You are aware that the KDE was released about a year and a half ago. It's not a matter of it "finally being released". Now Aug 30 is the probable release date of 1.1.2 which will make it much nicer looking (the formation of an Artist group was a good idea), and 2.0 will offer even more features next year. However, you can easily install 1.1.1 today and it will work extremely well.
I'm tired of listening to this by GNOME backers because it is utterly false.
KDE already has bindings for C++, Python, and Smalltalk, and Java is coming along nicely. I'm aware of GNOME bindings for C, C++ (but the C++ bindings are piss poor), python, and guile. It's just a metter of writing the bindings if you want them.
Second, have you read the docs for GNOME's orb ORBit. It has _only_ C bindings. Mico contains bindings for 3-4 different languages if I remember correctly. Now KDE is moving towards their own ORB, tinymico, a hack to mico to reduce memory usage. I'm not sure of the bindings for it.
Basically, you are dead wrong. There is nothing about the GNOME design that makes it particularly language agnostic, and its orb is very limited. KDE is at a point of being eqaully capable to GNOME in terms of language bindings, and I'm certain, given time, it will pass it.
That should say something to you. No one seems particularly excited about the next version of GNOME being built upon the technically inferior world of OLE2. Plus, it's vaporware at that.
Not to be a troll, but realistically, perhaps the reason people aren't talking about the future of GNOME is that the present of GNOME is not all that impressive or stable, and they believe that either GNOME doesn't have a real future, or that its future is to continue to walk in the world of mediocrity.
This was true a couple of years ago when I started using linux.
It is not true with the two wms I use most frequently, kwm (aka the window manager of KDE) and Windowmaker. In windowmaker you start and app and you drop the produced icon somewhere. In KDE you create shortcuts just like the Mac and Windows, or even drop that icon on your K-Menu.
These fetures are cool and damn useful. However, you miss the point. The point is sure I have to do some configuration if I want to customize my desktop. You have to do the same thing under Windows, MacOS, NeXTstep, BeOS, OS/2, ect. The difference is that I get to choose which GUI best fits my needs instead of MS or Apple, or Redhat or $VENDOR choosing for me.
In short, yes, a bit of configuration is necessary if I switch my windowmanager, but that's an extra option I have that I wouldn't have with other systems. If I choose one windowmanager and stick with it, I have no more configuration to do than I would under a lot of other systems. Finally, if you really don't like having a choice, you can just stick with whatever the default WM for the system is.
Simply put, there are no disadvantages of this system over the way windows' users aproach their GUI.
GNOME is pretty primitive is some ways, and not the best designed piece of software I'll grant you. Gnumeric is a pretty nice spreadsheet, but that's about all I see of great value in GNOME (of course the fact it dumps core regularly on my machine doesn't help).
Go grab your copy of Inside Windows NT, and actually read it (it actually isn't a bad book). The kernel-GUI relationship is very similar to the way it always has been in UNIX. There are a few difference, NT integrates GDI at a very low level, which allows for a bit faster of drawing to the screen. This is a good thing. The GGI project's KGI does a similar thing, but probably won't find its way into the linux kernel for a while, if ever. Some core linux deveopers don't agree with the assertation that having your video drivers in kernel space is a good thing.
As for the GUI, under windows explorer.exe and friends, that's just as abstracted from the core OS as KDE or GNOME or $WM is from the core UNIX OS. The Win32 subsystem runs above kernel space in NT just as X runs above kernel space in UNIX. Now, under NT if the Win32 subsystem dies, the kernel dies. This is because it is assumed without the Win32 subsystem your machine is worthless. This is a bad idea, IMHO. Furthermore, it is quite possible to replace your GUI (explorer.exe) with something else. Lightstep comes to mind as an alternative. You can also use things like zsh (which I do on my work machine a lot).
The primary difference in terms of GUIs is that UNIX gives you a lot more freedom, flexibility, and customizability than Windows NT does, plus problems up in the Graphical Engine section (X or Win32 layer) are less likely (it still not fool-proof) to take down the machine under UNIX.
Mandrake wouldn't be necessary if Redhat didn't have a history of releasing buggy distributions, and if Redhat wasn't so violently opposed to KDE for whatever reason. Not to start a holy war, but KDE is clearly the better product IMHO, and every other distribution but Redhat seems to understand this. Redhat has hired some GNOME developers, and IMHO that is why they wish to push GNOME over KDE. You can disagree if you'd like, but that how I feel.
Redhat packages a bunch of OSS utilities. Mandrake takes that package and plays with it until it doesn't suck anymore. I've got no problem with that.
Furthermore, Mandrake should be enough proof to all those people out there who believe that RedHat is going to become Linux's MS, that that isn't going to happen.
If that was what he was talking about, then he's even dumber than I had previously thought.
I'm a big fan of the KISS principle. However, a GUI installer is an app. Having a different installer app doesn't destroy the KISS principle.
As for stuff working, the linux installers I've used recently (Redhat/Mandrake, SuSE, and Caldera) all work just fine, even on machines that give NT fits.
Finally, as for the all-knowing Redhat and their GUI installer, it sucked ass. It was truly horrible and was no easier to use than the nowmal non-GUI one. At the time, getting X to work on all video cards wasn't a given either. Times have changed, and Caldera offers real additional functionality in its installer.
Linux was *NOT* designed to be a server OS. In fact it was really designed to be a desktop OS, one for Linus' desktop. Hell UNIX wasn't designed for servers, it was designed for resource sharing on a machine (which does map nicely to servers, but isn;t the same thing).
If you want something that was "designed for servers" try some Mainframe OSes, or perhaps VMS.
Making a system easy to install does not make it stable, nor does it make it less appropraite fro servers.
The GPL isn't the perfect license. I for one like the BSD license far better. Apache, *BSD, XFree, ect. all have non-GPL license and have gotten wonderful community support.
You obviously never tried to read, debug, trace your way through, ect. the Mozilla code. It was butt ugly. Hence it got little support. The license was irrelevent.
The President gives an order asking his cabinent to give him recommendations within the next 4 months of what, if any, new legislation is needed to prevent petty crime on the internet, just like there are current laws against crime via phone or mail, so that he might consider if any new laws need to be sent to Congress.
Can't Slashdot get some *real* content? Every week there is another stupid article about "What if MS made a linux distrib" and "What about fragmentation".
First, can people stop being paranoid little idiots. If MS wants to make a distrib, I'm all for that. If it's better, I'll use it on new machines I get my hands on (I don't believe in reinstalling, it's a religious issue really).
Can people get this through their thick skulls: Linux is not fragmented. It has never been fragmented. It is perhaps the least fragmented system on Earth. Every package ever made for linux, source and binary, can still be run on linux. You may need to go get or compile a library or build your kernel a bit differently, but that's not exactly difficult. Those moves from different C and C++ libraries aren't exactly big deals, and I build them from source, if you use something like rpms (which I don't because I don't like them) it's a trivial walk in the park.
The author said he was a linux advocate. I'll believe him. However, if that's the case he's a very poor linux advocate.
When linux advocates act paranoid they just look irrational. When linux advocates, in their paranoia, spread FUD like this article did, they severely hurt the cause of linux adoptation.
This product sounds more like an integrated mail, scheuling, groupware, ect. thing. In this market Exchange does well, but certainly is not alone atop the mountain. Lotus Notes does much the same thing. I'm not a huge fan of either, but ignoring Notes, and the fact it is huge in the business market, is not something you should do. HP is comparably the new kid in this market, and from what some people who have actual first hand expirience of this thing have said on this thread, it makes Exchange and Notes look like godsends.
I don't know why people keep thinking *BSD has a significantly better IP stack. It doesn't. However, the streams based implementation that is used by Solaris is generally a good deal better.
I'm sorry but instant messangers don't impress me. They don't offer any or at least not much more functionality than talk or irc messaging. It's yesterday's technology repackaged and sold to the masses.
If you want a small, limited mp3 player, there are plenty out there. When you load plugins dynamically, you don't necessarily loose effiency. XMMS is trying to be something more, for good or bad, it is tying to really grow into its name. If nothing else it makes it more interesting than yet another mpg123 frontend. Personally, I'm happy that it now acts as a nice mp3/wav/mod player, and look forward to seeing what else they can do.
Languages aren't compiled or interpretted. Implementations do compilation or interpretation. Some perl implementations so it one way some other. All the Perl 5 implementations I've seen do runtime compilation, IIRC most of the Perl 4 ones I saw didn't. Could be wrong though, since I don't like perl particularly much. I know tcl/tk changed its implementation recently from interpretation to runtime compilation (not that I like tcl either).
I'd tend to disagree with the statement about Java. Java's more of a derivitive of Smalltalk, IMHO with the horrors of C syntax slaped on. As for the the person who thought Perl was Lisp derived, I'd tend to disagree with that too, since I find perl to be an extremely disorganized and poorly laid out, although useful, language.
I would agree, however, that lisp is one of the nicest languages around, sytactically and otherwise. I'm more partial to scheme out of lisp's children languages than elisp, but that's neither here nor there.
As for lisp being easy to learn, teach, and write, as someone who learned to program first in scheme, I'd agree that it works very well for getting people to think the right way about approaching programming. As for people of low skill writing ugly code in lisp, I used to grade that same course the semester before the course went from scheme to java, and the semester after. Let's just say, it got a lot more painful to read that code.
javac stands for java-compiler. Have you ever tried to write a compiler Mr. Coward. It doesn't much matter if you output bytecode or machine code, unless optimization is what you're talking about.
Lisp is every bit the real programming language. It is Turing Complete, and extremely powerful. Much software has been written in it. The flip side is that Lisp code tends not to be very fast at all, nor is it applicable to a lot of problems, thus it is less used than C.
That, however, does not make it "not a real programming language".
Furthermore, let it be pointed out that Lisp predates things like C by a number of years, and along with Fortran (and perhaps Cobol, though after Jan. 1 it won't be on the list) is really the only language from that era that I can think of still in use.
Lisp laid a lot of the foundation for the paradigm of functional programming.
The Amiga was a great machine for its time, and it seems like the new Amiga people (who by the way are generally completely different from the old Amiga people, they are more like Gateway people) have some decent ideas. I don't know why you think this is bad. And what do you mean by "perpetual loser", what they don't get enough market share. If all you care about is that, there's this one company up in Seattle that seems to win a lot, you may have heard of it.
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that the KDE was released about a year and a half ago. It's not a matter of it "finally being released". Now Aug 30 is the probable release date of 1.1.2 which will make it much nicer looking (the formation of an Artist group was a good idea), and 2.0 will offer even more features next year. However, you can easily install 1.1.1 today and it will work extremely well.
Excuse me sir, but you are dumb.
I'm tired of listening to this by GNOME backers because it is utterly false.
KDE already has bindings for C++, Python, and Smalltalk, and Java is coming along nicely. I'm aware of GNOME bindings for C, C++ (but the C++ bindings are piss poor), python, and guile. It's just a metter of writing the bindings if you want them.
Second, have you read the docs for GNOME's orb ORBit. It has _only_ C bindings. Mico contains bindings for 3-4 different languages if I remember correctly. Now KDE is moving towards their own ORB, tinymico, a hack to mico to reduce memory usage. I'm not sure of the bindings for it.
Basically, you are dead wrong. There is nothing about the GNOME design that makes it particularly language agnostic, and its orb is very limited. KDE is at a point of being eqaully capable to GNOME in terms of language bindings, and I'm certain, given time, it will pass it.
That should say something to you. No one seems particularly excited about the next version of GNOME being built upon the technically inferior world of OLE2. Plus, it's vaporware at that.
Not to be a troll, but realistically, perhaps the reason people aren't talking about the future of GNOME is that the present of GNOME is not all that impressive or stable, and they believe that either GNOME doesn't have a real future, or that its future is to continue to walk in the world of mediocrity.
This was true a couple of years ago when I started using linux.
It is not true with the two wms I use most frequently, kwm (aka the window manager of KDE) and Windowmaker. In windowmaker you start and app and you drop the produced icon somewhere. In KDE you create shortcuts just like the Mac and Windows, or even drop that icon on your K-Menu.
These fetures are cool and damn useful. However, you miss the point. The point is sure I have to do some configuration if I want to customize my desktop. You have to do the same thing under Windows, MacOS, NeXTstep, BeOS, OS/2, ect. The difference is that I get to choose which GUI best fits my needs instead of MS or Apple, or Redhat or $VENDOR choosing for me.
In short, yes, a bit of configuration is necessary if I switch my windowmanager, but that's an extra option I have that I wouldn't have with other systems. If I choose one windowmanager and stick with it, I have no more configuration to do than I would under a lot of other systems. Finally, if you really don't like having a choice, you can just stick with whatever the default WM for the system is.
Simply put, there are no disadvantages of this system over the way windows' users aproach their GUI.
GNOME is pretty primitive is some ways, and not the best designed piece of software I'll grant you. Gnumeric is a pretty nice spreadsheet, but that's about all I see of great value in GNOME (of course the fact it dumps core regularly on my machine doesn't help).
KDE is light years more advanced IMHO.
Go grab your copy of Inside Windows NT, and actually read it (it actually isn't a bad book). The kernel-GUI relationship is very similar to the way it always has been in UNIX. There are a few difference, NT integrates GDI at a very low level, which allows for a bit faster of drawing to the screen. This is a good thing. The GGI project's KGI does a similar thing, but probably won't find its way into the linux kernel for a while, if ever. Some core linux deveopers don't agree with the assertation that having your video drivers in kernel space is a good thing.
As for the GUI, under windows explorer.exe and friends, that's just as abstracted from the core OS as KDE or GNOME or $WM is from the core UNIX OS. The Win32 subsystem runs above kernel space in NT just as X runs above kernel space in UNIX. Now, under NT if the Win32 subsystem dies, the kernel dies. This is because it is assumed without the Win32 subsystem your machine is worthless. This is a bad idea, IMHO. Furthermore, it is quite possible to replace your GUI (explorer.exe) with something else. Lightstep comes to mind as an alternative. You can also use things like zsh (which I do on my work machine a lot).
The primary difference in terms of GUIs is that UNIX gives you a lot more freedom, flexibility, and customizability than Windows NT does, plus problems up in the Graphical Engine section (X or Win32 layer) are less likely (it still not fool-proof) to take down the machine under UNIX.
I wish I could give you a URL but I can't.
It does exist. An old roomate of mine ran it on his Be Machine once when I was in the room. It worked pretty well as far as I could tell.
Mandrake wouldn't be necessary if Redhat didn't have a history of releasing buggy distributions, and if Redhat wasn't so violently opposed to KDE for whatever reason. Not to start a holy war, but KDE is clearly the better product IMHO, and every other distribution but Redhat seems to understand this. Redhat has hired some GNOME developers, and IMHO that is why they wish to push GNOME over KDE. You can disagree if you'd like, but that how I feel.
Redhat packages a bunch of OSS utilities. Mandrake takes that package and plays with it until it doesn't suck anymore. I've got no problem with that.
Furthermore, Mandrake should be enough proof to all those people out there who believe that RedHat is going to become Linux's MS, that that isn't going to happen.
If that was what he was talking about, then he's even dumber than I had previously thought.
I'm a big fan of the KISS principle. However, a GUI installer is an app. Having a different installer app doesn't destroy the KISS principle.
As for stuff working, the linux installers I've used recently (Redhat/Mandrake, SuSE, and Caldera) all work just fine, even on machines that give NT fits.
Finally, as for the all-knowing Redhat and their GUI installer, it sucked ass. It was truly horrible and was no easier to use than the nowmal non-GUI one. At the time, getting X to work on all video cards wasn't a given either. Times have changed, and Caldera offers real additional functionality in its installer.
No, you should get a clue.
Linux was *NOT* designed to be a server OS. In fact it was really designed to be a desktop OS, one for Linus' desktop. Hell UNIX wasn't designed for servers, it was designed for resource sharing on a machine (which does map nicely to servers, but isn;t the same thing).
If you want something that was "designed for servers" try some Mainframe OSes, or perhaps VMS.
Making a system easy to install does not make it stable, nor does it make it less appropraite fro servers.
In summary, you're an idiot.
You are dumb(tm).
The GPL isn't the perfect license. I for one like the BSD license far better. Apache, *BSD, XFree, ect. all have non-GPL license and have gotten wonderful community support.
You obviously never tried to read, debug, trace your way through, ect. the Mozilla code. It was butt ugly. Hence it got little support. The license was irrelevent.
The President gives an order asking his cabinent to give him recommendations within the next 4 months of what, if any, new legislation is needed to prevent petty crime on the internet, just like there are current laws against crime via phone or mail, so that he might consider if any new laws need to be sent to Congress.
You call that news?
Do you have a clue?
Caldera is absolutly not based on Redhat. Mandrake is. Not sure about TurboLinux.
Can't Slashdot get some *real* content? Every week there is another stupid article about "What if MS made a linux distrib" and "What about fragmentation".
First, can people stop being paranoid little idiots. If MS wants to make a distrib, I'm all for that. If it's better, I'll use it on new machines I get my hands on (I don't believe in reinstalling, it's a religious issue really).
Can people get this through their thick skulls:
Linux is not fragmented. It has never been fragmented. It is perhaps the least fragmented system on Earth. Every package ever made for linux, source and binary, can still be run on linux. You may need to go get or compile a library or build your kernel a bit differently, but that's not exactly difficult. Those moves from different C and C++ libraries aren't exactly big deals, and I build them from source, if you use something like rpms (which I don't because I don't like them) it's a trivial walk in the park.
The author said he was a linux advocate. I'll believe him. However, if that's the case he's a very poor linux advocate.
When linux advocates act paranoid they just look irrational. When linux advocates, in their paranoia, spread FUD like this article did, they severely hurt the cause of linux adoptation.
This product sounds more like an integrated mail, scheuling, groupware, ect. thing. In this market Exchange does well, but certainly is not alone atop the mountain. Lotus Notes does much the same thing. I'm not a huge fan of either, but ignoring Notes, and the fact it is huge in the business market, is not something you should do. HP is comparably the new kid in this market, and from what some people who have actual first hand expirience of this thing have said on this thread, it makes Exchange and Notes look like godsends.
Linux is linux is linux.
You support one ditrib you support hem all.
I don't know why people keep thinking *BSD has a significantly better IP stack. It doesn't. However, the streams based implementation that is used by Solaris is generally a good deal better.
There is some, it's called talk.
I'm sorry but instant messangers don't impress me. They don't offer any or at least not much more functionality than talk or irc messaging. It's yesterday's technology repackaged and sold to the masses.
If you want a small, limited mp3 player, there are plenty out there. When you load plugins dynamically, you don't necessarily loose effiency. XMMS is trying to be something more, for good or bad, it is tying to really grow into its name. If nothing else it makes it more interesting than yet another mpg123 frontend. Personally, I'm happy that it now acts as a nice mp3/wav/mod player, and look forward to seeing what else they can do.
Languages aren't compiled or interpretted. Implementations do compilation or interpretation. Some perl implementations so it one way some other. All the Perl 5 implementations I've seen do runtime compilation, IIRC most of the Perl 4 ones I saw didn't. Could be wrong though, since I don't like perl particularly much. I know tcl/tk changed its implementation recently from interpretation to runtime compilation (not that I like tcl either).
I'd tend to disagree with the statement about Java. Java's more of a derivitive of Smalltalk, IMHO with the horrors of C syntax slaped on. As for the the person who thought Perl was Lisp derived, I'd tend to disagree with that too, since I find perl to be an extremely disorganized and poorly laid out, although useful, language.
I would agree, however, that lisp is one of the nicest languages around, sytactically and otherwise. I'm more partial to scheme out of lisp's children languages than elisp, but that's neither here nor there.
As for lisp being easy to learn, teach, and write, as someone who learned to program first in scheme, I'd agree that it works very well for getting people to think the right way about approaching programming. As for people of low skill writing ugly code in lisp, I used to grade that same course the semester before the course went from scheme to java, and the semester after. Let's just say, it got a lot more painful to read that code.
javac stands for java-compiler. Have you ever tried to write a compiler Mr. Coward. It doesn't much matter if you output bytecode or machine code, unless optimization is what you're talking about.
With all do respect, you are dumb.
Lisp is every bit the real programming language. It is Turing Complete, and extremely powerful. Much software has been written in it. The flip side is that Lisp code tends not to be very fast at all, nor is it applicable to a lot of problems, thus it is less used than C.
That, however, does not make it "not a real programming language".
Furthermore, let it be pointed out that Lisp predates things like C by a number of years, and along with Fortran (and perhaps Cobol, though after Jan. 1 it won't be on the list) is really the only language from that era that I can think of still in use.
Lisp laid a lot of the foundation for the paradigm of functional programming.
The Amiga was a great machine for its time, and it seems like the new Amiga people (who by the way are generally completely different from the old Amiga people, they are more like Gateway people) have some decent ideas. I don't know why you think this is bad. And what do you mean by "perpetual loser", what they don't get enough market share. If all you care about is that, there's this one company up in Seattle that seems to win a lot, you may have heard of it.
amigacentral is also reporting this, and has a shot of the image mentioned on linuxtoday, see http://www.amigacentral.com/news.html