;) We used to do network redhat installs from sunsite because we could get faster throughput over the network down the road to chapel hill than we could get off older CD-ROMs. Those were the days. Crappy cable modem...
I hear from friends still at Duke that they will be laser engraving all of them. Seriously. No word on whether or not the university logo will also go on them. I'm personally waiting for them to be made in Duke Blue and offered to alumni.:)
This is a good approach, and the one I'd use,/if/ I had an easy admin interface to add accounts. But most don't (and it certainly sounds like the questioner on the original question doesn't.)
It is great. You never have to worry about giving out an indiscriminate address again. Signing up for a fantasy league on cnn/si? I used cnnsi@mydomain. cnnsi sold it and now I get several hundred spam a day there. And I can trivially filter and nuke them, with the added bonus that I know never to send them my business again. amtrak has amtrak@mydomain, I get all the mail from it, and can easily track that they have never violated their TOS. It's the greatest thing- I heartily recommend it to anyone who can.
What part of 'none of that is new' was not substantive? I didn't detail it point by point, but I shouldn't have to- if you'd actually done any research into how other groups do things (the way good social scientists do) you'd have discovered the many antecedents to what you're discussing. The bugsquad has been providing structural and social solutions to GNOME problems for some time now, encouraging and befriending new volunteers through QA. It's not rocket science. It's not just the bugsquad, either- any successful free software group with an actual thriving community provides social and 'spiritual' benefits, and, well, I've got a degree in political science- we can talk for hours about the political structure of free software projects, and how (again) any successful free software project has groups which facilitate structure and sane power arrangements. Free software projects that don't have these things tend to fail. Setting these as explicit goals is nice, and possibly necessary for a large group. But claiming that it is innovative is just not the case.
The GNOME bugsquad works tightly with the usability, documentation, and accessibility teams to ensure that those issues are first priority issues for the community, and has for years. If you look through our recent 2.6.0 showstopper emails, the issues are mostly not crashes- they are usability issues, documentation and design issues, translation issues, and slightly further back accessibility issues. There are definitely crasher bugs on the list, of course, but we realize (anyone who is good at QA realizes) that those are only surface issues, and that other issues are just as important if not more so.
Anyway, it's great for KDE that they are doing this- if it works anywhere near as ours has, it will make KDE a much more formidable competitor. But please stop telling the world that this is something new and innovative in free software. That's just as misleading as MS talking about innovation.
Ugh. Please don't call yourself a scientist- you're just good at PR. GNOME has been building such a community for over two years, and Mozilla for nearly five. An actual social scientist of even the most basic sort would have found that out before writing things. Building such a community is a great idea, and even worthy of study, I agree, but it's hardly new.
Did you read my link at all? We've been having online bug days and a bug channel for 2 1/2 years, where people get together on a daily basis to discuss bugs, help new bug volunteers, etc. And like I said, mozilla was doing it before GNOME was. Creating such a community is not new, and it's not rocket science.
I don't know, we normally have 30-50 people at least drop by for GNOME bug day. It's not huge, but we've been proving for two years now that having a quality team can work and really improve the quality of the project, if the rest of the project takes it to heart. It's good to see KDE emulating us in that respect- I'm sure it'll keep us on our toes.:)
I guess I'm going to post this all over until I get modded redundant, but this is not a KDE invention. GNOME has had such a team for two years now and mozilla had one before that.
If the majority of the country can only get on through mom-and-pop or local dialups, that will make it much harder for Big Content to place chokeholds on how everyone accesses and uses content. If 90% of the country used AOL, MSN, and AT&T, we'd all be screwed- you'd see complete blocks on all music downloads the moment that happened.
I'm 26. I have about 10,000 'no batteries' Lego in a closet at my mom's house, and love them all. But I also realize that playing with robots is a lot of fun, and Lego makes (made?) a great platform for that.
I wish I knew. Lego and Technic are really ideal platforms for this sort of thing, and I've not seen (though I haven't looked very hard) for alternatives for the central brick. [Well, MIT has some cool alternatives, but good luck finding those on the shelves.:)
Thanks for reminding me. [I used to know these things:) As far as massive bulk- I don't think they've ever sold more than 100K a year of the things, and sales have dropped massively every year since the first. So the bulk is probably not that massive.
Oh, sure (the chips are pretty standard bits- Motorola, I think? It's been a long time:) but they construct the 'motherboard' (such as it is) and everything around that in Switzerland.
The mindstorms were cool toys, for a little while. But Lego never upgraded them- realistically, they had not released a significant upgrade of any type in the now 6 years since they released the product. They could have made them either more powerful (and hence more appealing to the adults who bought tons of them early on, but got frustrated by HW limitations quickly) or they could have made them simpler (and hence more appealing to the kids who they normally try to target.) They did neither, and let the product stagnate. And that's why they have to kill it now. Shame, really- they could have been really, really great. [I used to maintain legOS, so I fall into the category of 'adults frustrated by the limitations.]
Since the article makes this totally,totally unclear, this is not a stable release. It's a totally devel, in many ways broken, release. Could eat your mail, pets, family, etc. So only download/install if you are brave. Or stupid. Or something. The stable release will go out with GNOME 2.6 in the spring, or at least that is the current plan. Hope that clarifies...
Well, Novell had not bought a KDE company until yesterday, and they replaced the gnome.org link with a suse.com link. We'll see about getting both on the front page again, somehow.
- for the first time ever, we've been able to open up our Ximian Desktop development process. You can get basically every patch we write on desktop built and applied to GNOME 2.4/2.5 via the xd-unstable channel.
- if you poke through gnome CVS, we've got skeletal code for a groupwise connector there. Again, something the old novell would never have done- release not only free code, but basically defacto API docs by way of code as well.
- up until the suse purchase this morning, we actually had a link to gnome.org on the front page of novell.com. Look around for a link to gnome.org on sun's site- it's not on the front page, and it's not in the Java Desktop main page, either.
So, like I said... it's even better than Nat says it is.:) Of course, I'd be lying if I told you that I can guarantee it'll be perfect going forward- but so far all the signs are very positive for that.
It's never going to be easy to just remove 200+ packages, so no, you can't just return to a pristine distro. [And anyone who thinks we should is welcome to show us how and demonstrate with an installation of similar complexity.:) But we have gone to a great deal of effort to match our versions, epochs, and package names with those of the distro so that distro upgrades to the next revision of the distro should go more smoothly than it did with XG1.4.
Slashdot Mirror
;) We used to do network redhat installs from sunsite because we could get faster throughput over the network down the road to chapel hill than we could get off older CD-ROMs. Those were the days. Crappy cable modem...
I hear from friends still at Duke that they will be laser engraving all of them. Seriously. No word on whether or not the university logo will also go on them. I'm personally waiting for them to be made in Duke Blue and offered to alumni. :)
God that sucked. Especially with lectures at 9:10.
This is a good approach, and the one I'd use, /if/ I had an easy admin interface to add accounts. But most don't (and it certainly sounds like the questioner on the original question doesn't.)
It is great. You never have to worry about giving out an indiscriminate address again. Signing up for a fantasy league on cnn/si? I used cnnsi@mydomain. cnnsi sold it and now I get several hundred spam a day there. And I can trivially filter and nuke them, with the added bonus that I know never to send them my business again. amtrak has amtrak@mydomain, I get all the mail from it, and can easily track that they have never violated their TOS. It's the greatest thing- I heartily recommend it to anyone who can.
What part of 'none of that is new' was not substantive? I didn't detail it point by point, but I shouldn't have to- if you'd actually done any research into how other groups do things (the way good social scientists do) you'd have discovered the many antecedents to what you're discussing. The bugsquad has been providing structural and social solutions to GNOME problems for some time now, encouraging and befriending new volunteers through QA. It's not rocket science. It's not just the bugsquad, either- any successful free software group with an actual thriving community provides social and 'spiritual' benefits, and, well, I've got a degree in political science- we can talk for hours about the political structure of free software projects, and how (again) any successful free software project has groups which facilitate structure and sane power arrangements. Free software projects that don't have these things tend to fail. Setting these as explicit goals is nice, and possibly necessary for a large group. But claiming that it is innovative is just not the case.
Anyway, it's great for KDE that they are doing this- if it works anywhere near as ours has, it will make KDE a much more formidable competitor. But please stop telling the world that this is something new and innovative in free software. That's just as misleading as MS talking about innovation.
Ugh. Please don't call yourself a scientist- you're just good at PR. GNOME has been building such a community for over two years, and Mozilla for nearly five. An actual social scientist of even the most basic sort would have found that out before writing things. Building such a community is a great idea, and even worthy of study, I agree, but it's hardly new.
Did you read my link at all? We've been having online bug days and a bug channel for 2 1/2 years, where people get together on a daily basis to discuss bugs, help new bug volunteers, etc. And like I said, mozilla was doing it before GNOME was. Creating such a community is not new, and it's not rocket science.
I don't know, we normally have 30-50 people at least drop by for GNOME bug day. It's not huge, but we've been proving for two years now that having a quality team can work and really improve the quality of the project, if the rest of the project takes it to heart. It's good to see KDE emulating us in that respect- I'm sure it'll keep us on our toes. :)
I guess I'm going to post this all over until I get modded redundant, but this is not a KDE invention. GNOME has had such a team for two years now and mozilla had one before that.
2-3, depending on how you want to count. It's good to see KDE catching up.
interesting! Any details on the improvements? I'm curious at least partially because I did most of my lego work for an educational institution. :)
If the majority of the country can only get on through mom-and-pop or local dialups, that will make it much harder for Big Content to place chokeholds on how everyone accesses and uses content. If 90% of the country used AOL, MSN, and AT&T, we'd all be screwed- you'd see complete blocks on all music downloads the moment that happened.
I'm 26. I have about 10,000 'no batteries' Lego in a closet at my mom's house, and love them all. But I also realize that playing with robots is a lot of fun, and Lego makes (made?) a great platform for that.
I wish I knew. Lego and Technic are really ideal platforms for this sort of thing, and I've not seen (though I haven't looked very hard) for alternatives for the central brick. [Well, MIT has some cool alternatives, but good luck finding those on the shelves. :)
Thanks for reminding me. [I used to know these things :) As far as massive bulk- I don't think they've ever sold more than 100K a year of the things, and sales have dropped massively every year since the first. So the bulk is probably not that massive.
Oh, sure (the chips are pretty standard bits- Motorola, I think? It's been a long time :) but they construct the 'motherboard' (such as it is) and everything around that in Switzerland.
Also, at least at first, the main production work was done in Switzerland- not exactly the cheapest place on earth to produce microelectronics.
The mindstorms were cool toys, for a little while. But Lego never upgraded them- realistically, they had not released a significant upgrade of any type in the now 6 years since they released the product. They could have made them either more powerful (and hence more appealing to the adults who bought tons of them early on, but got frustrated by HW limitations quickly) or they could have made them simpler (and hence more appealing to the kids who they normally try to target.) They did neither, and let the product stagnate. And that's why they have to kill it now. Shame, really- they could have been really, really great. [I used to maintain legOS, so I fall into the category of 'adults frustrated by the limitations.]
Since the article makes this totally,totally unclear, this is not a stable release. It's a totally devel, in many ways broken, release. Could eat your mail, pets, family, etc. So only download/install if you are brave. Or stupid. Or something. The stable release will go out with GNOME 2.6 in the spring, or at least that is the current plan. Hope that clarifies...
Well, Novell had not bought a KDE company until yesterday, and they replaced the gnome.org link with a suse.com link. We'll see about getting both on the front page again, somehow.
It's even better than what Nat says ;)
:) Of course, I'd be lying if I told you that I can guarantee it'll be perfect going forward- but so far all the signs are very positive for that.
- for the first time ever, we've been able to open up our Ximian Desktop development process. You can get basically every patch we write on desktop built and applied to GNOME 2.4/2.5 via the xd-unstable channel.
- if you poke through gnome CVS, we've got skeletal code for a groupwise connector there. Again, something the old novell would never have done- release not only free code, but basically defacto API docs by way of code as well.
- up until the suse purchase this morning, we actually had a link to gnome.org on the front page of novell.com. Look around for a link to gnome.org on sun's site- it's not on the front page, and it's not in the Java Desktop main page, either.
So, like I said... it's even better than Nat says it is.
It's never going to be easy to just remove 200+ packages, so no, you can't just return to a pristine distro. [And anyone who thinks we should is welcome to show us how and demonstrate with an installation of similar complexity. :) But we have gone to a great deal of effort to match our versions, epochs, and package names with those of the distro so that distro upgrades to the next revision of the distro should go more smoothly than it did with XG1.4.
FWIW, you can always get all the source to Evolution from cvs.gnome.org.