I personally probably won't be buying any open source products off the shelves anytime soon.
I bought a copy of SuSE linux a while back at a store. Paid about $40 or $60, got a few CDs and a couple manuals. I figured it was worth paying for the manuals and not having to download a gig and a half of ISOs... but unfortunately I was wrong.
I got it out of the box, and spent a couple hours installing it on my machine. So far so good, the installer was pretty easy to use and it went pretty fast (took maybe 30 or 40 minutes, I think.)
I booted up and was presented with a somewhat confusing login screen, and here for me is where it all went wrong - right there I had the option to choose multiple 'desktop environments' - it offered me KDE, GNOME, and a couple other options (I believe one of them was X11)... for me, this was confusing. I knew what all the environments were but I didn't particularly care to have to choose one just to use the machine. I started up KDE, since I had heard it was good. KDE started up fast, and I was able to hop in and start doing stuff. Did a little web browsing, and it worked great.
I logged onto IRC using XChat, and eventually one of my friends helped me get my windows drives mounted... unfortunately, it really wasn't pleasant having to figure out how to mount drives. I either didn't see SuSE's gui stuff for doing it, or that was a major oversight. So, SuSE lost a point there.
Then I started listening to some of my music in XMMS. Good so far, it worked great. I minimized it and started trying out the various apps that came loaded with the distro - games, productivity apps, etc. This is, IMO, where this distro (and the others I've played with, to a lesser or greater extent) failed. I was presented with multiple types of programs for almost everything, and there was very little on-screen help or guiding to help me select the best software to use. And to make things worse, some of the applications did things that I didn't expect. Selecting Wine caused my KDE desktop to dissapear and be replaced by Nautilus (the GNOME desktop, or so I'm told), and I couldn't get rid of it, so my session was now almost completely useless. I couldn't figure out how to do anything with nautilus or close it, so I had to shut down.
Then I tried to play one of the games I'd played on windows - Tux Racer. It said I needed hardware acceleration support, and here lies trouble. I fiddled with SuSE's configuration program (YAST) and could not get it to give me hardware acceleration for my Radeon 8500. It claimed to support it but wouldn't enable hardware 3d. So I went to ATI's site and grabbed their drivers. I then proceeded to try and install them. The installer messed with my configuration files, and then told me that I needed the kernel source code so I could recompile my kernel. (!) I didn't have the sources and I didn't know where to get them, so I closed the installer. Then, I opened YAST again to see if I could somehow find a way to get hardware acceleration working... and it wouldn't work. To make a long story short, somehow the combination of ATI's installer and YAST totally corrupted my XFree86 configuration to the point where even the CONSOLE would not display properly onscreen. Goodbye, linux partition.
If the companies behind these distros want to sell Linux to people and have them be satisfied customers (I have no problem supporting developers, but I wasn't happy with what I got for my money.), I think they need to work more on focus.
The average user doesn't need 3 CDs of stuff that he or she will probably never use. Include one good office suite, and make it easy to download the other ones if you ever need them - that's not hard to do! Do the same with other software... I don't think the average user needs to be confronted with multiple desktop environments, editing configuration files, and discerning the meaning of confusing application names. I know some distros are really good at being accessible, but there were only two distros at the store I visit
And it's all thanks to shite security engineering in MS and non-conformance to standards (the MIDI playing is caused by a non-W3c HTML tag "BGSOUND").
I don't see how BGSOUND has anything to do with this. You can play MIDIs in webpages without that tag. The OBJECT tag, for example... or an embedded media player control... or a regular old link.
It says in the article that this company makes ATMs. I think I'm going to go get some free money.
What about languages that don't compile?
on
LGPL is Viral for Java
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What about languages like PHP where the application is never compiled? The only way to use someone else's PHP is to #include it into your application - merge the code into your application.
Seems to me like the [L]GPL is sorely lacking in many areas - I'm developing a library and application in it, and it's very confusing to me to have to understand how to combine code that is not mine with code that is, without violating the license. I can't possibly write everything myself, and I want to be able to collaborate with other people... but any code of mine that is LGPL, can only be used in LGPL applications, and any code of mine that is GPL can only be used in GPL applications. And if my friend wrote a function that is GPL, I can't use it in my LGPL library without making it GPL, even if he wants me to! (He has to relicense his code under the LGPL for me if I actually am going to use it!)
I don't know if that's Viral or not, but it sure sucks.
What're you talking about? Oracle is Unbreakable! You must have misread the article, that article said that Oracle was fixing problems in other databases from other companies that were also named Oracle.
The summary says they're making a 'second pass' over the translated book to improve the consistency and correct flaws in individual 5-page groups. And, the fact that they have a special 'dictionary' containing all the necessary translations will probably improve consistency a lot.
Why is this a suprise? I honestly would expect a publisher to do the same for any other independent translations of titles if they were planning on releasing official translations, whether it be J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, or Hillary Clinton.
Of course, the battery will only last an hour if you do anything intensive like that.
I don't see any reason to buy a PDA if the battery only lasts a few hours under heavy load, and that's what I've seen of most PDAs these days. I remember when people would run their PDAs on AA batteries and they didn't need to replace them more than once a month.
What I want to know is if there's any way to do any sort of Reflection in PHP. I'd buy this book if it had anything on that subject. JSP, ASP.net, and ASP all have Reflection or at least some features similar to it, but PHP seems to have nothing of the type... and there are some types of code that are next to impossible to write without Reflection - things like XML serialization/deserialization in particular are a pain without it.
Am I the only person who's tired of hearing about the latest way for idiots to screw up their computer and infect dozens of other computers used by similarly idiotic people? I mean, come on... Haven't there been patches and security measures around for years that prevent viruses like this one from infecting your PC?
I guess it is helpful for admins to see virus warnings on slashdot though.
I'm pretty sure that's talking about patches, not dependency checking. Windows has very little need for anything like RPM's... most software developers just throw together an install package using NSIS or something similar, or a ZIP file.
First off, I use both Java and.NET regularly for application development.
Anyway, all these evil things you say that MS is going to do with.NET... how exactly is Sun unable to do the same things with Java? Both platforms are owned by their creators (Java/Sun,.NET/MS)... In many ways,.NET is actually more open because MS decided to make parts of it standards. How could MS possibly hope to 'relegate mono to the sidewalk' when it's already a usable multiplatform environment for building applications, built on existing standards? Even if MS somehow makes all other.NET implementations useless for MS's.NET software, Mono will still be useful on its own.
Please, keep telling me how I've 'sold my sole to the devil'. Would you also mind telling me how you got modded up to +5?
They don't even have the source code to software they used to run their elections?
Doesn't that mean that IF there was any fraud during the elections, that it is now impossible to prove whether or not it had to do with the software? Since the government doesn't have the actual code, any code they get from the authors in the future cannot be proven to be the code used in the election...
I find it impressive that a technology that's been around since 1985 is not only still usable, but it's used almost everywhere for printing and is also an extremely powerful language. If only more technology was created this way these days. Definitely a testament to the people who created postscript...
We can stop this, you know. All this idiocy can end. Intuit's about-face proves that even the big powerful companies will listen when enough people speak up.
We need to write our senators, our mayors, our governors, our friends, our coworkers - even the president. The more loud we are, the less they will be able to deny what we're saying.
Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat tags out and SuSE jumps into the fray, and then they both do a combo on SCO!
SCO is down to its last bit of health, it looks like the end!
Oh wait, SCO just tagged out! Here comes Microsoft!
Please select an option.
A, B, C, D
>
Oh yeah. That's user friendly.
I personally probably won't be buying any open source products off the shelves anytime soon.
I bought a copy of SuSE linux a while back at a store. Paid about $40 or $60, got a few CDs and a couple manuals. I figured it was worth paying for the manuals and not having to download a gig and a half of ISOs... but unfortunately I was wrong.
I got it out of the box, and spent a couple hours installing it on my machine. So far so good, the installer was pretty easy to use and it went pretty fast (took maybe 30 or 40 minutes, I think.)
I booted up and was presented with a somewhat confusing login screen, and here for me is where it all went wrong - right there I had the option to choose multiple 'desktop environments' - it offered me KDE, GNOME, and a couple other options (I believe one of them was X11)... for me, this was confusing. I knew what all the environments were but I didn't particularly care to have to choose one just to use the machine. I started up KDE, since I had heard it was good. KDE started up fast, and I was able to hop in and start doing stuff. Did a little web browsing, and it worked great.
I logged onto IRC using XChat, and eventually one of my friends helped me get my windows drives mounted... unfortunately, it really wasn't pleasant having to figure out how to mount drives. I either didn't see SuSE's gui stuff for doing it, or that was a major oversight. So, SuSE lost a point there.
Then I started listening to some of my music in XMMS. Good so far, it worked great. I minimized it and started trying out the various apps that came loaded with the distro - games, productivity apps, etc. This is, IMO, where this distro (and the others I've played with, to a lesser or greater extent) failed. I was presented with multiple types of programs for almost everything, and there was very little on-screen help or guiding to help me select the best software to use. And to make things worse, some of the applications did things that I didn't expect. Selecting Wine caused my KDE desktop to dissapear and be replaced by Nautilus (the GNOME desktop, or so I'm told), and I couldn't get rid of it, so my session was now almost completely useless. I couldn't figure out how to do anything with nautilus or close it, so I had to shut down.
Then I tried to play one of the games I'd played on windows - Tux Racer. It said I needed hardware acceleration support, and here lies trouble. I fiddled with SuSE's configuration program (YAST) and could not get it to give me hardware acceleration for my Radeon 8500. It claimed to support it but wouldn't enable hardware 3d. So I went to ATI's site and grabbed their drivers. I then proceeded to try and install them. The installer messed with my configuration files, and then told me that I needed the kernel source code so I could recompile my kernel. (!) I didn't have the sources and I didn't know where to get them, so I closed the installer. Then, I opened YAST again to see if I could somehow find a way to get hardware acceleration working... and it wouldn't work. To make a long story short, somehow the combination of ATI's installer and YAST totally corrupted my XFree86 configuration to the point where even the CONSOLE would not display properly onscreen. Goodbye, linux partition.
If the companies behind these distros want to sell Linux to people and have them be satisfied customers (I have no problem supporting developers, but I wasn't happy with what I got for my money.), I think they need to work more on focus.
The average user doesn't need 3 CDs of stuff that he or she will probably never use. Include one good office suite, and make it easy to download the other ones if you ever need them - that's not hard to do! Do the same with other software... I don't think the average user needs to be confronted with multiple desktop environments, editing configuration files, and discerning the meaning of confusing application names. I know some distros are really good at being accessible, but there were only two distros at the store I visit
I guess that's why OS X's close button is right next to its Minimize too?
:)
Right.
By default, PHP escapes all input (i.e. ' is replaced with \')
Are you sure about that? Because every PHP server I've ever used doesn't escape strings by default, you have to use addslashes().
And it's all thanks to shite security engineering in MS and non-conformance to standards (the MIDI playing is caused by a non-W3c HTML tag "BGSOUND").
I don't see how BGSOUND has anything to do with this. You can play MIDIs in webpages without that tag. The OBJECT tag, for example... or an embedded media player control... or a regular old link.
It says in the article that this company makes ATMs. I think I'm going to go get some free money.
What about languages like PHP where the application is never compiled? The only way to use someone else's PHP is to #include it into your application - merge the code into your application.
Seems to me like the [L]GPL is sorely lacking in many areas - I'm developing a library and application in it, and it's very confusing to me to have to understand how to combine code that is not mine with code that is, without violating the license. I can't possibly write everything myself, and I want to be able to collaborate with other people... but any code of mine that is LGPL, can only be used in LGPL applications, and any code of mine that is GPL can only be used in GPL applications. And if my friend wrote a function that is GPL, I can't use it in my LGPL library without making it GPL, even if he wants me to! (He has to relicense his code under the LGPL for me if I actually am going to use it!)
I don't know if that's Viral or not, but it sure sucks.
Except that part in the article where it says Netscape 6 or above work for voting. 8-)
What're you talking about? Oracle is Unbreakable! You must have misread the article, that article said that Oracle was fixing problems in other databases from other companies that were also named Oracle.
The summary says they're making a 'second pass' over the translated book to improve the consistency and correct flaws in individual 5-page groups. And, the fact that they have a special 'dictionary' containing all the necessary translations will probably improve consistency a lot.
Why is this a suprise? I honestly would expect a publisher to do the same for any other independent translations of titles if they were planning on releasing official translations, whether it be J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, or Hillary Clinton.
One true windows path? Where does the path lead to? Podunk, Nebraska?
Look out for the automatic stapler! Look out! Aggghghhghghghh`!@~12 my nEck!/@
Tell... tell mY childen i love tehm..
Of course, the battery will only last an hour if you do anything intensive like that.
I don't see any reason to buy a PDA if the battery only lasts a few hours under heavy load, and that's what I've seen of most PDAs these days. I remember when people would run their PDAs on AA batteries and they didn't need to replace them more than once a month.
No it doesn't, heathen!
It's shinier, duh!
What I want to know is if there's any way to do any sort of Reflection in PHP. I'd buy this book if it had anything on that subject. JSP, ASP.net, and ASP all have Reflection or at least some features similar to it, but PHP seems to have nothing of the type... and there are some types of code that are next to impossible to write without Reflection - things like XML serialization/deserialization in particular are a pain without it.
Am I the only person who's tired of hearing about the latest way for idiots to screw up their computer and infect dozens of other computers used by similarly idiotic people? I mean, come on... Haven't there been patches and security measures around for years that prevent viruses like this one from infecting your PC?
I guess it is helpful for admins to see virus warnings on slashdot though.
I'm pretty sure that's talking about patches, not dependency checking. Windows has very little need for anything like RPM's... most software developers just throw together an install package using NSIS or something similar, or a ZIP file.
First off, I use both Java and .NET regularly for application development.
.NET... how exactly is Sun unable to do the same things with Java? Both platforms are owned by their creators (Java/Sun, .NET/MS)... In many ways, .NET is actually more open because MS decided to make parts of it standards. How could MS possibly hope to 'relegate mono to the sidewalk' when it's already a usable multiplatform environment for building applications, built on existing standards? Even if MS somehow makes all other .NET implementations useless for MS's .NET software, Mono will still be useful on its own.
Anyway, all these evil things you say that MS is going to do with
Please, keep telling me how I've 'sold my sole to the devil'. Would you also mind telling me how you got modded up to +5?
Hmm, maybe because they don't control the hardware?
Nah, couldn't be that. Must be because MS sucks and Apple doesn't!
They don't even have the source code to software they used to run their elections?
Doesn't that mean that IF there was any fraud during the elections, that it is now impossible to prove whether or not it had to do with the software? Since the government doesn't have the actual code, any code they get from the authors in the future cannot be proven to be the code used in the election...
What a mess.
I find it impressive that a technology that's been around since 1985 is not only still usable, but it's used almost everywhere for printing and is also an extremely powerful language. If only more technology was created this way these days. Definitely a testament to the people who created postscript...
We've got here a fine specimen of the North American Professor! He's a feisty little one, so you better stay back.
Hey little fella, hey there... AGH! CRIKEY! HE'S GRADING ME TERM PAPER!
No, seriously folks, I'll be here all week. Thank you, no, thank you.
We can stop this, you know. All this idiocy can end. Intuit's about-face proves that even the big powerful companies will listen when enough people speak up.
We need to write our senators, our mayors, our governors, our friends, our coworkers - even the president. The more loud we are, the less they will be able to deny what we're saying.