I really don't get it. Why is it better to write an application that works on linux than to try and make a platform that can utilize both linux and windoze apps?
Yes, you don't get it.
Because the windows API is in purpose a moving target that you have to reverse engineer. Project WINE is doing a huge effort and they could never hit 100% the moving target.
As long as the aforementioned platform is free as in Willy, who cares anymore? The whole point of the excercize was to be freed from the constraints of the evil kingdom in Redmond, right?
Wrong, this has never been the whole point. It is one, rather lateral point. Most people in this story follow either the Open Source philosopy, or the Free(dom) Software Philosophy. You have some reading to do, but in short: access to the source code and freedom to use the code.
So if you can run windows apps without windows, you're free, right?
Wrong, you are still paying MS taxes for generic software that in many cases actually exists natively in the Free Software world. The reason ? MS even even keeps the filesystems specs and application data formats closed. This is why:
Why is Samba good for providing linux-windoze compatibility and suchlike, but this Canadian linux bad for providing (allegedly, I haven't tried it so I don't know for sure) the capability to run windoze apps on linux bad?
Because Samba let's you get network interoperability in case you need to deal with MS machines in your network, and this project (which is not bad but is meant to fail) promises 100% binary compatibility, which is impossible and not necesessarily the best thing. This also why OpenOffice is great. It interoperates with MS office even though the latter doesn't want to.
Sounds to me like a bad case of "blame Canada"
Wha ??? Candians are as involved in Free Software as anybody else...
Linux will overtake Windows as the number one operating system within the next three years.
How many years before the server/desktop OS becomes irrelevant? The apps make the platform valuable, not the OS.
She actually addressed this point. From the article:
Parity takes a long time, and especially against a convicted monopolist. I think the milestone to look for is when Linux takes 10% of the market. [...] we're going to see it move from being a fringe market to something that ISVs and hardware vendors are porting to and supporting.
It's all about critical mass. Whenever GNU/Linux is big enough the apps will be there. Of course it is an egg and chicken problem, but I think the corporate sector will progressively adopt it as she points out and that will be good enough to reach critical mass (10% is a nice figure IMHO).
Did you read the article ? What were you trolling about again ?
If someone has a problem with the way the advertising is done, then they shouldn't use it. It is not like Google is hiding all of this information from their users.
I strongly disagree:
If Google terms of service violate European law, it is appropriate for Europe based people to complain.
Google listens. If they are taking a wrong turn, it is wise to let them know.
So, if a company offers to do something illegal to its customers, do you think the company is untouchable, because you are not forced to be its customer ? This is just nonsense.
Yes, they are honest, and you can probably trust their current management. But what will happen to your personal data in future under new management ?
It's funny. Your same argument has been used to death by microsofties before: what's wrong with microsoft ? Nobody forces to use their products. Yeah...
Why is it that most of these affordable PCs are sold with 128 Mb of memory ? It is inevitable to use the swap for real world applications, or at least dramatically reduce memory caching, thus reducing the performance dramatically. Wal-Mart can very easily get a good deal on OEM memory, and put a nice 256 Mb in these things for a small difference in the final price. And they'd keep their users much happier.
The folks at sub300 for instance sell a sub US$ 300 PC with 256 Mb, that's more like it (no link provided because I am really not posting a plug).
I agree, I am myself an experienced GNU/Linux/*nix user and I choose Mandrake. I guess the point is, some people think that because Mandrake is easy to use for newbies, it is not appropriate for experienced users. This is not necessarilly true in general, and certainly not true in what respects to Mandrake.
As a power user, Mandrake gives me:
An extremely easy to administer distro. Adding/installing services is a breeze.
Most hardware is autodetected.
Sweet software management (urpmi et al). I never reinstall from scratch, just upgrade from CDs or network.
Standards compliance (LSB certified)
A huge software selection. Add Mandrake/contrib to your urpmi media and you are golden.
My Unix path has been: Solaris & Slack -> Redhat -> Mandrake. I will change again if I find something more suitable for my needs, this is a not a religion. But getting back to the point, Mandrake is a fabulous general purpose distro for general audience. Not just a migration toy for home users/newbies.
A key to keep Mandrake afloat in the real hard times was the club, an initiative by former Mandrake employee Deno, and followed up by thousands of enthusiasts who decided to support their favorite distro. Great work to all.
I hope to see more and more features and advantages for club members in the future, to encourage not only nice people who want to say "thank you", but also many other people to join...
Even I failed to see it or it's not mentioned in the article. But anyways, never underestimate how much more comfortable the "switcher" will feel if (s)he keeps a win partition available.
I did this at home. The computer came with Win98 at the time, I installed RedHat as dual boot, and for the first week or two my wife kept rebooting now and then, but very quickly she preferred to leave it running Linux, and that was it. This machine is now happily running Mandrake, with tipical uptimes of months.
How much can a change in the political administration of a country influence its Justice ? In theory very little. The independence of these powers is essential to a democracy. In practice, the US DoJ changed from prosecuting a monopolist corporation (with B. Clinton) to: first letting go, and now publically defend, the same monopolist (with the current administration, which shall go unnamed;-). Quite a change, quite a change...
Because Dell's effort was completely half-assed, at best. Dell made as much effort to sale Linux as you wanna kiss your friend's date's ugly girlfriend. Simple fact is, if someone actually makes an attempt, they make actually be able to do something with it.
... for software projects to give actual figures when they talk about performance gains in new releases. Even though these figures are always relative, it is better than just saying "increased performance".
And also, what a good looking, clean design for the README page. Kudos !!!.
First of all, this is exactly what
IBM is doing
, targeting the high end of the spectrum. Particularly Linux on Mainframes and what not.
There is a huge market in the corporate world for high end Linux computing, in part replacing Unix mainframes.
But also there are several vendors of High end Linux Workstations. Folks like
ASL,
PogoLinux,
Micronux and the list goes on.
Here the market niche is scientific/tech workstations, and yes, they are typically high end.
The market that is still not ripe for High end Linux workstations is the power gamer home PC, and this is the one probably holding WalMart, HP and others back on high end Linux PCs
Yeah, let's hope they go belly up. Now, who is the baby ?
Re:I use KDE from Time to Time
on
Review: KDE 3.2
·
· Score: 1
Funny, I felt exactly the same way, until KDE 2 was released. At this point it didn't feel it was awkward anymore, it was (IMHO) more consistent (though GNOME had and still has some killer apps, like TheGIMP, Gnumeric...). And now I still keep GNOME installed in case KDE breaks, and in the end yeah, I would use GNOME if I needed to and still be happy:-)
This is so important. Some of the... well, probably most of the C++ documentation is so complex that scares people off. Granted, the language is complex. But you can always present documentation in a friendly manner, with examples, and leave subtle points for a separate, advanced discussion. But I have the feeling that some C++ experts want to be part of an elite of a few enlightened people who know it. Too bad because it is a great language.
In this regard, Qt is a beautiful C++ toolkit, easy to use, really friendly, nicely integrated and documented. Not to mention the great RAD tools like QtDesigner...
Not much, but it doesn't really matter. Dell is sending a message to Redmond, wait a couple weeks until they get a new deal with M$... everyone is doing this very same little trick these days, and I guess freedos is easier to support than linux for Dell while the negotiations take place...
Or just use "info:whatever" in Konqueror. Even doing "info:" will show you an index of Info pages. You can do the same trick with man pages: "man:whatever".
This working group is also supported by OSDL's Linux User Advisory Council, which is comprised of senior IT executives from global 500 companies. The overall working group objectives have been developed by an exploratory committee with representatives from freedesktop.org, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, OSDL, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems.
Note that the only non-profit member of the committee is precisely freedsktop.org - For those who don't know, freedsktop.org is (in a nutshell) a common effort by the GNOME and KDE developers to develop standards to let Linux Desktop Enviroments coo- and interoperate. Things like a universal protocol for the system tray, etc.
It just makes sense to see OSDL and their corporate partners sponsor Freedesktop.org, it is a win-win investement for everyone involved... and I would much rather see the big corps interested on GNU/Linux support Interoperability and Standards than adopt one particular technology as a "de facto standard". Way to go !
I want to try to explain how BSD works in a way that Linux people can absorb.
It this an arrogant statement or what ? This sort of moderate arrogance, of showing off some alleged superiority, together with the constant efforts to undermine Linux from some BSD enthusiasts, don't really help me get interested on BSD.
But the reason I use Linux rather than BSD is simple: I personally prefer the GPL rather than the BSD License. Let alone the argument of which is better, I heard both sides several times, and I prefer the FSF's philosophy. This doesn't imply that I don't like the BSD philosphy. If the Linux kernel didn't exist, I would definitely be running KDE on to of some flavour of BSD...
Regardless of whether or not it backfires, it _does_ help interoperability, and that is a Good Thing no matter how you look at it.
Well, but as you mention below, MS does have a history of trying to break interoperability. In fact, that's what they do by default, in order to keep their precious monopoly, think of their office formats for instance.
Here they are helping interoperability because they have no choice. Unix, particularly GNU/Linux, BSD and other open variants, is in the server room, and it is there to stay.
I have no simpaties for MS, and my humble way to boicot them is to not use any product from them. OTOH, if for some reason I had no choice than to keep a MS box for some reason, I would use this tool, SAMBA, and whatever is available to play nice to the free (libre) world of computing.
To each his own. The notion of the perfect size/weight is subjective.
The same goes for pricing and OS. I would much rather get
this 1.3 kg subnotebook, loaded with Lindows, no MS tax, for less than a US$900 (as compared to $4000 for the X505/XP). BTW, there are other options in Lindows.com. And yes, I would wipe it and put Mandrake on it:-)
...while this is good for cosistency across their desktop [...] it also limits its users from an out-of-the-box KDE and its thousands of apps choice.
And that's a Good Thing(tm).
I have to disagree. I can see why they prefer to ship only one desktop environment for corporate use. But at least they should include Qt and the KDE libs in their core OS. It is foolish not to. It really isn't much of an overhead, and they would allow some flexibility to their users (I am talking the SysAdmins working for their clients). What if they want to deploy konqueror for file management, for instance ? Or Kdevelop as an IDE ? This is really insane, but hey, it is Sun;-)
Instead of modding you as overrated, I will answer some missconcceptions.
Ok, you can't have it all. As you mentioned: your non-geeks friends and family are having fun with Mandrake. However you want to install and compile things, and Gentoo is more like what you want. Cool again. That's what free software is all about, freedom and choices.
But this needs to be clarified:
I see Mandrake now at a very delicate point, getting each day more and more like proprietary OSes, hiding a lot of stuff from the user (even thought the tools and the utililities are open source they sometimes choose ways that are non-standards).
This is inaccurate. First of all, Mandrake is much, much, much closer to debian or whatever distro you could think of, than it is to proprietary OS's. You get the damn source, period Also: Mandrake is LSB (standards) compliant. Another period;-)
Now, what you propably would agree with me, is that Mandrake has become too agressive in their customization of free software packages, and this includes the kernel. IMHO, they would be much better off shipping vanilla packages plus a minimal set of patches. Take for instance the kernel, they should (IMHO) jus add supermount, and add the third-party modules as they do, and that should be it. All of this on top of the latest vanilla stable kernel.
If you follow cooker or read the changelogs in their RPMS, you'll notice that they spend a lot of energy backporting things from development branches for several packages. Notably, they do it with the kernel. This precious time would be much better invested on improving their own tools, which as you said, have some flaws, but as you also said, give you overall a great distro working out of the box.
In the end, even when mandrake can be improved, you have to realize that you can't have it all. You either put a lot of your own time on building your customized distro from scratch (or a la gentoo), or you take a distro that does it for you, and yes, it will make some decisions for you. It is your choice, enjoy freedom;-)
It is really unbelievable. One would think that Linux or *BSD would be the first choice for an embedded OS in a car. Secure, fast, stable, open source and gratis. The most important thing being the open source bit. The so-called user friendliness of MS's products is not an davantage here, nor the availability of drivers for home electronics.
However, MS shows their teeth once again, and grabs a deal with the big guns. That's how they operate, they don't care much about software quality. All they need is Public Relations at the appropriate level, that's enough for them. And some dirty tricks to kill out the competition...
Slashdot Mirror
;-)
Did you read the article ? What were you trolling about again ?
-
If Google terms of service violate European law, it is appropriate for Europe based people to complain.
-
Google listens. If they are taking a wrong turn, it is wise to let them know.
- So, if a company offers to do something illegal to its customers, do you think the company is untouchable, because you are not forced to be its customer ? This is just nonsense.
- Yes, they are honest, and you can probably trust their current management. But what will happen to your personal data in future under new management ?
It's funny. Your same argument has been used to death by microsofties before: what's wrong with microsoft ? Nobody forces to use their products. YeahThe folks at sub300 for instance sell a sub US$ 300 PC with 256 Mb, that's more like it (no link provided because I am really not posting a plug).
As a power user, Mandrake gives me:
My Unix path has been: Solaris & Slack -> Redhat -> Mandrake. I will change again if I find something more suitable for my needs, this is a not a religion. But getting back to the point, Mandrake is a fabulous general purpose distro for general audience. Not just a migration toy for home users/newbies.
I hope to see more and more features and advantages for club members in the future, to encourage not only nice people who want to say "thank you", but also many other people to join ...
I did this at home. The computer came with Win98 at the time, I installed RedHat as dual boot, and for the first week or two my wife kept rebooting now and then, but very quickly she preferred to leave it running Linux, and that was it. This machine is now happily running Mandrake, with tipical uptimes of months.
How much can a change in the political administration of a country influence its Justice ? In theory very little. The independence of these powers is essential to a democracy. In practice, the US DoJ changed from prosecuting a monopolist corporation (with B. Clinton) to: first letting go, and now publically defend, the same monopolist (with the current administration, which shall go unnamed ;-). Quite a change, quite a change ...
And also, what a good looking, clean design for the README page. Kudos !!!.
First of all, this is exactly what IBM is doing , targeting the high end of the spectrum. Particularly Linux on Mainframes and what not. There is a huge market in the corporate world for high end Linux computing, in part replacing Unix mainframes.
But also there are several vendors of High end Linux Workstations. Folks like ASL, PogoLinux, Micronux and the list goes on. Here the market niche is scientific/tech workstations, and yes, they are typically high end.
The market that is still not ripe for High end Linux workstations is the power gamer home PC, and this is the one probably holding WalMart, HP and others back on high end Linux PCs
-
Sponsoring several open source projects:
-
kde-look.org
- kde-apps.org
-
Mozilla
-
Nvu
-
gaim
-
And the list goes on
...
-
Hiring Everaldo
Yeah, let's hope they go belly up. Now, who is the baby ?Funny, I felt exactly the same way, until KDE 2 was released. At this point it didn't feel it was awkward anymore, it was (IMHO) more consistent (though GNOME had and still has some killer apps, like TheGIMP, Gnumeric ...). And now I still keep GNOME installed in case KDE breaks, and in the end yeah, I would use GNOME if I needed to and still be happy :-)
This is so important. Some of the ... well, probably most of the C++ documentation is so complex that scares people off. Granted, the language is complex. But you can always present documentation in a friendly manner, with examples, and leave subtle points for a separate, advanced discussion. But I have the feeling that some C++ experts want to be part of an elite of a few enlightened people who know it. Too bad because it is a great language.
In this regard, Qt is a beautiful C++ toolkit, easy to use, really friendly, nicely integrated and documented. Not to mention the great RAD tools like QtDesigner ...
Not much, but it doesn't really matter. Dell is sending a message to Redmond, wait a couple weeks until they get a new deal with M$ ... everyone is doing this very same little trick these days, and I guess freedos is easier to support than linux for Dell while the negotiations take place ...
Or just use "info:whatever" in Konqueror. Even doing "info:" will show you an index of Info pages. You can do the same trick with man pages: "man:whatever".
Note that the only non-profit member of the committee is precisely freedsktop.org - For those who don't know, freedsktop.org is (in a nutshell) a common effort by the GNOME and KDE developers to develop standards to let Linux Desktop Enviroments coo- and interoperate. Things like a universal protocol for the system tray, etc.
It just makes sense to see OSDL and their corporate partners sponsor Freedesktop.org, it is a win-win investement for everyone involved ... and I would much rather see the big corps interested on GNU/Linux support Interoperability and Standards than adopt one particular technology as a "de facto standard". Way to go !
It this an arrogant statement or what ? This sort of moderate arrogance, of showing off some alleged superiority, together with the constant efforts to undermine Linux from some BSD enthusiasts, don't really help me get interested on BSD.
But the reason I use Linux rather than BSD is simple: I personally prefer the GPL rather than the BSD License. Let alone the argument of which is better, I heard both sides several times, and I prefer the FSF's philosophy. This doesn't imply that I don't like the BSD philosphy. If the Linux kernel didn't exist, I would definitely be running KDE on to of some flavour of BSD ...
(Yeah, I am a scientist myself ...)
Well, but as you mention below, MS does have a history of trying to break interoperability. In fact, that's what they do by default, in order to keep their precious monopoly, think of their office formats for instance.
Here they are helping interoperability because they have no choice. Unix, particularly GNU/Linux, BSD and other open variants, is in the server room, and it is there to stay.
I have no simpaties for MS, and my humble way to boicot them is to not use any product from them. OTOH, if for some reason I had no choice than to keep a MS box for some reason, I would use this tool, SAMBA, and whatever is available to play nice to the free (libre) world of computing.
The same goes for pricing and OS. I would much rather get this 1.3 kg subnotebook, loaded with Lindows, no MS tax, for less than a US$900 (as compared to $4000 for the X505/XP). BTW, there are other options in Lindows.com. And yes, I would wipe it and put Mandrake on it :-)
I have to disagree. I can see why they prefer to ship only one desktop environment for corporate use. But at least they should include Qt and the KDE libs in their core OS. It is foolish not to. It really isn't much of an overhead, and they would allow some flexibility to their users (I am talking the SysAdmins working for their clients). What if they want to deploy konqueror for file management, for instance ? Or Kdevelop as an IDE ? This is really insane, but hey, it is Sun ;-)
Ok, you can't have it all. As you mentioned: your non-geeks friends and family are having fun with Mandrake. However you want to install and compile things, and Gentoo is more like what you want. Cool again. That's what free software is all about, freedom and choices.
But this needs to be clarified:
This is inaccurate. First of all, Mandrake is much, much, much closer to debian or whatever distro you could think of, than it is to proprietary OS's. You get the damn source, period Also: Mandrake is LSB (standards) compliant. Another period ;-)
Now, what you propably would agree with me, is that Mandrake has become too agressive in their customization of free software packages, and this includes the kernel. IMHO, they would be much better off shipping vanilla packages plus a minimal set of patches. Take for instance the kernel, they should (IMHO) jus add supermount, and add the third-party modules as they do, and that should be it. All of this on top of the latest vanilla stable kernel.
If you follow cooker or read the changelogs in their RPMS, you'll notice that they spend a lot of energy backporting things from development branches for several packages. Notably, they do it with the kernel. This precious time would be much better invested on improving their own tools, which as you said, have some flaws, but as you also said, give you overall a great distro working out of the box.
In the end, even when mandrake can be improved, you have to realize that you can't have it all. You either put a lot of your own time on building your customized distro from scratch (or a la gentoo), or you take a distro that does it for you, and yes, it will make some decisions for you. It is your choice, enjoy freedom ;-)
However, MS shows their teeth once again, and grabs a deal with the big guns. That's how they operate, they don't care much about software quality. All they need is Public Relations at the appropriate level, that's enough for them. And some dirty tricks to kill out the competition ...