I used to use debuggers all of the time, and they were certainly useful at the time.
But the difference between a debugger and printf statements is negligable - you can't use a debugger effectively unless you have a test case that definitely finds the bug that you are tracking down. But if you have such a test case, you can use printf's to find it as well...
Acshually, for nasty bugs, it's normally easy to track down using fprintf's to a log file, and then grep or some other relevant tool to find out where the problem lies.
Well by being able to see the shell script, we can see in retrospect that it was just a bug, one that any of us could have made and one you wouldn't have detected unless you happened to have the right conditions for it to have happened. We can _see_ that it wasn't done on purpose, which at least is better than knowing that it was done on purpose.
If it had been closed source, then we would all be very paranoid right now about whether or not there was some hacker at apple with a vendetta.
That's not quite how I mean. As an example, take Kate, the KDE editor. It has 3 panels - a tree view to the left, and to the top right an editor and below it (bottom right) an xterm.
I would like to be able to, as a user, create this same layout using, say, konqueror, nedit and an xterm. I'd do something to tell the window manager to stick them together, and I would be able to resize the edges, and have it affect all of the windows. And save the configuration so I can start it up again easily.
OK, kate already exists so I don't need to do this, but how about if I wanted an instant messanger attatched to the side of it, an irc client underneath it, and a news ticker underneath that, and I want it all to act as a single window, where I can resize any set of the programs without overlapping?
Hey, go the whole hog and find an easy way to send messages from one of the programs to another and bingo! the user suddenly can create his very own programs out of small components - the gui equivalent of the command line philosophy perhaps?
A feature I would like to see is sort of a compromise - the ability to join two windows together and make the line at which they touch act like a splitter, and the two windows together act as a single window.
Unfortunately I never seem to have the time to wade through the code of my favourate window managers to find out if this would be easy to do:-(
If you look at cheating as a way of bypassing the integrity/security of the system, then by the game being open source it might make it easier to develop defenses - the "many eyes" concept.
There again, when you consider the huge ingenuity of cheaters everywhere, making the game closed source doesn't stop people cheating - for instance, who could have guessed that someone would come up with a hacked GL driver for Halflife which made the walls transparent? How do you stop someone from cheating by using it? (the answer is to download the punkbuster client and play on punkbuster servers, BTW)
Well, I can't conclude whether there will be more cheating or not, I guess I'll keep my eye on it and see what happens.
Anyone remember when Windows 95 came out originally? It had no games, or at least the ones it did have sucked big time. Everyone moaned that Windows gaming would never take off because dos games were faster, and more dedicated.
And now everyone uses Windows.
Why?
Because it was still possible to play at least some dos games under Windows (because it was built on dos), and with for a bit of hassle, Windows would close, your game would run, you finish your game and windows would reboot.
Yeah, it wasn't neat, but it let people move to Windows 95 and still play their dos games. Once the user base was large enough, native games became available.
My point is, the argument against Wine is exactly the same.What I want to be able to tell people is
"Yeah, you CAN play all your existing Windows games under Linux! Try it and see! It's SOOOOO much better than Windows!!!".
Y'see, if we could get people using Linux more, the user base grows. Then it becomes more feasible to make native Linux games. Then the user base grows some more... See what I'm getting at?
If wine can play all windows games, we can get all those game loving people who won't try Linux because it hasn't got any games to try it and love it too.
It's only about a meg-and-half in size max. What, are you still booting your system from floppies, or is your pron directory so big you an't afford the space?
For me the advantage of XOSL (making my computer look nicer when I boot it in the morning) seruosly outwheighs using lilo or grub directly.
P.S. I'm one of those people who turns their computer off when they are not using it;-)
I've been using XOSL since I started using Linux - it makes my system... feel nicer. Instead of the harsh-looking command prompt, I get a nice graphical interface allowing me to browse between linux (my default) or Windows (which I log into about once every six months).
The fact is, LILO and Grub look HORRID in comparison. OK, they are totally functional, but XOSL is so much nicer, and makes your computer feel easier to use.
Obviously, it's not any use to anyone with only one operating system on your computer, but if you have more than one, and users who need to boot the computer but are not sure about command lines, XOSL can be a very cheap (aka free) god-send.
And remember that the current version of XOSL hasn't been changed in quite a while - I'm waiting for an updatedversion to come out, which is rumoured to replace lilo, among otehr things.
Reading through the article, is it just me or would the entire slashdot community be up in arms if something so unbacked up and speculative was posted saying Windows was better than Unix?
I loath Windows, but I also don't like reading un-convincing articles boasting how great unix is - I much prefer case studies, for instance, which show what as actually happened.
True, they can't necessarily be trusted any more than this, but at least there is the feeling there that they might be for real.
Whilst I still used Windows at home, I have to say that the google toolbar has to be the most excellent search aid that I ever installed. Type any word into it, and you could choose to either search for them or (and this was the best bit) highlight EVERY occurance of the word on whichever page you happened to be on, just like when you look in the google cache.
Very useful for skim-reading pages to find relevant information, even if it isn't the page that you searched for originally
It used to be my altime favourate search engine - until Google came out. Now, I haven't used it in over a year.
Why? Because Google gives me better, more relevant results all of the time.
This is a serious question - for what kind of things is Altavista better at searching for than Google?
The only thing that I miss in Google is the ability to _properly_ search for a phrase, showing only those results which contain the exact phrase. (In my experience, quotation marks get ignored in Google)
There is a niche market for minidisk player/recorders - namely where people need to make on-the-fly recordings which are of near-CD quality.
A prime example of this is radio stations. Stick a microphone in one end of the minidisk, a set of headphones in the other and bingo - your own personal transportable interviewing equipment.
We use them all the time at the Student Radio station I work at, and from other people who have done work experience at proffesional radio stations, so do they.
As an addendum to what I just said, I had a quick look at konqueror and realised that Ogg files didn't preview.
(Incidentally, I don't know if this breaks anything else, so proceed at your own peril)
After a couple of minutes digging, I found out that in KDE Menu -> Preferences -> File Browsing -> File Associations, Ogg was listed as an Application, rather than an Audio mimetype I have read reasons why this is, but the upshot is that they did not preview. To make it preview, I changed it to an audio mimetype.
I've been using this feature in konqueror for some time now, so it definitely exists, and it works with ogg Vorbis files too - I'm guessing that it is fairly simple to set up.ogg in Nautilus too if mp3's can be, but having yet to get Nautilus working, I can't check this out:-(
Perhaps I'll actually be able to run it now
on
Nautilus 1.0.5 Release
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Being a KDE fan, I don't use Gnome, but I check up on it every so often to see if it's reached a state where I might convert - not because I don't like KDE, just that I like to keep my options open and use the desktop which best suits me.
Trouble is, the last couple of times I tried to run Gnome, Nautilus would appear to lock up completely for 30+ seconds at a time.
I don't know why and haven't been interested enough in Gnome to find out why yet. I'll probably give it another try now though, see if it works yet.
Ummm... this may sound suprising to you, but I have yet to recompile a piece of software so that it works on my Linux box.
You see, this is one of those things that the developers do, and then I just download it from a Debian Mirror. I'm not a CVS-kinda person, I download what is given to me in nice, easy to swallow capsules.
Exactly the same happens with Windows software - how many downloads have you tried in the past which at some point or other said "we do not support Windows ME yet", when it was only a month or so old. Actually, I remember even further when some software didn't officially support Windows 98.Same thing.
Fact is, most Windows people don't compile there own software, but when it comes to Linux... well when it becomes a widespread desktop environment, most people won't compile their own software then either.
I might be missing something, but if the power consumption is so much lower, what happens when you overclock these chips?
Does it mean you can get real high speed out of them when compared to the performance of an intel chips running at the same speed, or does the heat from overclocking come from somewhere else, meaning that you can't do this?
This is like porting Photoshop to linux, who would care?
Your forgetting that it's real good PR. For instance, your trying to convince your mates to convert to Linux.
They say, "Yeah, but I can't live without winamp"
You say, "Look, use XMMS it does everything that winamp does!"
They say, "What, you mean it's a rip-off? I'll stick with Win amp"
Of course, if you say, "Duh! Winamp's on Linux too, y'know!" then they can't use that argument against you.
Same goes for photoshop - I'm really looking forward to the next release of the Gimp, but as it stands it's missing an important feature (to do with colour models, I can't remember exactly what it is) which means that you can't use it for professional quality printed work. If photoshop was on Linux, then proffesional designers could switch without whining so much.
Umm... yeah, that's my point really. Big name software that everyone knows makes your system seem more appealing.
Even if not binary compatable, what's to stop someone making a plugin which allows XMMS to play winamp plugins, and vica-versa? Less effort than recompiling/recoding the zillions of plugins out there, and I doubt there would be _that_ much of a performance loss.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to use debuggers all of the time, and they were certainly useful at the time.
But the difference between a debugger and printf statements is negligable - you can't use a debugger effectively unless you have a test case that definitely finds the bug that you are tracking down. But if you have such a test case, you can use printf's to find it as well...
Acshually, for nasty bugs, it's normally easy to track down using fprintf's to a log file, and then grep or some other relevant tool to find out where the problem lies.
So use what you prefer - try both though.
Well by being able to see the shell script, we can see in retrospect that it was just a bug, one that any of us could have made and one you wouldn't have detected unless you happened to have the right conditions for it to have happened. We can _see_ that it wasn't done on purpose, which at least is better than knowing that it was done on purpose.
If it had been closed source, then we would all be very paranoid right now about whether or not there was some hacker at apple with a vendetta.
Go back a directory and you can get the timeline in PDF, PS, and EPS format - the postscript file is ~130K in size.
XMMS does it already.
That's not quite how I mean. As an example, take Kate, the KDE editor. It has 3 panels - a tree view to the left, and to the top right an editor and below it (bottom right) an xterm.
I would like to be able to, as a user, create this same layout using, say, konqueror, nedit and an xterm. I'd do something to tell the window manager to stick them together, and I would be able to resize the edges, and have it affect all of the windows. And save the configuration so I can start it up again easily.
OK, kate already exists so I don't need to do this, but how about if I wanted an instant messanger attatched to the side of it, an irc client underneath it, and a news ticker underneath that, and I want it all to act as a single window, where I can resize any set of the programs without overlapping?
Hey, go the whole hog and find an easy way to send messages from one of the programs to another and bingo! the user suddenly can create his very own programs out of small components - the gui equivalent of the command line philosophy perhaps?
A feature I would like to see is sort of a compromise - the ability to join two windows together and make the line at which they touch act like a splitter, and the two windows together act as a single window.
:-(
Unfortunately I never seem to have the time to wade through the code of my favourate window managers to find out if this would be easy to do
Hmm... I didn't type any HTML Tags, so why have my beautiful paragraphs been destroyed by <BR><BR>'s?
I'd guess it depends on how you look at it.
If you look at cheating as a way of bypassing the integrity/security of the system, then by the game being open source it might make it easier to develop defenses - the "many eyes" concept.
There again, when you consider the huge ingenuity of cheaters everywhere, making the game closed source doesn't stop people cheating - for instance, who could have guessed that someone would come up with a hacked GL driver for Halflife which made the walls transparent? How do you stop someone from cheating by using it? (the answer is to download the punkbuster client and play on punkbuster servers, BTW)
Well, I can't conclude whether there will be more cheating or not, I guess I'll keep my eye on it and see what happens.
And I'm sure it's not that hard to set apt-get up as a cron job!
:-)
Obviously, don't do this with the unstable distro or you'll come in one morning and find out that something went hideously wrong...
But then, you wouldn't be running unstable on a critical system, would you?
Anyone remember when Windows 95 came out originally? It had no games, or at least the ones it did have sucked big time. Everyone moaned that Windows gaming would never take off because dos games were faster, and more dedicated.
And now everyone uses Windows.
Why?
Because it was still possible to play at least some dos games under Windows (because it was built on dos), and with for a bit of hassle, Windows would close, your game would run, you finish your game and windows would reboot.
Yeah, it wasn't neat, but it let people move to Windows 95 and still play their dos games. Once the user base was large enough, native games became available.
My point is, the argument against Wine is exactly the same.What I want to be able to tell people is
"Yeah, you CAN play all your existing Windows games under Linux! Try it and see! It's SOOOOO much better than Windows!!!".
Y'see, if we could get people using Linux more, the user base grows. Then it becomes more feasible to make native Linux games. Then the user base grows some more... See what I'm getting at?
If wine can play all windows games, we can get all those game loving people who won't try Linux because it hasn't got any games to try it and love it too.
Ah, I see your problem, you've installed them the wrong way round!
Try installing Windows in VMWare on Linux running in VMWare on Windows running...
It's only about a meg-and-half in size max. What, are you still booting your system from floppies, or is your pron directory so big you an't afford the space?
;-)
For me the advantage of XOSL (making my computer look nicer when I boot it in the morning) seruosly outwheighs using lilo or grub directly.
P.S. I'm one of those people who turns their computer off when they are not using it
I've been using XOSL since I started using Linux - it makes my system... feel nicer. Instead of the harsh-looking command prompt, I get a nice graphical interface allowing me to browse between linux (my default) or Windows (which I log into about once every six months).
The fact is, LILO and Grub look HORRID in comparison. OK, they are totally functional, but XOSL is so much nicer, and makes your computer feel easier to use.
Obviously, it's not any use to anyone with only one operating system on your computer, but if you have more than one, and users who need to boot the computer but are not sure about command lines, XOSL can be a very cheap (aka free) god-send.
And remember that the current version of XOSL hasn't been changed in quite a while - I'm waiting for an updatedversion to come out, which is rumoured to replace lilo, among otehr things.
Reading through the article, is it just me or would the entire slashdot community be up in arms if something so unbacked up and speculative was posted saying Windows was better than Unix?
I loath Windows, but I also don't like reading un-convincing articles boasting how great unix is - I much prefer case studies, for instance, which show what as actually happened.
True, they can't necessarily be trusted any more than this, but at least there is the feeling there that they might be for real.
In what way is it spyware? Sure, they can log things you search for, but umm... don't they do that when you search for something anyway?
Whilst I still used Windows at home, I have to say that the google toolbar has to be the most excellent search aid that I ever installed. Type any word into it, and you could choose to either search for them or (and this was the best bit) highlight EVERY occurance of the word on whichever page you happened to be on, just like when you look in the google cache.
Very useful for skim-reading pages to find relevant information, even if it isn't the page that you searched for originally
It used to be my altime favourate search engine - until Google came out. Now, I haven't used it in over a year.
Why? Because Google gives me better, more relevant results all of the time.
This is a serious question - for what kind of things is Altavista better at searching for than Google?
The only thing that I miss in Google is the ability to _properly_ search for a phrase, showing only those results which contain the exact phrase. (In my experience, quotation marks get ignored in Google)
There is a niche market for minidisk player/recorders - namely where people need to make on-the-fly recordings which are of near-CD quality.
A prime example of this is radio stations. Stick a microphone in one end of the minidisk, a set of headphones in the other and bingo - your own personal transportable interviewing equipment.
We use them all the time at the Student Radio station I work at, and from other people who have done work experience at proffesional radio stations, so do they.
As an addendum to what I just said, I had a quick look at konqueror and realised that Ogg files didn't preview.
:-)
(Incidentally, I don't know if this breaks anything else, so proceed at your own peril)
After a couple of minutes digging, I found out that in KDE Menu -> Preferences -> File Browsing -> File Associations, Ogg was listed as an Application, rather than an Audio mimetype I have read reasons why this is, but the upshot is that they did not preview. To make it preview, I changed it to an audio mimetype.
Just thought I'd pass the knowledge on
I've been using this feature in konqueror for some time now, so it definitely exists, and it works with ogg Vorbis files too - I'm guessing that it is fairly simple to set up .ogg in Nautilus too if mp3's can be, but having yet to get Nautilus working, I can't check this out :-(
Being a KDE fan, I don't use Gnome, but I check up on it every so often to see if it's reached a state where I might convert - not because I don't like KDE, just that I like to keep my options open and use the desktop which best suits me.
Trouble is, the last couple of times I tried to run Gnome, Nautilus would appear to lock up completely for 30+ seconds at a time.
I don't know why and haven't been interested enough in Gnome to find out why yet. I'll probably give it another try now though, see if it works yet.
OMG...I was replied to by the Taco!
:-)
Actually, I think you'll find it was "cmdrtaco on", as in note that there are two "on"'s at the end of his name instead of one.
This doesn't happen with anyone else's name, and I doubt that Taco would reserve a bug for his own, private usage
Ummm... this may sound suprising to you, but I have yet to recompile a piece of software so that it works on my Linux box.
You see, this is one of those things that the developers do, and then I just download it from a Debian Mirror. I'm not a CVS-kinda person, I download what is given to me in nice, easy to swallow capsules.
Exactly the same happens with Windows software - how many downloads have you tried in the past which at some point or other said "we do not support Windows ME yet", when it was only a month or so old. Actually, I remember even further when some software didn't officially support Windows 98.Same thing.
Fact is, most Windows people don't compile there own software, but when it comes to Linux... well when it becomes a widespread desktop environment, most people won't compile their own software then either.
At least in Linux you have the choice though.
I might be missing something, but if the power consumption is so much lower, what happens when you overclock these chips?
Does it mean you can get real high speed out of them when compared to the performance of an intel chips running at the same speed, or does the heat from overclocking come from somewhere else, meaning that you can't do this?
This is like porting Photoshop to linux, who would care?
Your forgetting that it's real good PR. For instance, your trying to convince your mates to convert to Linux.
They say, "Yeah, but I can't live without winamp"
You say, "Look, use XMMS it does everything that winamp does!"
They say, "What, you mean it's a rip-off? I'll stick with Win amp"
Of course, if you say, "Duh! Winamp's on Linux too, y'know!" then they can't use that argument against you.
Same goes for photoshop - I'm really looking forward to the next release of the Gimp, but as it stands it's missing an important feature (to do with colour models, I can't remember exactly what it is) which means that you can't use it for professional quality printed work. If photoshop was on Linux, then proffesional designers could switch without whining so much.
Umm... yeah, that's my point really. Big name software that everyone knows makes your system seem more appealing.
Even if not binary compatable, what's to stop someone making a plugin which allows XMMS to play winamp plugins, and vica-versa? Less effort than recompiling/recoding the zillions of plugins out there, and I doubt there would be _that_ much of a performance loss.