros. Again, this is better than Mac how?
I don't recall any Windows or Mac system giving you feedback when you first touch the mouse, when you single-click on an icon, when you try to type into the desktop (no open windows), etc.
Mac and Windows both provide feedback when you single-click on an icon (notice it gets blue? that means its selected), neither provide feedback when your action *has no effect*. The lack of feedback is in fact feedback letting you know that nothing's happened. That's obvious.
Two things. First, don't think this doesn't apply to Mac. I just talked about Windows shortcommings because that's what I was using at the time. I never found Mac good enough to replace Windows, so that was a non-starter.
You obviously haven't seriously looked at Mac for years, as a number of your Mac-related arguments are misinformed. I've used XP, OS X, and Mandrake 10, all recently as in the past couple months. I know what the situation is like on these platforms *today*, not 5 years ago. You might want to get informed before you sta
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Because, somehow, I was aware of this without being a Mozilla developer, by only reading public statements and the development roadmap. So is the problem that developers don't read the roadmap and don't read the Mozilla Foundation's public statements?
I think where we're getting hung up is that you're saying that developers/users should have known that "the end of suite development was coming" and suggesting that people didn't realize this (obvious) fact. I think they did know that, and thus the question of "why didn't they realize it" already has an answer - they did. I think it's fair to say that most people did realize that, one day, Mozilla would no longer actively develop the suite.
What bothered many people (including me, particularly) is that the 1.8 release cycle mislead many people into thinking there would be a 1.8 release. In other words, that this wasn't *yet* the end of the suite. What people saw up until a few weeks ago was the normal alpha/beta/release cycle that Mozilla has done for years. They had no real evidence from Mozilla to show that this was in fact *not* such a normal cycle, or that they should react any differently than they did in the past. (i.e. bug test, tweak, update translations, etc. for the new release and prepare it for official release) There was no concrete evidence showing that 1.7 was the end of the suite.
Furthermore, this form of decision making projects the image that the Mozilla project simply makes decisions like this out of the blue. Everyone just got together one day and said "okay, let's stop developing this now". To businesses, that looks *very* reactionary, and it suggests that Mozilla doesn't have a plan. It would make them think - do we want an organization like that being part of our infrastructure? Are they preparing for the future, or just taking it day by day?
What could have been done to smooth things out considerably and avoid wasted effort was simply to make an official statement at the start of the 1.8 development cycle that there would be no 1.8 public release and that the 1.8 testing cycle was specifically for testing Mozilla's backend technologies. No confusion, no fuss, the future of Mozilla is laid out right after 1.7, the perfect time to do so. The core question, in my mind, is why didn't this happen? IMHO, that's the real question that ought to be asked.
If it was stated on the roadmap 2 or 3 years ago that there would be no Mozilla 1.8, then why was it a discussion issue just a month or so back? It certainly seems like someone in the Mozilla dev crew didn't know as an absolute fact that there'd be no Mozilla 1.8, and if their own developers didn't know, how can you fault average users for not realizing it?
Yeah, people knew it would stop being supported, but I think they just thought they'd get a little warning beforehand. After all, what were all those people testing, then? The "backend" of Mozilla? Was this made clear to them? Did they realize they were testing software that would never be officially released? If they DID realize it, would they have still spent time testing it? I read about one poor guy who actually went through and updated language translations for Mozilla 1.8, only to find it was pointless of him to do so. A little communication earlier on in the process would have avoided all this.
Criticize all you want, but big organizations would be eaten alive by their customers if they pulled something like this. Microsoft has trouble discontinuing Win98 support YEARS in advance. Mozilla is growing, and open source is a give and take strategy. If the project wants the support of the community, they've got to be willing to accomodate the needs and concerns of the community as well. I don't think it's fair to simply bash Mozilla for their mistakes, but I believe they could have dealt with the situation better than they did, and it would benefit the project if they learned how to handle these situations better, especially now that they're getting the attention of the public in general.
Dear Ms. Baker,
;-) I noticed the hiring of Josh Aas to the Mozilla Foundation and a commitment to improving Mac support, which I was very excited to hear about, and I was wondering if this includes improving the embedding libraries on Mac? (Modern Mac apps have significant troubles with the current embedding libs, which are geared towards OS 8/9 apps.) I realize this is open source, and I'm certainly willing to help in any efforts towards this end (and have already made headway towards some patches), but I would need some help and support from the Mozilla project to make this real.
I'm one of the core developers on wxMozilla, and for some time I've been wondering how exactly the GRE / Gecko SDK fits into the overall Mozilla framework and roadmap. I have two questions that center around that issue.
First, the current Mozilla communication issues are especially confusing for embedders, because, for example, the GRE has traditionally used the same numbering scheme as the Mozilla Suite. (i.e. there's not going to be a Mozilla 1.8, but what does that mean for GRE 1.8?) Furthermore, there's no roadmap for the GRE, so it's hard to tell where it's going or what the priorities are. So could you comment on what you see as the future of the GRE and Gecko SDK as Mozilla products?
I have one more related question, because I'm a Mac user.
Thanks for taking some time out to read and respond to these issues!
Open source is a philosophy as much as it is a development methodology. The less people who are exposed to it, the less people who are comforatble with accepting open source solutions. A large number of PHBs are still very nervous towards open source, and to be honest, it's hard to blame them. In terms of high-quality GUI desktop application software, open source only has a few shining success stories. (Mozilla, OpenOffice, and sort of GIMP.)
:-)
Now, there very well could be some great Linux/KDE apps out there, but the fact is a vast majority of computer users never see nor use them. So, they turn to their commercial Windows alternatives instead, and the status quo is re-enforced.
Moving to Linux to get these apps is a bit like learning how to swim in the deep end of the pool. The OS is unfamiliar, the apps are unfamiliar, the "package management system" is completely new and different from Windows (and while efficient, is not very intuitive); in short, everything is unfamiliar. I can't think of any killer app that could offset all these disadvantages.
So while the KDE developers may *want* users to move to Linux for those 'killer apps', if no one even knows these killer apps exist, and moving takes a huge committment (and a decent amount of technical expertise), realistically, who will want to move?
In fact, having apps like Mozilla and OpenOffice work on Windows means that if people do choose Linux, they'll feel more at home on the OS with apps they're familiar with. Yes, yes, I know people would cite the whole OS/2 fiasco, but I don't think Windows compatibility killed them - it was their inability to differentiate themselves from Windows that did it. After all, if someone says "well then, why not just get Windows", then obviously OS/2 doesn't offer much above and beyond Windows, does it?
With Linux, it will need not only to be like Windows, but better than it, and not just in terms of security. It needs to be easier and more productive. I'm talking about things at the OS level, like system configuration and package management, not just at the application level. I think it's telling that the two main differentiating factors between Linux distros is their package management system and their system configuration tools. Hmmm... Maybe distros are trying to differentiate themselves because these things are the 'killer apps' of an OS?
But IMHO, these tools do not yet measure up to their Windows counterparts in terms of intuitiveness and simplicity. And that's the main thing that keeps me off Linux. Unfortunately, there's nothing to lead me to think this will be resolved on any distro soon. In the meantime, if app developers would like me to use their app, they should consider porting it.
How do you know it was rhetorical? He even says "Think", challenging the reader as to if they know an answer. (Suggesting that he thought they couldn't quickly come up with one.) A rather silly challenge if 1000s of people can give the answer in one breath. (Which *many* authors, 'knowledge workers', students, and others could.) If I said "Think: How can you find files from the commnad line?", how would *you* have responded? Would you have defended my "rhetorical" question, or laughed me off as someone who doesn't know the basics of CLI?
In any case, you seem bothered by the fact that several people are quite happy with the GUI solution, or even have pointed out deficiencies in wc. To me, it's not about what's better, CLI or GUI - it's silly to argue about it. The right tool for the right job for that particular user is the "correct" answer, be it CLI or GUI. If it works, and the user likes it, what's the problem? That they could be 12% more efficient? What if they don't care? What if they use the command once every 3 months and spending 1 minute finding it is acceptable? Maybe if open source developers could get over some of their detest for GUIs, they could build better GUIs and get more people using their tools.
On second though, nah, that's a silly idea... ;-) On with the reasons why CLIs do everything better and GUIs are so annoying!
What he was referring to, albeit rather poorly, is this odd idea called "cause and effect." That is, actions cause reactions, and thus that terrorists' actions are in part (if not majorly) determined by the world in which they live. The more injustice seen by muslims around the world, the more they will consider becoming terrorists, and the more resources a terrorist organization will have. More resources mean more likelihood of a successful attack. Is this not logical?
Of course, there's the definition of 'injustice', which is somewhat relative, but I'll get to that later.
Draft? Hate to tell you this, but the draft was the democrats idea, and now it's certainly not going to come to pass.
This is a mindless jab at the Democrats. Kerry also refuted a draft, so your contention here is just as justified as the one you're responding to (that GWB/Rep = draft).
The middle east has been propetually in conflict. We've now established two democracies (well, probably 1.5 so far). The region used to only have death. Now it has both death and hope.
And what if China thought the US becoming communist would significantly reduce the amount of conflict in the world, and thus invaded us - and won? Would that be 'just' or an 'injustice'? It certainly would have been a justified war in the eyes of the supporters of communism, just as installing democracies around the world is seen as justified by - surprise - democracies! But I have a feeling Americans would feel that it was actually an injustice done to them. So what you see as a 'just' and necessary overthrowing of a tyrant government, most other people see as empire trying to expand it's own reach and violently forcing its ways upon people who never even asked for help. So for you America is spreading 'hope', but to the people who feel they're being occupied, it's spreading 'oppresion'. Or, as someone in that region might say, 'more of the same'.
Forcing your ideologies on other people is based on a belief that your ideology is right for everyone - including those who you don't understand or identify with. You talk like you're intimately familiar with matters of the Middle East, and know what's best for everyone there, yet if you're like most people I've talked to, you've never been there and know little more than what you read in the papers. I'd be happy for you to prove me wrong, of course. And the ironic part is that you later go on to say that the rest of the world doesn't know what's right for America! (But we do, in fact, know what's right for the rest of the world, right?)
Ummm.... it's the dems that like to play funny games with the constitution. They don't like the fact that conservative judges actually look to what the constitution says, and what the founders meant when they wrote it. The dems think it needs to be "interpretted dynamically" (i.e. mean whatever the judge says it means).
The Old Testament says an eye for an eye, but the New Testiment says turn the other cheek. By your logic, if rules as serious at those in the Constitution are not meant to be 'dynamic', Jesus had no place challenging the "eye for an eye" law, and we should be using it as the basis of our legal system as well. But the world changes, and the law needs to change too. And spare me your response about eroding the Constitution, no one is intending to do that. (The Patriot Act and DMCA probably come closer to that than most of the things you're actually responding to anyways.)
In any case, your statement ignores the fact that *interpretation* is as a matter of fact a dynamic process that depends on the individual interpreting. If it needs to be interpreted at all, there was in fact some ambiguity in it. Possibly the Framers of the Constitution left a little ambiguity in there for a reason? Democracy thrives when there are many different interpretations being debated, not when the only people being heard are all on the same side. I don't believe th
Sounds a bit childish and I think the candidates could easily find something good to say about each other. They don't because they're trying to differentiate themselves, not show what a great guy their candidate is.
;-)
Not to mention the "when" in that question really should be "if".
How about this instead?
"I am getting very frustrated and disappointed by the continued use of negative advertising in political advertising campaigns. I also feel that a campaign ad cannot truly explain a candidate's position on social security, health care, the environment, or terrorism in the course of 30-60 seconds. Yet this is probably the form of advertising that reaches the most voters. How effective do you think media advertising is in conveying your message, and what if anything do you think needs to be reformed about political advertising campaigns?"
A second question, either for the candidates or for anyone here who may know the answer: "Also, is there any independent source where I can find comparisons of your various stances on issues to objectively weigh the differences from an objective viewpoint?"
SuSE, RedHat/Fedora, Debian, Yoper, Linspire, Lycoris, Xandros, Yoper, Slackware, Mandrake, Arklinux... Oops, that's 11, and I'm sure I'm missing some. I've completely ignored embedded distros, firewall distros, "server-oriented" distros and just went for the distros that are popular and "desktop friendly", most of which are specifically targetted towards the desktop.
Name the different target market each one attempts to target. Also, name three features that makes each distro unique among its competitors. Maybe for 3 or 4 of the distros you'll be able to do that, but for the rest the answer is basically "It's just another Linux, just with different package options/versions".
I'm all for "clear choices" and products optimized for a particular market segment. But I think this strong defense of choice ignores the fact that such choice is basically dividing the volunteer resources of the OSS community over a bunch of only slightly different distros.
I mean, think about it. Is it really better to create a whole new distro and make it fast than to take an existing system (say, RedHat and Mandrake) and provide the same optimizations to *those* products? As a "Linux experimenter", I've given myself headaches trying to figure out what distro out of the above list I should use. It's not a clear-cut decision, and each time a new distro comes out, I think - gee, does this mean I should switch my desktop just to get nice feature X or Y?
I congratulate Yoper on their innovations, but the first thing I want to know is when these innovations are going to make it into other distros so that the Linux community as a whole can get a speed boost, rather than the Yoper community.
I realize this project isn't at the "released" stage yet, but the web site and even the article linked here don't really provide much info on what makes UserLinux "special". Not only is there little to market specifically to suit types, but to me as a geek there's no info on the site that shouts "here's why we're different!" Specifically, information like: how does it intend to improve the Linux "desktop" initiative? This really needs to be fixed, IMHO, if people are to take a serious interest in UserLinux. To me, it's looking like "yet another distro" which is more upsetting then anything, because I'm getting tired of having more and more similar but slightly different choices that leave me wondering why so many distros are considered to be a good thing. Maybe if everyone decided to work together, rather than all start their own distros, the Linux platform would be in better shape than it is on the desktop.
So, why will UserLinux not be just another one of the pack?
To me, a "serious" application simply defines it's capabilities and usefulness. I mean, after all, the question any developer must ask themselves is "can I use this tool to do what I need?" I guess to you a "serious application" needs to be purely coded in one language. Most apps in the world today would fail that test, including just about any GUI-based C# Mono apps, which also would rely on C/C++ for much of their code. Python obviously fails your test, but that doesn't bother me much because your test doesn't have any impact on Python's usefulness to me (or many others).
It would be practically impossible to get a truly representative sample of 100+ million people around the globe (that's a really rough estimate of number of PC users). There are a ton of other dependent variables at play here that would affect the sample - age, gender, education, social and economic status, living conditions, etc., etc.. To be "representative", people from all major data points should be accounted for, to ensure that the data isn't skewed towards a particular segment of the population - in this case, he'd have to make sure he collected samples from all over the world, and from all walks of life. His results are based off of about 3,000 lines of text taken from MSN, PC Magazine web sites, and 3,000 lines from the Macintouch web site (yes, one web site!). And of course, he knows nothing about ANYONE from whom he collected data. There isn't even any guarantee that all the data comes from PC and Mac users! (A PC user on a Mac forum? No way!) There's so little data here that it's a joke to even suggest anything based on this data alone.
I know (I hope?) this was done to be a bit silly, but really it's a bit insulting, I think. That's why I don't even understand why this was posted.
I mean, come on people! I'm a Mac user and I think this is about the stupidest thing one could spend time on. The author is comparing 2-3% of the computing world with 97-98% of the rest of the computing world. It should have occurred to him that results will vary HIGHLY depending on which portions of the population are used for the sample. The result is that such a comparison is useless, pointless, and elitest.
/. front page. If you need to post something that bad, just post a dupe. We're used to it by now, and who knows, there may be someone who missed the original post!
The sad part is that this made it to the
No, that would clearly be an apples to oranges comparison. Actually, what I was reacting to was some comments in the article suggesting that Mono+GTK# is some long-awaited alternative to Java for developing cross platform GUI applications. The conclusion certainly seems to imply that Java was the only real "cross platform" language+toolkit out there before Mono+GTK#, and the author(s) sound almost ecstatic that there is now a way other than Java to develop cross-platform GUI apps without going with "low level" languages like C/C++. Hence my response of "uhm, I've been doing this for years already". ;-)
.NET, though not extensively, and I do understand why this is useful to some people. But I would dispute the point that this is the first "non-Java" way to really get cross-platform, and in some cases it may not even be the best one.
I've actually programmed with
I probably shouldn't respond to an obviously stereotypical comment, really, but I'll bite as many people don't realize that you can do a lot with "interpreted" languages...
One of my wxPython apps does trivial little things like provides WYSIWYG HTML editing (via embedded Mozilla), lets you preview pages in IE/Mozilla at the click of a tab, exports files and in fact entire sites from HTML to PDF, lets you create online, self-grading quizzes, maintain your site structure using a treeview, including clipboard copy/paste, creates full-text indexes of all your HTML content, and lets you create your own themes or content editors very quickly via extensible plugins. Sure, a good portion of the guts are coded in C/C++, but as I didn't code most of those C/C++ sections, I don't really care. They just work from Python and I can build interfaces and "glue" the C/C++ pieces together very quickly. Furthermore, if I had to write all this in C/C++... Well, as a one man project it just never would have happened. Those who are interested can check it out at http://www.eclass.net.
If there were more interest in a Linux/Mac version, I could make packages for those platforms, but it does run from source as is. (Mozilla embedding doesn't work from Mac well yet, but that's because of issues with the Mozilla codebase, not with wxPython/Python.)
But this probably isn't a serious app, except maybe to the people who use it to do their work. =)
I've already been doing this sort of cross-platform programming for years with wxWidgets/wxPython. I'm not waiting on Mac support - I'm already using it (and improving it!). What amazes me is that the authors act like Mono is breaking new ground by having a portable programming language that can do GUIs but is easier than Java. Hello? Apparently no one ever told them about Python/wxPython?
.NET experience comes from using Windows. And as the Ars Technica article shows, it's going to be a while before anyone can really write sophisticated cross-platform GUI apps using this toolkit. (And will it be GTK# on Mac? Does that mean X11 is needed there? Ugh.)
;-)
And not only can I use it today, I get better results than I would with GTK# or Java in terms of cross-platform interfaces. If you've ever seen the GIMP on Windows, you'd know that GTK apps don't quite look like professional Windows apps. Emulated interfaces will always look out of place, particularly as themes get more common.
I'd encourage anyone who is interested in cross-platform programming to download Python and wxPython, then run the wxPython demo on Windows, Linux or Mac OS X, and then explain to me exactly how it is that Mono is breaking new ground. (Note also that the wxPython 2.5.2 release on Mac will sport a number of nice improvements and is due out soon.)
The only new and unique thing that I see about Mono is that it uses and is compatible with APIs designed by Microsoft. As a compatibility layer, that has some value, but they will always be two steps behind Microsoft and MS will always ensure that the best
Anyways, time to go back to making my native, cross-platform apps.
... when you get a virus on one of these things? ;-)
First, I'm not trying to make him change his mind. He made up his mind before he started, which means he's only interested in information which helps prove his (false) argument.
Second, you're right that anyone in the free/open source community knows he's full of it, but you'd be surprised how people who are told only one side of a story are likely to agree with that side. Those people will see two things: he makes an argument (which they will assume he has proof of), and we are not (officially) responding. (These people don't read Slashdot.) Our "brushing it off" looks to them like we have something to hide, just as KB is suggesting.
Sure, some people won't take the bait - but some will, and it may have a direct effect on government and military adoption of "free" source technologies. The best way to get elected officials to support your positions are to make your positions clear and refute opposing positions with solid information. With a few exceptions, most of the elected officials and incumbents really are not tuned into open/free source software.
Maybe you didn't notice, but he was using Linus/Linux's imaginary "code theft" as an example of what he sees as the "hybrid source" community's attitude towards IP. In other words, he's saying that if you develop or promote GPL software, you probably think stealing IP from others is OK, and you're going to try and drain resources from the economy for your own benefit. (In other words: Look, Linus did it and he's revered by the community!) So yes, he is accusing not only Linus, but the entire free software commmunity of callous attitudes towards IP rights. This isn't about Linus - it's about GPL software, "hybrid source", and make no mistake, he's trying to kill adoption and funding of it by painting its promoters as immoral.
I think it's about time everyone got together and created one polished and solid response to Ken Brown's lies and insinuations. We've heard from Andrew Tanenbaum, ESR, RMS, Linus, etc., but what I would like to see is a formal and official response to the AdTI book that is being published, tearing up its insinuations point-for-point, in a way that his own target audience (i.e. "decision makers") couldn't ignore. Particularly, I think it needs to be made clear that even his *own* research on how Minix influenced Linux code showed no code "theft".
The people that KB is targetting just aren't going to "stay tuned" for the latest back and forth between KB and OSS advocate X. They need to have all the evidence presented to them clearly and concisely, and I think it needs to be from all the major players in the OSS community. I think this will *strongly* discourage people like KB from spouting lies and deception, as they know they will be called on it, at the expense of any journalistic integrity they may have had. And the more obvious it becomes that this is (likely solicited) FUD, the more the whole exercise will backfire on those that hoped to benefit from it.
Not for me. A "geek" is someone who learns technology for th fun of it, or as their full-time job. This is the group of people that Linux (somewhat) has.
A "power user" is someone who doesn't have a computer networking/programming job and whose primary interest is not in computers, but this person may maintain a small home network or do things like change their theme, etc. Someone who learned the workings of Windows enough so that they can configure it however they want, but not so much that they qualify as a "geek". A geek is a whole other level of technical competency to me.
I'll take a closer look at ZeroInstall.
They aren't going to make cross-platform easy, unless they want you to buy your machines from Dell. (Or they can get you to pay $500+ for their cross-platform development kit. ;-)
If you want cross-platform, check out wxWidgets. It works. Apple *definitely* isn't going to go through all the work to get GNUStep synched with Cocoa and working with native APIs on Windows AND Linux.
But here's the point I was trying to make, though I probably didn't express it very well. Although Linux has been "trying very hard", unlike Apple, the Linux community doesn't seem to have a concrete idea of who to target and who *not* to target. That's why I, a former Windows user, find KDE's "Explorer" harder to use than "Windows Explorer", despite the fact that the Windows interface was always a major influence on their development. They copied the easy, visual, stuff, but when they started making decisions on their own, true usability gave way to "by developer for developer" features and poor UI paradigms which are hard for new users to understand. GNOME is my preferred desktop, and IMHO it's much better, but it still shows the developer focus in some places. (Some things I really don't understand, like, why do I have a quick access icon for the terminal up top, but not for my Home folder? I'd hope I would use the latter more than the former. =) And as I'll explain a bit more below, I think these issues are pretty petty to what I consider to be major issues with Linux - mostly maintenance-related issues, like installing software and configuring the computer.
But if GNOME, say, were to set off in a "let's clone OS X and its killer apps" direction, they *still* would not raise the migration rate on PCs from Windows much.
Nor do I want them to clone Apple's apps. Heck, for me, it's not the apps I have problems with on Linux - it's the system design, and complexity of maintenance! I wish *someone* would make it as easy to install programs as it is on Windows, or even better, on Mac. I wish someone would clean up the filesystem so that conceptually it's more desktop, rather than mainframe/client-server, oriented. We don't need 3 letter folder names now that we can click on the folder instead of type it in. It's the little things like this that ruin Linux for me. A number of apps work fine for me on Linux if I can get them up and running! (Which leads to dependence on the vendor for a proper package, or someone who makes a *working* package for your distro...) I really feel that this whole Linux packaging system is an over-engineered solution which tries to work around, rather than address, problems with the design of Linux's filesystem and software installation/maintenance procedures.
I'd be happy as a lark if I started seeing things like self-contained app bundles on Linux and a cleaner filesystem; I think it would make life so much easier for the not-a-newbie-but-not-a-*nix-geek crowd. And to be honest, I think that crowd is a huge market. But even with all the vendors, and all the movement going on in the Linux space, I get the impression that the issues that matter to people like me aren't even on their radar. Which, IMHO, is a real shame. I've even gotten so frustrated that in my darkest hours I've thought about making a Linux distro to fix all this... But it's too much to do by myself and I don't even know enough to get started at this point. :-/
BTW, no Mozilla leader has proposed cloning XAML, so don't worry about us wasting time on that.
Good, as I got a strong impression of this from those discussion notes and it had me worried. =)
Unfortunately, studies I've seen say that Linux desktops do not have lower TCO. And not for want of consistent user interface among apps, or fancy desktop GUIs.
IMHO it's because Linux users and developers are just too used to the complexity inherent in the OS, where everything is exposed to you, and so they don't even realize that complexity is a problem for other users. It's hard to solve a problem you can't see. Some people can't even fathom why someone would like the Windows/Mac way of doing things.
Personally, I think if Linux vendors want to gain some "mind share" and make in
But as I've said all along, I'm talking about people sitting in front of a UNIX box for the first time! People without a trainer, and without a manual. Maybe they downloaded an ISO from a web site. That's how I got Linux.
Nope... How to get help is the main thing the reference teaches them.
Interesting. So when they want to find a program on their box for, say, system configuration and they don't have the manual, how do they do that? help system config?
No, there are big reasons not to compile for classic. People aren't happy if their program has to run under emulation, uses up a big chunk of extra memory, or doesn't have a remotely similar interface as everything else on the system.
I didn't say Classic, I said CFM. CFM apps don't run under emulation.
Name one program made for OS X that will work on OS 9.
I'll name 3, off-hand. Dreamweaver MX, Fetch (my FTP client), and BBEdit. These are just apps I use every day. And honestly, I don't check to see if all my apps run in OS 9 simply because I don't care.
Most have an installer, however.
Under OS 9 they did. Under OS X, the bundle format lets people write and distribute self-contained apps, that have shared libraries, resources, etc in them. The bundles even work on OS 9 if you build using CFM, or you can even provide a Mach and CFM build in the same bundle if you want to take advantage of OS X but still run on OS 9.
I can tell you that I drag and drop about every app I download these days. The main exclusions I can think of are Macromedia apps, and wxPython (because it installs files in UNIX). Some apps which install Frameworks may need an installer too, but that's a rarety except for Apple's own apps. You can of course refuse to believe me if you like, but it is true.
I know exactly what the compatibility issues are... In detail. I know all about Cocoa, Carbon, Aqua, Classic and all that. From your comment above, I get the feeling you are a bit fuzzy on it.
LOL! I develop using many of these technologies. You obviously aren't even clear on the differences between CFM/Classic.
Which is why you have to beg for support from companies every time the slightest thing about Mac OS changes. You say there's great backwards compatibility, but tell that to anybody who has to use PageMaker on OS X.
Huh? I don't know the situation with PageMaker (except that Adobe has been dragging their feet on OS X support), but otherwise I can't tell what you're talking about as someone who uses Mac OS X every single day.
First off, Mach is not the FreeBSD kernel. You don't seem to know this. OS X has select few FreeBSD programs, but none of them are the core programs. They are only the userland programs included in the base system, and not all of them at that. You run sysctl on OSX and see what you get. Run kldstat and see what you get. You do not have a system that even remotely resembles FreeBSD. I've used Darwin, I know EXACTLY what you've got running under that interface.
To be honest, I don't know what those commands do nor do I care. I don't need them. But it's UNIX for me in this sense - I can download a UNIX app, and most times it just builds and runs. So I can run all my UNIX/Linux software on Mac. That's all I need and care about. =) Yes, it does sometimes require modifications, and that does suck, but actually the OSS community really comes through here and these days I don't see many compatibility issues at all because of it.
Don't use the word "we". You are obviously a whiner, and a troll it seems, making spurious arguements, not knowing what you are talking about while accusing me of the same. You complain about everything Linux does because you want it to do everything the way OS
First, I wanted to say thanks for taking the time out to read and respond to my comment.
Good point about Apple, but only half the truth is told here. Apple is not targeting commodity PC hardware. It has its own boutique hardware that people want in addition to the boutique software Apple purveys. This is a huge advantage, although of limited growth potential, and an advantage that is not transferable to Linux.
That's true to an extent, but many people buy Apple for the software. The hardware integration is nice, but not the core 'switching' feature for people, at least for me. I'd buy OS X if it was available for PC, though for the reasons you mentioned they won't do that, and I can't blame them. If Linux were anywhere close to that, I'd buy it, but that's getting a bit off-topic. ;-) The point is that it really doesn't matter what Microsoft does if you have your own target market that they haven't targeted yet, or you can provide a better out-of-box solution for some particular problem than they can. And since Mozilla runs on Windows, you can still target Windows users for your solutions.
Embedding is hardly a growth market. There are at most a handful of apps that might embed Gecko on Linux, and Mozilla would get little or no funding or user-agent market share from them.
First, I should say I meant growth as in marketshare, which I got the (possibly mistaken) impression was high on your list of goals. So I understand it's not a huge money maker, I saw it more as a back door to get the GRE on peoples' machines, which would eventually lead to easier deployment of Mozilla-based solutions.
But on a related note, as an application developer, I've been writing apps for years and I have yet to find a *good* HTML editor that I can put in my app. Would I pay money for it? Yes, without a doubt. Heck, I've put countless hours into the development of wxMozilla just so I could finally get a decent cross-platform HTML editor for my app. (Some people would say I'm a bit stubborn... =)
Another thing I'd pay for (or hopefully could convince my boss to subsidize), would be some priority bug and feature resolution for Mozilla. At $500 (say) for some priority support tickets (so many hours, or so many incidents) I think I could get it past my boss. For example, I really, really wish someone would just allow me to static link NSPR!! It was allowed at one point, then turned off for some reason, but the fact is that on Windows, in most cases apps cannot share the NSPR libraries anyways, defeating the purpose of using shared libraries. It would make embedding much easier on Windows, and I'd certainly pay to get some attention paid to it. Maybe I'm the only one who'd want a service like this, but I'm not so sure I'm alone here.
This may be heresy to open-source true believers, but maintaining and extending Gecko requires a minimum number of paid, full-time hackers, managers, and QA and release staff, in addition to the wide and deep volunteer community from which those staff were hired. Currently Sun, IBM, Red Hat, and the Mozilla Foundation, at least, employ such people.
I'm not a OSS purist by any means, and I believe that you've every right to make money off this! In fact, I want you to so that Mozilla can continue. :-)
Mozilla already has "killer app" strategies in place funding the browser and, more recently, Thunderbird. ... browsers are still killer apps, mainly because they are sufficient front ends to web apps, which have displaced fat/proprietary/vertical client/server apps.
No disrespect, but I disagree with you that browsers are killer apps, even for web apps. In my experience, they're commodity apps now. I use Safari on Mac, for example, for only one reason - it's faster. I use web-based apps for my schooling, for my work, and for my home web site, and Safari handles them all pretty well. So although Firefox is pretty slick on Mac, it's not slick enough to displace Safari for me. Also, when I
Then how did you learn? Exploration? IRC? Reading books? (in other words, HOWTOs you paid for)
1. How is learning a few command-line tools worse than learning how to use Photoshop, Office, etc? Frankly, command-line tools are much easier.
Except that Photoshop, Office, etc. has toolbars and menus that let you explore their functionality. For Linux, you need to be told the command that helps you perform task X before you can go anywhere.
2. There's very little learning to do. Once you've figured out that --help shows the options, you've learned how to use any command-line program Unix has.
So, say I want to edit some text and I've got a command line staring at me. I don't have a UNIX book, nor an instructor. How do I find out what to do? --help edit text? On Windows, I can browse Start->Programs until I find this thing called "Notepad". Hmmm... Maybe I can use that? Ditto for Mac, except it's /Applications and TextEdit. The point is that GUIs allow visual exploration. People who've already mastered the command line see no use for it, but that's only because they don't need it.
As with your MS-DOS class example, take away their MS-DOS book after 30 mins and see how well they've mastered it. =) As soon as they need to do something outside of what they read, they just have to raise their hand. Sure, it's fine if you're willing to pay for a class to learn Linux or MS-DOS, but for people who have options that *don't* include paying for a class (Windows, Mac), Linux falls short.
That's been my point all along. Windows/Mac can't do most of the things that Unix systems can. Windows and Mac do not give you those things... Windows and Mac give you a bare minimum of system functionality, and don't let you do anything more than that.
And my point (all along) has been that its perfectly fine with me, and most people. Remember this discussion started about problems with Linux in terms of marketing it to non-geeks, as GNOME and Mozilla are trying to go in that direction.
Yes, and so do Mac programs. Good luck installing an OS X program on OS9.
Thanks, but I don't need it. If Mac apps are built using CFM, they'll install and run on both OS 9 and OS X. Typically the only reason to NOT compile for the CFM libraries is for UNIX-based apps, or apps that take advantage of Mac OS X capabilities, and it is reasonable that it would not install on OS 9 as OS 9 does not have the capabilities needed to run the program. And forward compatibility is even better. My OS 9 apps install and run on OS X, even despite it being a totally different system from the ground up. In contrast, I've found that a "Mandrake 9" package may not work with Mandrake 10, or same with Red Hat and other distros. Again, this is better than Mac how?
I don't recall any Windows or Mac system giving you feedback when you first touch the mouse, when you single-click on an icon, when you try to type into the desktop (no open windows), etc.
Mac and Windows both provide feedback when you single-click on an icon (notice it gets blue? that means its selected), neither provide feedback when your action *has no effect*. The lack of feedback is in fact feedback letting you know that nothing's happened. That's obvious.
Two things. First, don't think this doesn't apply to Mac. I just talked about Windows shortcommings because that's what I was using at the time. I never found Mac good enough to replace Windows, so that was a non-starter.
You obviously haven't seriously looked at Mac for years, as a number of your Mac-related arguments are misinformed. I've used XP, OS X, and Mandrake 10, all recently as in the past couple months. I know what the situation is like on these platforms *today*, not 5 years ago. You might want to get informed before you sta