Reading their Berlin vs. X paper certainly explains why such a project is worthwhile, despite the fact that X is plenty good at what it does. However, I was a little shocked to see that it is has been under development for 5 years, and they are only on version 0.2, with hardly any of the features that they tout implemented.
Given this, it seems likely that a usable release is at least another ten years off, and then don't forget the five or ten years it's going to take for common applications to be ported over and kinks to be worked out.
In other words, this truly is the "GUI of the future"...the very distant future.
Now maybe everyone can shut up about whether Linux is "enterprise-ready." I don't think you get much more Enterprise-class than this. Not only is it a massive volume of data, but it's highly sensative data. In the case of the NYSE, much of our economy is based around the day-to-day functioning of these systems.
This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that Linux needs right now. Funny to think that with all the awesome software we have (Apache, KDE, the Gimp, Linux itself...) the thing we need the most right now is a lame little viewer for some proprietary media formats. But it's true.
I have no problem at all paying for software like this. Especially since they have priced it quite reasonably.
Now, let's hope it actually _works_ and isn't just marketing hype surrounding a shoddy product.:)
Really, now. There's a huge demand for broadband, but no one can seem to stay in business even with hundreds of customers (both consumers and businesses) forking over lots of money each month for the service.
In an era of dot-coms with no revenue stream whatsoever staying in business for years, how is it that these companies are going broke?
Amongst all this talk of the importance of "web services", I wonder where the real value to the user comes in. My question is: what's the Killer App of a website that goes beyond Apache+PHP? I haven't seen it, and the only thing that anyone seems to be able to say about it is "login authentication." I've worked with EJB, and they are neat - but I have yet to see what they could offer the end user that standard PHP can't.
This reminds me a lot of the talk I heard going on about ActiveX. This cutting-edge new technology was supposed to revolutionize creating components for viewing on the web or, in fact, in any application. Three years later and high-profile websites like amazon.com, yahoo.com, and google.com are still running on Apache, and a Killer App for ActiveX has yet to emerge.
I'm not saying that this "web services" thing _couldn't_ have a killer app - I'd just like to see it first before I decide that forking over tens of thousands of dollars to Microsoft in order to run my website is a good idea.
Good points, but refutable
on
Taming the Web
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
He does make some good points, and this is good stuff to think about - definitely not something you want to dismiss out of hand. However, I think all of the points are refutable from many angles. Here's my take:
#1 - The Internet is Too International to Be Controlled
Actually, I think it's more than the international issues can keep things tied up in red tape long enough that we can do whatever we want in the meantime. Things on the Internet happen in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, and sometimes days; in terms of International law, they happen in terms of years and decades. By the time law is adapted to new technologies, those technologies are long since past the "new" stage and well on to the "outdated" stage, with other technologies to replace them. Law will never be able to keep up.
#2 - The Net is too Interconnected to Control
He focuses mainly on two points: that true peer-to-peer sharing is still to inefficient as networks get large, and that most Internet users run off of a few major networks (AOL, Earthlink, MSN). For the first point - yes that's true, but it's just technological hurdle. Such things, as we all well know, are much easier to solve than matters of law, and no doubt true peer-to-peer networks will be "good enough" sometime in the near future. As for the second point - well, the "hackers", which includes most everyone on Slashdot, don't use any of those services for Internet access. So it's true that those services could probably disconnect the mass market from the sharing networks fairly easily; but it seems likely that that would either cause many people to defect to "real" ISPs, or else that people would develop protocols that disguise themselvs as email, FTP, or web transfers.
#3 - The Net is too filled with Hackers to Control
His entire argument here seems to be that sooner or later companies will distribute their electronic information on properitary hardware that can't be accessed by a PC. If that's true, then he's right. But I don't think that will be profitable for the companies, because what's the point of getting something in electronic format if you can't put it on your computer? And if there is any way to view the information on your computer screen, then some bright 16-year-old from Norway will figure out how to download it as data. Period.
While I appreciate the sentiment of the article, it seems rife with misinformation. For example:
"Another feature that NuSphere is adding to MySQL is replication..."
Er, I'm pretty sure that's been in there for quite some time, through the master/slave system.
"The language resembles Oracle's PL/SQL (Procedural Language/SQL), except that PL/pgSQL offers the use of functions only, not procedures. A function call always returns some result, while a procedure may execute certain operations without returning a result."
Wow, that's certainly earth-shattering. Just discard the result. Cripes.
"PostgreSQL, like MySQL, also doesn't provide any native replication capability."
Maybe I misunderstand replication, but what's the matter with:
"But some Web businesses are finding that they can function perfectly well with open source databases."
Yeah, I guess the features I like are speed, stability, ease of deployment, and excellent development tools. PostgreSQL and MySQL have all of this in spades; the commercial databases I've worked with usually seem clunky and contrived by comparisson.
...because, for once, a company made their way to the top by simply _having a stellar product_. When I first began using it I was shocked by how many orders of magnatude better than any other search engine it was. But to my surprise, everyone else realized it too, to the point that Google now completely dominates the search engine industry.
I do hope these other engines (many of which I've tried, and they ain't bad) offer up some competition, because a monopoly is bad even when the monolopy provider is so good. But in the meantime it's great to finally see a product suceeding so well based entirely upon its merit.
Their games are just the sort of apps Linux is lacking in: professional, slick, and run easily out of the box. They are advancing the state of multimedia with projects like SMPEG, OpenAL, and their contributions to SDL.
I hope they stay in business and continue to produce their games, but this is a rather bad example for the future of Linux businesses. They did everything right, and even so they are in financial straights already.
> At 98F it would take at least a few hundred years to temper a piece of steel, at a few hundred degrees you can do it in hours.
Sorry, my wording was bad. Obvious the steel was heated in a fire; the steel was _quenched_ in the slave's gut. (Versus water, or salt water, or oil, or any of the other things that one normally uses.)
Reading this article reminds me of just how far out of hand the War on Drugs really is. Drug testing chess players? Come on! Drug testing is a violation of civil rights in any case, but at least with (say) someone that's going to be operating heavy machinery you can kind of see what they are thinking. What's a stoned chess player going to do, get philisophical during the chess match?
The story about quenching it in a slave's gut is that the exact temperature necessary to give the steel its trademark temper was 98 degrees, the temperature of the human body.
Mandrake comes with the most "junk", the best control panels, the most support for weird hardware out-of-the-box, the most apps, and (possibly) the nicest installer. It also is based on Red Hat, so it's industry standard.
Red Hat is a good choice too; it's a little more non-nonsense, a little less fun, and slightly more stable.
There's always Redmond Linux if you're a die-hard Windows user that wants your interface to change as little as possible.
Other than that, I would have to say that I don't specifically recommend any of the others, although I will admit that most of my experience is with the "big names."
Homogeneous technology has long-term risks
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
Although hardly a very subtle way of putting it, the author is completely correct - all technology being the same has risks that go beyond monopolistic practices. Thankfully, the free software community "knows" this, and so even though a given nice may be dominated by a large key player, there are many other excellent choices as well. Think Linux vs. the BSDs, KDE vs. Gnome, Red Hat vs. Debian, StarOffice vs KOffice, and so on.
Of course, free software is fundamentally more safe from this sort of problem: with proprietary software, it's entirely in the hands of the vendor. With free software, most of us are lazy so we leave it in the hands of the "vendor" (who may be just some guy from Norway). But we do have the _power_ to change it ourselves should the need truly arise.
Linux developers should be proud...
on
Linux Turns 10
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
...and everyone that is a part of the open source community, including "mere" users. In ten years we have come further than any comparable OS in that same amount of time. Remember, this isn't ten years since Linux 1.0 - this is ten years since the project was announced _at all_.
What's most amazing is that we've done it all on our own sweat, blood and tears. We've created something for ourselves (and others) that is powerful, useful, and has shaped the world of technology (and thus the world in general) in many important ways. All of it was for just one goal: to create something cool.
Congratulations, everyone!
How about a Dr. Sbaitso version?
on
Eliza for Spam
·
· Score: 1
My favorite Eliza program of all time has to be Dr. Sbaitso that came with the original Creative Labs SoundBlaster card. I'd love to hear the ol' doctor saying, "Make.Money.Fast!"
If I'm not mistaken, this leaves only ONE major DSL carrier: Covad. Given that there are tens thousands of businesses with money in hand for DSL, it hardly seems like an unsustainable market. Compare to all these dot-coms that have no revenue stream whatsoever; DSL companies have revenues of several million dollars (or more) per month. And they can't stay alive? What's the deal?
Agreed on all points, especially the last one. Interface consistency is something that has frustrated even *me*, and I'm a died-in-the-wool UNIX old-timer. (Hell, I actually _like_ the way that Motif looks.)
That's why I find KDE so exciting. They are actually acheiving a level of consistency and quality in the interface that meets (or, in my opinion, exceeds) that of Microsoft, Apple, or really any other desktop I can think of.
What I'd really like to see is KLinux. A distro centered entirely around KDE, with no non-KDE apps available. At this point that might make the app selection just a little slim, particularly since KOffice is still not on-par with the functionality of something like StarOffice. But I think there are many users that would really appreciate the level of consistency that would be achieved by such a distribution, and the distro maintainers could focus on a 100% KDE-based system, hopefully producing a more integrated final OS.
Apple delivers end-user experience
on
Mac Rants
·
· Score: 1
Apple is about delivering a total end-user experience that is pleasant, integrated, and straightforward. The apps are attractive and performance is always "good enough" and the details aren't so important. Compare this to the PC world where people choose what video card to buy based on intensive Quake benchmarks; Mac users don't even worry about their video card. They just buy a computer.
And even though I'm more inclined towards the PC way of doing things, myself, every time I have an opportunity to use a Mac (whether it be an older iMac or a 400 mHz G4 Cube) I find the experience pleasant. Apps are responsive, scrolling is smooth, the hard drive never grinds for ten seconds on end when I run two apps at once, etc.
I just wish both Apple and everyone else would realize that fact, and stop trying to promote the G4's as being in competition with PCs for performance.
When Northpoint went under, my ISP sent me an email saying that it would be up for another 30 days so that they could switch us over to someone else. Two days later the connection died permenantly.
I just got the email about Covad from my ISP yesterday. Hopefully this time I'll at least have time to swi
I dunno, I've seen browsers grow exponentially in bloat and instability trying to support all the client-side technologies (Java, JavaScript, DHTML, Flash, ActiveX..) over the years. And in the end, web pages that do most stuff server-side and just pass along HTML with a little bit of javascript mouseovers usually provide the most pleasant end-user experience.
Do we really need more client-side bloat? By pushing the task of compiling code onto the client, you take a task that can be done quickly, efficiently, and seamlessly by the server and move it to a thousand clients, all of which are likely to screw up, and none of which can boast the computational power of the server.
I just smell another new buzzword to make me upgrade my browser, make web pages not work right, make my browser eat more RAM, and make whatever company invented the technology money as the browsers scramble to license the technology.
Re:Buy 2 steps below the top
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
·
· Score: 1
Er...shit! This was supposed to be in response to another article. That's what I get for "power-browsing" with multiple Slashdot windows open.:)
Buy 2 steps below the top
on
KDE 2.2 Tagged
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
I always buy two steps below the top, as that seems to be where the best price/performance can be found. Back when 386/33's and 386/40's were available, I bought a 386/25, for example. Fast forward to today, I'd buy a 1.2 Ghz Athalon - the different between a 1.33 and a 1.2 is like two dollars on pricewatch.
Of course, one thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that CPU prices (especially AMD's) are so low that for someone who's spending thousands of dollars on a system, an extra $40 or so to go to the "top of the line" processor from the best price/performance choice is well worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading their Berlin vs. X paper certainly explains why such a project is worthwhile, despite the fact that X is plenty good at what it does. However, I was a little shocked to see that it is has been under development for 5 years, and they are only on version 0.2, with hardly any of the features that they tout implemented.
Given this, it seems likely that a usable release is at least another ten years off, and then don't forget the five or ten years it's going to take for common applications to be ported over and kinks to be worked out.
In other words, this truly is the "GUI of the future"...the very distant future.
Now maybe everyone can shut up about whether Linux is "enterprise-ready." I don't think you get much more Enterprise-class than this. Not only is it a massive volume of data, but it's highly sensative data. In the case of the NYSE, much of our economy is based around the day-to-day functioning of these systems.
This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that Linux needs right now. Funny to think that with all the awesome software we have (Apache, KDE, the Gimp, Linux itself...) the thing we need the most right now is a lame little viewer for some proprietary media formats. But it's true.
:)
I have no problem at all paying for software like this. Especially since they have priced it quite reasonably.
Now, let's hope it actually _works_ and isn't just marketing hype surrounding a shoddy product.
Read it in last month's print version; here it is online:
t ml
http://www.sciam.com/2001/0801issue/0801scicit4.h
Really, now. There's a huge demand for broadband, but no one can seem to stay in business even with hundreds of customers (both consumers and businesses) forking over lots of money each month for the service.
In an era of dot-coms with no revenue stream whatsoever staying in business for years, how is it that these companies are going broke?
Amongst all this talk of the importance of "web services", I wonder where the real value to the user comes in. My question is: what's the Killer App of a website that goes beyond Apache+PHP? I haven't seen it, and the only thing that anyone seems to be able to say about it is "login authentication." I've worked with EJB, and they are neat - but I have yet to see what they could offer the end user that standard PHP can't.
This reminds me a lot of the talk I heard going on about ActiveX. This cutting-edge new technology was supposed to revolutionize creating components for viewing on the web or, in fact, in any application. Three years later and high-profile websites like amazon.com, yahoo.com, and google.com are still running on Apache, and a Killer App for ActiveX has yet to emerge.
I'm not saying that this "web services" thing _couldn't_ have a killer app - I'd just like to see it first before I decide that forking over tens of thousands of dollars to Microsoft in order to run my website is a good idea.
He does make some good points, and this is good stuff to think about - definitely not something you want to dismiss out of hand. However, I think all of the points are refutable from many angles. Here's my take:
#1 - The Internet is Too International to Be Controlled
Actually, I think it's more than the international issues can keep things tied up in red tape long enough that we can do whatever we want in the meantime. Things on the Internet happen in terms of seconds, minutes, hours, and sometimes days; in terms of International law, they happen in terms of years and decades. By the time law is adapted to new technologies, those technologies are long since past the "new" stage and well on to the "outdated" stage, with other technologies to replace them. Law will never be able to keep up.
#2 - The Net is too Interconnected to Control
He focuses mainly on two points: that true peer-to-peer sharing is still to inefficient as networks get large, and that most Internet users run off of a few major networks (AOL, Earthlink, MSN). For the first point - yes that's true, but it's just technological hurdle. Such things, as we all well know, are much easier to solve than matters of law, and no doubt true peer-to-peer networks will be "good enough" sometime in the near future. As for the second point - well, the "hackers", which includes most everyone on Slashdot, don't use any of those services for Internet access. So it's true that those services could probably disconnect the mass market from the sharing networks fairly easily; but it seems likely that that would either cause many people to defect to "real" ISPs, or else that people would develop protocols that disguise themselvs as email, FTP, or web transfers.
#3 - The Net is too filled with Hackers to Control
His entire argument here seems to be that sooner or later companies will distribute their electronic information on properitary hardware that can't be accessed by a PC. If that's true, then he's right. But I don't think that will be profitable for the companies, because what's the point of getting something in electronic format if you can't put it on your computer? And if there is any way to view the information on your computer screen, then some bright 16-year-old from Norway will figure out how to download it as data. Period.
While I appreciate the sentiment of the article, it seems rife with misinformation. For example:
"Another feature that NuSphere is adding to MySQL is replication..."
Er, I'm pretty sure that's been in there for quite some time, through the master/slave system.
"The language resembles Oracle's PL/SQL (Procedural Language/SQL), except that PL/pgSQL offers the use of functions only, not procedures. A function call always returns some result, while a procedure may execute certain operations without returning a result."
Wow, that's certainly earth-shattering. Just discard the result. Cripes.
"PostgreSQL, like MySQL, also doesn't provide any native replication capability."
Maybe I misunderstand replication, but what's the matter with:
$ pg_dump mydb | bzip2 > dump.bz2
$ scp dump.bz2 newdb.host.com:
$ ssh newdb.host.com "pg_create mydb; bunzip2 dump.bz2 | psql -e mydb"
"But some Web businesses are finding that they can function perfectly well with open source databases."
Yeah, I guess the features I like are speed, stability, ease of deployment, and excellent development tools. PostgreSQL and MySQL have all of this in spades; the commercial databases I've worked with usually seem clunky and contrived by comparisson.
...because, for once, a company made their way to the top by simply _having a stellar product_. When I first began using it I was shocked by how many orders of magnatude better than any other search engine it was. But to my surprise, everyone else realized it too, to the point that Google now completely dominates the search engine industry.
I do hope these other engines (many of which I've tried, and they ain't bad) offer up some competition, because a monopoly is bad even when the monolopy provider is so good. But in the meantime it's great to finally see a product suceeding so well based entirely upon its merit.
Their games are just the sort of apps Linux is lacking in: professional, slick, and run easily out of the box. They are advancing the state of multimedia with projects like SMPEG, OpenAL, and their contributions to SDL.
I hope they stay in business and continue to produce their games, but this is a rather bad example for the future of Linux businesses. They did everything right, and even so they are in financial straights already.
> At 98F it would take at least a few hundred years to temper a piece of steel, at a few hundred degrees you can do it in hours.
Sorry, my wording was bad. Obvious the steel was heated in a fire; the steel was _quenched_ in the slave's gut. (Versus water, or salt water, or oil, or any of the other things that one normally uses.)
I doubt it's true, but that's the story, anyhow.
More ranting and raving on this subject: http://www.neoteric.nu
The story about quenching it in a slave's gut is that the exact temperature necessary to give the steel its trademark temper was 98 degrees, the temperature of the human body.
Mandrake comes with the most "junk", the best control panels, the most support for weird hardware out-of-the-box, the most apps, and (possibly) the nicest installer. It also is based on Red Hat, so it's industry standard.
Red Hat is a good choice too; it's a little more non-nonsense, a little less fun, and slightly more stable.
There's always Redmond Linux if you're a die-hard Windows user that wants your interface to change as little as possible.
Other than that, I would have to say that I don't specifically recommend any of the others, although I will admit that most of my experience is with the "big names."
Although hardly a very subtle way of putting it, the author is completely correct - all technology being the same has risks that go beyond monopolistic practices. Thankfully, the free software community "knows" this, and so even though a given nice may be dominated by a large key player, there are many other excellent choices as well. Think Linux vs. the BSDs, KDE vs. Gnome, Red Hat vs. Debian, StarOffice vs KOffice, and so on.
Of course, free software is fundamentally more safe from this sort of problem: with proprietary software, it's entirely in the hands of the vendor. With free software, most of us are lazy so we leave it in the hands of the "vendor" (who may be just some guy from Norway). But we do have the _power_ to change it ourselves should the need truly arise.
...and everyone that is a part of the open source community, including "mere" users. In ten years we have come further than any comparable OS in that same amount of time. Remember, this isn't ten years since Linux 1.0 - this is ten years since the project was announced _at all_.
What's most amazing is that we've done it all on our own sweat, blood and tears. We've created something for ourselves (and others) that is powerful, useful, and has shaped the world of technology (and thus the world in general) in many important ways. All of it was for just one goal: to create something cool.
Congratulations, everyone!
My favorite Eliza program of all time has to be Dr. Sbaitso that came with the original Creative Labs SoundBlaster card. I'd love to hear the ol' doctor saying, "Make.Money.Fast!"
If I'm not mistaken, this leaves only ONE major DSL carrier: Covad. Given that there are tens thousands of businesses with money in hand for DSL, it hardly seems like an unsustainable market. Compare to all these dot-coms that have no revenue stream whatsoever; DSL companies have revenues of several million dollars (or more) per month. And they can't stay alive? What's the deal?
Agreed on all points, especially the last one. Interface consistency is something that has frustrated even *me*, and I'm a died-in-the-wool UNIX old-timer. (Hell, I actually _like_ the way that Motif looks.)
That's why I find KDE so exciting. They are actually acheiving a level of consistency and quality in the interface that meets (or, in my opinion, exceeds) that of Microsoft, Apple, or really any other desktop I can think of.
What I'd really like to see is KLinux. A distro centered entirely around KDE, with no non-KDE apps available. At this point that might make the app selection just a little slim, particularly since KOffice is still not on-par with the functionality of something like StarOffice. But I think there are many users that would really appreciate the level of consistency that would be achieved by such a distribution, and the distro maintainers could focus on a 100% KDE-based system, hopefully producing a more integrated final OS.
Apple is about delivering a total end-user experience that is pleasant, integrated, and straightforward. The apps are attractive and performance is always "good enough" and the details aren't so important. Compare this to the PC world where people choose what video card to buy based on intensive Quake benchmarks; Mac users don't even worry about their video card. They just buy a computer.
And even though I'm more inclined towards the PC way of doing things, myself, every time I have an opportunity to use a Mac (whether it be an older iMac or a 400 mHz G4 Cube) I find the experience pleasant. Apps are responsive, scrolling is smooth, the hard drive never grinds for ten seconds on end when I run two apps at once, etc.
I just wish both Apple and everyone else would realize that fact, and stop trying to promote the G4's as being in competition with PCs for performance.
When Northpoint went under, my ISP sent me an email saying that it would be up for another 30 days so that they could switch us over to someone else. Two days later the connection died permenantly.
I just got the email about Covad from my ISP yesterday. Hopefully this time I'll at least have time to swi
It's a good thing the latest version of Konqueror supports ActiveX, then. I'd hate to miss out on all that great advertising!
I dunno, I've seen browsers grow exponentially in bloat and instability trying to support all the client-side technologies (Java, JavaScript, DHTML, Flash, ActiveX..) over the years. And in the end, web pages that do most stuff server-side and just pass along HTML with a little bit of javascript mouseovers usually provide the most pleasant end-user experience.
Do we really need more client-side bloat? By pushing the task of compiling code onto the client, you take a task that can be done quickly, efficiently, and seamlessly by the server and move it to a thousand clients, all of which are likely to screw up, and none of which can boast the computational power of the server.
I just smell another new buzzword to make me upgrade my browser, make web pages not work right, make my browser eat more RAM, and make whatever company invented the technology money as the browsers scramble to license the technology.
Er...shit! This was supposed to be in response to another article. That's what I get for "power-browsing" with multiple Slashdot windows open. :)
I always buy two steps below the top, as that seems to be where the best price/performance can be found. Back when 386/33's and 386/40's were available, I bought a 386/25, for example. Fast forward to today, I'd buy a 1.2 Ghz Athalon - the different between a 1.33 and a 1.2 is like two dollars on pricewatch.
Of course, one thing the article doesn't mention is the fact that CPU prices (especially AMD's) are so low that for someone who's spending thousands of dollars on a system, an extra $40 or so to go to the "top of the line" processor from the best price/performance choice is well worth it.