I'm wondering how long before we see this in XFree86.
It probably won't go into XFree86. The freedesktop.org X server contains a rewritten core and relies on many X extensions that the XFree86 project is really not embracing. Despite the good work the XFree86 team has done over the years, they have a long history of hesitation and, even worse, conflict with those that would take XFree86 in a non-standardised direction.
I applaud the new efforts on freedesktop.org, especially by the evergreen Keith Packard, and this is what we need to see in the FLOSS world.
X11 is one of the few areas where there is no real competition between projects. Linux vs. BSDs (vs. each other) or KDE vs. GNOME. It's healthy; it pushes the projects to higher levels of progress. Once freedesktop.org's X server is ready for mass consumption (hopefully not too long) then this 'lack of competition' changes.
FLOSS will see a whole new world of graphical coolness as Window Managers and Desktop Environments add Compositing Managers to produce awesome effects using freedesktop.org's X server and the group of projects supporting it.
The freedesktop.org X server intermingles with things like Cairo and lots of other exntensions. Conversely, XFree86 seems to fight any hopeful extensions.
What will happen is that in a couple of years, many DEs and WMs will ship with a 'feature X requires freedesktop.org's X server and will not work with XFree86' and XFree86 will lose backing and momentum.
The only downside to freedesktop.org's X server is that it will no longer run well on a 20mhz 486.
It runs on linux and, therefore, it logically follows that it was stolen by terrorist[s].
If you'd actually looked at the helicopter then you'd well know that it could not run linux nor was it stolen by terrorists.
Linux would not run on something so hideous.
It has been stolen by environmental extremists to protect the world from having to look at it. Who knows how it might have decimated wildlife died of fright after thinking clams were out for revenge after having become giant and gotten the ability to fly.
Either that or group behind Batteries Not Included was out to protect future royalties and the potential for a remake.
if it doesn't work on a mac it's not going anywhere.
I don't think that Macs are the issue.
The thing about Flash is that it's basically a web extension. It's something that prettifies your browser. It is only successful because the majority of computers can install it very easily.
If this 'Sparkle' going to be a 'Flash' killer, it'll have to get 80% or more market penetration.
IIRC this thing hasn't shipped with any Windows OS to date. It's one thing creating and writing some nice little vector gadget. It's another thing getting everybody to have it.
I really think that 'Sparkle' is aimed more at beautifying Longhorn and providing a nice way to prettify applications for Longhorn. It is not a web presentation tool, which is the niche that Flash successfully fills.
Blender is open source at its best; highly polished, cross-platform.
Yes, it is.
It's a pity that this slashdot news story was not properly verified by the editors as Blender 2.3 is not yet released. The submitter was really referring to the recently released preview of Blender 2.3 which people will be finding it slightly buggy whilst now expecting it to be a final release.
This would be a shame because since Blender was bought by the community and became open source, it's development has accelerated and moved in a direction that, as with all open source software, is highly influenced by the needs of it's community.
One of the main criticisms of Blender was that it's power was masked by an unintuitive interface that was very inconsistent. Most features were designed to be activated by the keyboard, as opposed to through the GUI, and that confused most people new to Blender who were unfamiliar with the keyboard shortcuts.
So the Blender community set about a rethink of the user interface. The proposal is well thought out, well planned, and well documented. And from what I have seen of the 2.3 preview release, the final 2.3 release will be a brilliant piece of software.
Really, the commercial 3d development studio vendors should start getting worried.
Actually, I'd suggest that for a music playe with a good GUI you should look at Rhythmbox.
The current XMMS release is Gtk1 only (boo!) although it is being rewritten from the ground upwards. However, somebody has make a Gtk2 fork of the current XMMS codebase, named Beep which is looking pretty decent.
I would agree with the original post. JuK looks hideous. However, hideous is not unusable which I would say is the most important point. Still, we'd all be Gucci models if we could.
I know nothing about Newham specifically, but the perception in many parts of the UK are that many local councils are not well run.
It's quite easy to prove your theory.
UK councils are indirectly controlled by the government in that the majority of law and local investment initiatives (think public services) comes right from the top. The government is poorly run, ergo local councils - Newham among them - are poorly run.
The scary thing is, look at how fumbling and incompetent some of the more senior politicians are. If they're that bad, how bad must the ones be that only make it as local council members?
The problem is that there is really nobody unbiased to do this type of analisys.
You have pro-Microsoft (including themselves), Free Software zealots, and normal people.
Obviously, pro-Microsoft peeps will always interpret and flip data to make it look like it's by far the best option.
Obviously, Free Software zealots will favour Free Software although their reports tend to be more realistic due to the fact there usually isn't "the collective" ensuring that it has to be ridiculously favourable.
Then there's everday, normal peeps. They quite simply don't care. Microsoft software, for all it's problems, gets the job done and is familiar. Moving to Free Software may solve many problems, but the move itself will be months (or even years) of hassle and the new software initially unfamiliar. It may be cheaper but, hell, so is cycling into work.
Before you can get decent reports you need interested people who are genuinely impartial. How many of them are there in the IT world?
It's really quite a piece of work. In fact it looks like it might be the most comprehensive guide yet written on how to migrate to opensource. This is good stuff.
Yeah, riiiiiiiight.
The first thing I do with any of these 'migration' things is to flip straight to the bit on groupware since that is the single most difficult piece of the puzzle to place; especially document management and scheduling.
What does this paper say? I paraphrase: "Er... well... there's no real option other than web-based groupware although there's Kroupware that we have yet to evaluate."
Generally, invoicing for other people's work is not held in high regard by the law.
Well, they would be in for some real trouble - perhaps under criminal law - if they were to go ahead, invoice and get money out of people, then get crapped on in court and their claims over Linux to be thrown out. Hiding behind a plc would not then be enough to protect the instigators as all and sundry would be baying for their blood.
In the highly unlikely event that SCO are proven to have been wronged against, you can bet your bottom dollar they'll be throwing around invoices and chasing compensation from everybody.
But they know and we know they're in for a legal whooping from Big Blue and Little Red Riding Hood. And they know and we know that there's a limit to the amount of shit they can stir before they have to bathe in it; at the moment they still stand a chance of escaping having made enough money to retire on through selling their own inflated stock.
The website redesign won't make Mozilla more successful. Advertising is what's needed, plain and simple. How the site looks won't affect people's awareness of Mozilla, advertising will.
In attempting to be blunt, you've oversimplified the situation to the point that what you've said is frankly wide of the mark.
Point 1: A website is an advertisement. (As are all points that lie on the road to regularly using a product.)
Point 2: People, in general, are fickle. Advertising with the old web page would have been a battle.
Granted, a website redesign won't affect awareness. It's not an attempt to affect awareness. Awareness and impressions/usage are two very different things.
Advertising only works well when it holds newfound attention. The successful advertisement will take people straight to the next stop on the advertising chain: Mozilla's homepage. Here applies the age-old saying: First impressions last. The first impression you get is from the website - the point of entry for newcomers.
The old site was hackish. The main selling points from a user perspective were missed and there was no implied incentive to continue on to the download page.
The "midway design" (midway between the old and the new) was better but there was too much information on the one page. Developer information didn't need to be on the front page - developers know where they are going. And you can't describe every Mozilla product succinctly in one page like the "midway design" did.
The new design is an excellent front page. All the important points are immediately made to the reader. It sells Mozilla excellently and will get the attention of the user to a degree that even if their initial trials with Mozilla are unsuccessful they will return to what they perceive as a professionally presented project. With the old page, if it didn't work, it was probably forgotten.
A case in point would be the GNU project. They certainly aren't the most well known of organisations outside of tech circles but it isn't as if they haven't advertised themselves; GNU/Linux. Have you seen their website recently?
A stand on patents covering basic software methods is long overdue. They just should not be allowed. All patents pertaining to software methods should be invalidated and the software development community - of both closed and open sourced - just be allowed to continue to develop decent, innovative software that improves peoples lives.
There is nothing innovative about a single patent pertaining to software. They are simply tools to stifle the development of competitors or to extort money out of them.
But "Democracy" makes this impossible. There's too much self-interest and money invested in the USPTO and things will not change, just move abroad out of the scope of enforcement.
I'm sure if Microsoft wasn't involved in equally dubious activities then they would make a stand against this. They won't make a stand because, to them, this is a thorn in a field full of strawberries. Rich pickings.
Wow, 99% of slashdot applaudes the laws when they're announced. Now, when these laws are applied, everybody realises that they are just ludicrously harsh (I mean, you can bugger children and you get a sentence of only a few years, with no fines).
Is it that it's MDI - quite like Dreamweaver, which nobody seems to bother about?
Ah, it's because, unlike Dreamweaver, the MDI uses separate windows. And Windows just doesn't provide the means by which to manage these windows. How ironic.
You see, in the Free Software world, any window manager worth it's salt provides window grouping so you can focus 'em all at once if you want to.
So I guess the problem with the GIMP is not it's interface, but that it's designed to run in environments that have the capacity to handle it. Choice is a fine thing.
It is good to know the free spirit is still alive in some people. I am just a tiny bit surprized that a free thinker like you would want to cooperate with the community.
Okay, I really didn't phrase my comment well. Rephrased:
People will always dodge and abuse laws. Instead, we should strengthen through community coorperation in problem prevention.
All the blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into anti-spam efforts have had NO EFFECT. I still get dozens of spams every week. I just don't have to see them thanks to Bayesian Filtering.
Use your brain. It's this simple: Everybody employs anti-spam technology. Spam doesn't reach people. People sending spam therefore do not make money. Spam stops.
If spamming was not profitable, people would not do it.
It's the getting "everybody to intelligently use anti-spam tech" bit that's the difficult part. Hence my mention of ISPs.
Implementing new laws is useless. New laws will simply be circumvented - for example, can you apply your laws outside of the US and is the Internet a US-only thing?
The big boys of the spam industry will not be affected. Just a few idiots and a few unfortunate people who are the victims of authorities abusing available laws.
The way to reduce spam is to reduce the effect of spam, not to make it illegal.
I can't for the life of me find anything bad on the thoughts of spammer rotting in jail.
To think that just those guilty of mass spam are to be the only victims of such law being applied is to think that innocent people don't go to jail. Naive and, frankly, stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wondering how long before we see this in XFree86.
:)
It probably won't go into XFree86. The freedesktop.org X server contains a rewritten core and relies on many X extensions that the XFree86 project is really not embracing. Despite the good work the XFree86 team has done over the years, they have a long history of hesitation and, even worse, conflict with those that would take XFree86 in a non-standardised direction.
I applaud the new efforts on freedesktop.org, especially by the evergreen Keith Packard, and this is what we need to see in the FLOSS world.
X11 is one of the few areas where there is no real competition between projects. Linux vs. BSDs (vs. each other) or KDE vs. GNOME. It's healthy; it pushes the projects to higher levels of progress. Once freedesktop.org's X server is ready for mass consumption (hopefully not too long) then this 'lack of competition' changes.
FLOSS will see a whole new world of graphical coolness as Window Managers and Desktop Environments add Compositing Managers to produce awesome effects using freedesktop.org's X server and the group of projects supporting it.
The freedesktop.org X server intermingles with things like Cairo and lots of other exntensions. Conversely, XFree86 seems to fight any hopeful extensions.
What will happen is that in a couple of years, many DEs and WMs will ship with a 'feature X requires freedesktop.org's X server and will not work with XFree86' and XFree86 will lose backing and momentum.
The only downside to freedesktop.org's X server is that it will no longer run well on a 20mhz 486.
Yeah, I don't care either.
It runs on linux and, therefore, it logically follows that it was stolen by terrorist[s].
If you'd actually looked at the helicopter then you'd well know that it could not run linux nor was it stolen by terrorists.
Linux would not run on something so hideous.
It has been stolen by environmental extremists to protect the world from having to look at it. Who knows how it might have decimated wildlife died of fright after thinking clams were out for revenge after having become giant and gotten the ability to fly.
Either that or group behind Batteries Not Included was out to protect future royalties and the potential for a remake.
if it doesn't work on a mac it's not going anywhere.
I don't think that Macs are the issue.
The thing about Flash is that it's basically a web extension. It's something that prettifies your browser. It is only successful because the majority of computers can install it very easily.
If this 'Sparkle' going to be a 'Flash' killer, it'll have to get 80% or more market penetration.
IIRC this thing hasn't shipped with any Windows OS to date. It's one thing creating and writing some nice little vector gadget. It's another thing getting everybody to have it.
I really think that 'Sparkle' is aimed more at beautifying Longhorn and providing a nice way to prettify applications for Longhorn. It is not a web presentation tool, which is the niche that Flash successfully fills.
2 words for ya: different markets.
Argh why is it that I rely on www.blender.org for updates when they bloodey well announce it on www.blender3d.org... talk about bad synchronisation!
Blender is open source at its best; highly polished, cross-platform.
Yes, it is.
It's a pity that this slashdot news story was not properly verified by the editors as Blender 2.3 is not yet released. The submitter was really referring to the recently released preview of Blender 2.3 which people will be finding it slightly buggy whilst now expecting it to be a final release.
This would be a shame because since Blender was bought by the community and became open source, it's development has accelerated and moved in a direction that, as with all open source software, is highly influenced by the needs of it's community.
One of the main criticisms of Blender was that it's power was masked by an unintuitive interface that was very inconsistent. Most features were designed to be activated by the keyboard, as opposed to through the GUI, and that confused most people new to Blender who were unfamiliar with the keyboard shortcuts.
So the Blender community set about a rethink of the user interface. The proposal is well thought out, well planned, and well documented. And from what I have seen of the 2.3 preview release, the final 2.3 release will be a brilliant piece of software.
Really, the commercial 3d development studio vendors should start getting worried.
Except that Novell can just tell SCO that they can't sue - I wonder why we don't hear more on this... Since it appears that SCO can't sue IBM anyway.
Well, Novell stands to gain nothing by suing SCO now.
However:
1) Wait for SCO vs. IBM to work itself out
2) If SCO wins, sue SCO
3) PROFIT!
If SCO loses, Novell then hasn't paid large fees to lawyers and has lost nothing.
Actually, I'd suggest that for a music playe with a good GUI you should look at Rhythmbox.
The current XMMS release is Gtk1 only (boo!) although it is being rewritten from the ground upwards. However, somebody has make a Gtk2 fork of the current XMMS codebase, named Beep which is looking pretty decent.
I would agree with the original post. JuK looks hideous. However, hideous is not unusable which I would say is the most important point. Still, we'd all be Gucci models if we could.
He certainly didn't mean the unavailable "medioKre".
I cite prior art.
I cite prior art.
or maybe i'm full of crap.
The first step on the path to enlightenment is accurate self-reflection.
Two words for ya: sar-casm
I know nothing about Newham specifically, but the perception in many parts of the UK are that many local councils are not well run.
It's quite easy to prove your theory.
UK councils are indirectly controlled by the government in that the majority of law and local investment initiatives (think public services) comes right from the top. The government is poorly run, ergo local councils - Newham among them - are poorly run.
The scary thing is, look at how fumbling and incompetent some of the more senior politicians are. If they're that bad, how bad must the ones be that only make it as local council members?
I want to see an unbiased proof
That's what we all want to see.
The problem is that there is really nobody unbiased to do this type of analisys.
You have pro-Microsoft (including themselves), Free Software zealots, and normal people.
Obviously, pro-Microsoft peeps will always interpret and flip data to make it look like it's by far the best option.
Obviously, Free Software zealots will favour Free Software although their reports tend to be more realistic due to the fact there usually isn't "the collective" ensuring that it has to be ridiculously favourable.
Then there's everday, normal peeps. They quite simply don't care. Microsoft software, for all it's problems, gets the job done and is familiar. Moving to Free Software may solve many problems, but the move itself will be months (or even years) of hassle and the new software initially unfamiliar. It may be cheaper but, hell, so is cycling into work.
Before you can get decent reports you need interested people who are genuinely impartial. How many of them are there in the IT world?
Anyway, that's my ANALisys of the situation.
It's really quite a piece of work. In fact it looks like it might be the most comprehensive guide yet written on how to migrate to opensource. This is good stuff.
Yeah, riiiiiiiight.
The first thing I do with any of these 'migration' things is to flip straight to the bit on groupware since that is the single most difficult piece of the puzzle to place; especially document management and scheduling.
What does this paper say? I paraphrase: "Er... well... there's no real option other than web-based groupware although there's Kroupware that we have yet to evaluate."
Really... you could have fooled me!
Then the comments on document management are that the only project they know of is no longer actively maintained.
They really didn't look very hard! (And that's not the only option.)
Really, when I see that they gloss over possibly the most important (read: least known) parts then I'm anything but impressed.
Generally, invoicing for other people's work is not held in high regard by the law.
Well, they would be in for some real trouble - perhaps under criminal law - if they were to go ahead, invoice and get money out of people, then get crapped on in court and their claims over Linux to be thrown out. Hiding behind a plc would not then be enough to protect the instigators as all and sundry would be baying for their blood.
In the highly unlikely event that SCO are proven to have been wronged against, you can bet your bottom dollar they'll be throwing around invoices and chasing compensation from everybody.
But they know and we know they're in for a legal whooping from Big Blue and Little Red Riding Hood. And they know and we know that there's a limit to the amount of shit they can stir before they have to bathe in it; at the moment they still stand a chance of escaping having made enough money to retire on through selling their own inflated stock.
Ugh, 2 words for you: Issues, Perspective.
Deal with them and get some.
The website redesign won't make Mozilla more successful. Advertising is what's needed, plain and simple. How the site looks won't affect people's awareness of Mozilla, advertising will.
In attempting to be blunt, you've oversimplified the situation to the point that what you've said is frankly wide of the mark.
Point 1: A website is an advertisement. (As are all points that lie on the road to regularly using a product.)
Point 2: People, in general, are fickle. Advertising with the old web page would have been a battle.
Granted, a website redesign won't affect awareness. It's not an attempt to affect awareness. Awareness and impressions/usage are two very different things.
Advertising only works well when it holds newfound attention. The successful advertisement will take people straight to the next stop on the advertising chain: Mozilla's homepage. Here applies the age-old saying: First impressions last. The first impression you get is from the website - the point of entry for newcomers.
The old site was hackish. The main selling points from a user perspective were missed and there was no implied incentive to continue on to the download page.
The "midway design" (midway between the old and the new) was better but there was too much information on the one page. Developer information didn't need to be on the front page - developers know where they are going. And you can't describe every Mozilla product succinctly in one page like the "midway design" did.
The new design is an excellent front page. All the important points are immediately made to the reader. It sells Mozilla excellently and will get the attention of the user to a degree that even if their initial trials with Mozilla are unsuccessful they will return to what they perceive as a professionally presented project. With the old page, if it didn't work, it was probably forgotten.
A case in point would be the GNU project. They certainly aren't the most well known of organisations outside of tech circles but it isn't as if they haven't advertised themselves; GNU/Linux. Have you seen their website recently?
A stand on patents covering basic software methods is long overdue. They just should not be allowed. All patents pertaining to software methods should be invalidated and the software development community - of both closed and open sourced - just be allowed to continue to develop decent, innovative software that improves peoples lives.
There is nothing innovative about a single patent pertaining to software. They are simply tools to stifle the development of competitors or to extort money out of them.
But "Democracy" makes this impossible. There's too much self-interest and money invested in the USPTO and things will not change, just move abroad out of the scope of enforcement.
I'm sure if Microsoft wasn't involved in equally dubious activities then they would make a stand against this. They won't make a stand because, to them, this is a thorn in a field full of strawberries. Rich pickings.
Wow, 99% of slashdot applaudes the laws when they're announced. Now, when these laws are applied, everybody realises that they are just ludicrously harsh (I mean, you can bugger children and you get a sentence of only a few years, with no fines).
Oh the irony. The crowd is fickle.
In my limited experience, that's not entirely true. I had to fight like crazy with a patent examiner over a patent I obtained.
Yeah, but that's because you were obtaining a patent. Microsoft bought theirs.
What's so bad about GIMPs user interface?
Is it that it's MDI - quite like Dreamweaver, which nobody seems to bother about?
Ah, it's because, unlike Dreamweaver, the MDI uses separate windows. And Windows just doesn't provide the means by which to manage these windows. How ironic.
You see, in the Free Software world, any window manager worth it's salt provides window grouping so you can focus 'em all at once if you want to.
So I guess the problem with the GIMP is not it's interface, but that it's designed to run in environments that have the capacity to handle it. Choice is a fine thing.
It is good to know the free spirit is still alive in some people. I am just a tiny bit surprized that a free thinker like you would want to cooperate with the community.
Okay, I really didn't phrase my comment well. Rephrased:
People will always dodge and abuse laws. Instead, we should strengthen through community coorperation in problem prevention.
All the blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into anti-spam efforts have had NO EFFECT. I still get dozens of spams every week. I just don't have to see them thanks to Bayesian Filtering.
Use your brain. It's this simple: Everybody employs anti-spam technology. Spam doesn't reach people. People sending spam therefore do not make money. Spam stops.
If spamming was not profitable, people would not do it.
It's the getting "everybody to intelligently use anti-spam tech" bit that's the difficult part. Hence my mention of ISPs.
Implementing new laws is useless. New laws will simply be circumvented - for example, can you apply your laws outside of the US and is the Internet a US-only thing?
The big boys of the spam industry will not be affected. Just a few idiots and a few unfortunate people who are the victims of authorities abusing available laws.
The way to reduce spam is to reduce the effect of spam, not to make it illegal.
I can't for the life of me find anything bad on the thoughts of spammer rotting in jail.
To think that just those guilty of mass spam are to be the only victims of such law being applied is to think that innocent people don't go to jail. Naive and, frankly, stupid.