Anyway, what I want to do is run linux on my k6-2 333 or heaven forbid my p1-100 and still be able to browse the web.
This is what I like the most about open source software; the diversity that is a natural consequence of the open-source model has resulted in a number of browsers:
This only lists the browsers which will give a reasonable browsing experience with the majority of web sites out there. There are some other open-source browsers, too, such as Amaya (still being updated, it may even be usable for normal web browsing), Grail, among others. And, of course, for the remote ssh or non-X connection, there is Lynx, W3M, and Links.
The only people who need Linux to run on old hardware are the Luddites who refuse to part with their old equipment, and they are nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community.
I agree that the type of compromises that people have to make to make software that runs well on older hardware are sometimes less than ideal; things like memory protection, true security between applications, and a nice fancy GUI user interface take system resources; in order to program so that less user resources are used, one either had to give up stability (look at the stability of Windows 3.1 or MacOS from the same era) or user interface (The days of the TWM X user interface).
That said, there are legitimate reasons to have older computers. I remember talking to a technical support rep who had just spent nearly an hour helping a customer run our software on a system with only two megabytes of ram (this was early 1996; 16 megs of ram was the norm; 32 megs of ram cost $350 at the time). I asked him "Why didn't the customer buy more memory?" His reply: "Because she was a single mom." This lady, after feeding her kid and paying for the babysitter, plain simply did not have the money to upgrade her computer.
Another example: Foreign countries. I was recently in Mexico, in an area where the economy was thriving because people earn a whopping six dollars an hour at a Volkwagen factory down there. Now, six dollars does not seem like a lot to the average American. With $20,000 houses and $3 meals at nice restuarants, however, that six dollars can go a long way. One thing that does not change price is computing hardware; in fact, computing hardware actually costa little bit more, thanks to a 15% sales tax (IVA) which Mexico has. I am sure these people would appreciate anything they can do to not have to spend a lot of money on (to them) expensive computer upgrades. (Since labor is cheap, people who finally need to upgrade their computers take their computers to shops where people do motherboard swaps and what not).
Another example is students on universities living on student loans.
Also, from a programmer's perspective, it is often not that difficult to make sure the code runs fine on older hardware. Simpler software, in general, uses less hardware resources.
- Sam
Re:Something that isn't pointed out enough
on
SuSE 7.3 vs XP
·
· Score: 1
Who still has 32 MB RAM these days?
Laptop users. My previous laptop, which I finally replaced nine months ago, had only 24 megs of RAM on it, and could only be expanded up to 40 megs of RAM total.
KDE 1.x was too heavy to run on it; I did not even try putting KDE 2.x or Gnome on that beast. In fact, I used FVWM 1.x and Netscape 4.x (Mozilla was also too heavy to run on it) until I finally upgraded my laptop.
Arkanes (why do you post without using your real name?),
He did not arbitrarily decide what "open source" is. Open source is a trademarked term, and there is a definition, as defined by the trademark owners, of what does and does not entail "open source" software. As it turns out, bungie.net software release can not properlly be called "open source".
- Sam
I have no regrets that Scott tried
on
A Loki Timeline
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It is very easy to sit on the sidelines, point at Scott Draker, and say "Look, this guy was an idiot. How could he have thought that he could make money porting games to Linux?" or any of a number of possible insults.
It is far easier to critcize what someone else is doing than to do it better oneself. I know that I could not have accomplished what Scott accomplished: the existence on Linux of games which I thought I would always have to boot in to Windows to play.
Scott Draker and Loki entertainment have made my life just a little bit better. I have only one computer right now; an older (circa 1999) ThinkPad which only runs Linux (the hard disk is too small to fit more than one OS), which I use for open-source development.
A good friend of mine and myself both enjoy playing Heroes of Might & Magic III together. Because of Scott Draker putting his neck on the line and making Loki games a reality, we are able to play this game together wherever I can put down my laptop (The game has a "hotseat" mode which allows multiple people to play the game on the same computer).
For this alone, I am glad that Scott had the courage to make a dream a reality.
I am saddened that it had to end so soon. I hope that, when the economy picks up again, we can make the dream a reality again.
There is one thing which I am certain of: Linux will survive these hard times that we are in right now. Its open source nature means that it can survive in a time which has killed BeOS.
I will continue my own open-source development; it is only proprietary software that suffers in these tough times.
Actually, after my upstream internet connection cut off my access to the internet (when I was out of the country, grrr), I found that a web mail account was the fastest and easiest way for me to have a functioning account so I could send email to friends and family again.
I don't find the "tried and true" argument very convincing, because it usually translates to "I do not want the world to change". A world that does not change is not a very interesting world.
- Sam
This is an excellent case for free software
on
Spyware in Audio Galaxy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Spyware is a natural consequence of the gratis (free beer) approach of proprietary software. While there is no monetary charge for downloading the software, the gratis software can have features which the end user considers undesirable; such as violating their privacy.
A system based on software libre (free speech software), on the other hand, is much less likely to have spyware. First of all, since there are "more eyeballs" looking at the source code, people who make libre software are less likely to add features to the software which the end user may not like. Second of all, the mindset behind making libre software is different than the mindset behind gratis software; there is more desire to give people features they want and less desire to make software which has undesirable features to increase one's bottom line.
While I do feel that propritary software works better than libre software for many things, such as video games, I am glad that I have a system that is over 90% libre software; this minimizes the chances that there is undesirable spyware on my system.
This may be why the editors are reluctant to post spyware stories; people using software libre instead of proprietary software do not need to worry about this kind of thing.
Hmm, OK; I figured out what you are talking about. THe "Arrmagedon's Blade" expansion to Heroes III does, in fact, have a sprite which is a woman with dark hair and blue butterfly wings.
Alas, that particular expansion was never released for Linux, which means that the version of Heroes III you have is running on Windows; or possibly with Wine.
(If it is somehow possible to hack the Armageddon Blade LODs soo that they will run under Linux, this is news to use)
So, this means that Lindows code must also be licensed under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license.
That depends on whether Lindows code is directly linked to the KDE code or not.
Contrary to popular belivef, people are not required to make all software on a GPL system GPL; it is perfectly acceptable in the GPL to have a GPL system that runs proprietary software.
And 24-7 or not, we did sometimes have to lock up.
Yep. I once worked at a similar operation. Once, we had a long-term power outage, so we had to lock up, even though we were 24x7x365.
As it turned out, the store across the street, also 24x7x365, did not have a functioning lock on their door (they may not have had a lock at all), so the poor clerk had to stay inside the store and call the police to protect people entering the store to loot things.
- Sam
Linux has a very good coding environment
on
Last Word on Loki
·
· Score: 3, Flamebait
[Using Linux is] doing without... gaming, coding
I find it very interesting that you feel that using Linux means doing without gaming nor coding.
Let me guess: You live in the United States (more details on why I have this theory below).
Linux has had a large number of games ported to it; I believe Loki ported 20 or so before going under. I find that this is enough games for me to waste far too much time playing; my open source coding project would not be in its current state if I spent any more time playing games on Linux; and I only have two games which I regularily play on my Linux laptop. I have not had time to finish either game.
As for coding, I find the coding environments of Linux extremely usable and powerful. For example, the Perl interpreter allowed me to create, within one day, a new unified documentation format for all of my program's documentation when people who translate my documentation requested this.
When someone says "Linux does not have a usable coding environment" what that person is saying, in effect, is "I am not willing to take the time and effort to learn the excellent coding environments the Linux has". Which I find very strange.
Programming, after all, is not like playing a video game. Programming is a discipline which takes time and effort to learn. The effort to learn, say, the Emacs environment or the most common Vi commands, is trivial compared to the effort required to learn how to write a usable and maintainable computer program.
My general experience is that Europians are generally more willing to take the time and effort to learn the language of Linux; most of the people who are helping me out with my open-source project are from Europe. I think this is because most Europians have had to learn one or more foreign languages; learning a foreign language makes one intently aware of the time and effort needed to accomplish something truly worth accomplishing.
Programming code is not like watching "Allie McBeal" on TV; my general experience is that people who need automated tools to generate code write code that is inefficient, difficult to read, and unmaintainable.
Linux is not a charity case
The free software foundation is, in fact, a charity.
As a Heroes III addict, I do not believe that there is a critter named a "sprite" in the game; the closest thing I can think of is the "imp" that the inferno town has.
Another thing: Combining imps, unicorns, and water elementals will cause a morale penalty--3 or more town creature types together; or does this not apply when an army has elementals?
And, yes, I can see why a little girl would like the unicorn (especially the non-upgraded kind), the imp (the way it jumps around is cute), and the water elemental (the blue color of that critter is cute for a kid also). If she likes horsies, there is also, of course, the cavilers, the centaur captains, and the pegusi.
On Linux - oh christ. Go try and dig out the chipset docs for your PC and gfx card if you've got them and start digging into the Xfree config files. Make sure you don't type in bad settings that'll cook your monitor or fry the card because you've put in a sync value that exceeds their specs. I got to fight with a default of Xfree4.x for a hour because my mouse type (though supported) isn't even documented (luckily i had an old v3.x config file still laying around). And no, Xconfigurator isn't even close.
I beg to differ (this is Slashdot, after all).
For the majority of systems out there, Xconfigurator makes configuring X as painless as configuring graphics on Windows--more painless, actually. For starters, I get dizzy looking at 640x480x16 being refreshed at 60hz. Secondly, there is a greter chance that a given graphics card will work fine in Linux "out of the box" at full resolution than it will in Windows.
Also, it is easy to change the resolution in X; once it is set up, it is as simple as CNTL+ALT+'+' or CNTL+ALT+'-'.
Then again, I agree with you that Linux can become very difficult to work with if one has to get "off the beaten path". For example, when I was down in México, there was this old Panasonic printer there that I wanted to print to. It took me literally two hours of me offending the Latinas because I was cussing in Spanish (Cultural note: The Spanish word for 'computer' has a really obscene Spanish cuss word in the middle of it) to get that printer to work under Linux. However, once I got the printer to work, that printer worked without fail every time I needed to use it.
I would like to say that, of all of the games that Loki ported to Linux,
the one that was good enough for me to use a Windows computer to play
before Loki's port was Heroes of Might and Magic III. As it turns out,
the games in the Heroes series were the only games that I ever considered
good enough to use Windows to play. Loki's port of Heroes III meant that
I can now get all of my gaming needs met without having to dual boot;
significant when my computer only has a 3 gig hard disk.
This game wastes hours of my time on my Linux laptop, and hours of my
friend's time when we play hotseat together. The game still has hours of
my time to waste, since I have not yet finished the campaigns; and, even
after finishing the campaigns, there are the single senerio maps and, of
course, the third party maps over at astral wizards.
I only have a small number of dissapointments with the Linux version of
Heroes III. One is that Loki never finished the map editor; one still
needs to use Windows to make a decent Heroes III map. The other is that
the expansion packs were never (and never will be, now) ported to Linux;
while Loki wanted to do it, New World Computing would not give them the
source code to make it possible. And, finally, I am dissapointed that
Loki will not be around when Heroes 4 gets released; Heroes III without
the expansion packs is all the Linux community gets of the excellent
Heroes series.
I am not a hard core gamer; but I am an open source developer who
appreciates having some good games on Linux to blow off steam after
dealing with a frustrating programming problem. Loki has made enough
games to meet this need. I hope I do not offend anyone by saying that
people who feel that Linux does not have enough games need to find other
things to do with their time than play video games.
Now, to the people at Loki, I wish them the utmost of luck.
And, who knows, maybe one of the other Linux game publishers will port
Heroes IV to Linux.
Talking to myself, but I have concluded that islinux4you.com is a troll. I found the following gem on the site:
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast.
I will peobably lose karma for this, but I can't stand to see downright wrong perceptions about Linux being spread around.
The person who posted the parent to this posting has a signature which points to a site with the url islinux4you.com. Among other things, this web site has the following inaccurate assertions:
we were considering using [Linux] for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the GNU General Public License. Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Looking at this, I come up with three possiblities:
This person is seriously ignorant of the GPL.
This person is a troll (e.g. someone who enjoys getting other people angry because they are too pathetic to accomplish anything else)
This person is being paid by some company that perceives Linux to be a threat.
For the Windows users here, the quoted text is simply incorrect. The GPL allows modified versions for internal use without requiring the modified source to be distributed; the GPL allows people to compile anything they want with GCC; using any license; the only time the GPL is an issue is if someone wants to distribute a binary of a product which uses GPL source code.
I have also seen the "create a random (or more) bit stream, for which the first 20 bits has a SHA-1 hash of: 867b5" method; both have the same thinking: Make it computationally expensive to send out email.
The problem with a technique like this it is unfair to the webmail and large ISPs who have, for the most part, large quantities of legitimate email traffic coming out of their mail servers. Then again, most "From fakename@yahoo.com" spam is sent from other servers, with a forged return address; we can add a "outgoing mail exchanger" record to DNS; mail that claims to be from "name@exmaple.com" but does not come from a listed outgoing mail exchanger for name@example.com is rejected.
Then again, this makes it inconvenient for travellers who may want to send out legitimate name@yahoo.com email from a non-Yahoo connection.
Keep in mind, of course, that "which" is an interrogative word (which book should I buy?), and that "that" is a demonstrative adjective (this car; that book; etc.).
In the context being discussed, "which" and "that" are syonyms--they are both clauses which indicate that we are specifying or describing in more detail a noun. "Which" is a little less common and a little more formal.
In paragraphs which a lot of these kinds of subordinate clauses, it is a good idea to switch between "that" and "which", so that the paragraph does not use the same word too frequently. In addition, it is better to use the word "which" in a sentance which already uses "that" as a descriptive pronoun (e.g. this book and that book)
Finally, 'which' is never placed after a verb, e.g. one can say "I think that Slashdot has too many trolls", but one can not say "I think which Slashdot...".
I fantasize about, one of these days, moving to a foreign country and becoming an English teacher for the foreigners there.
But when it comes down to documentation (At my company at least) They want everything, what classes are there, what methods, how the code will be written, yada, yada, yada.
And I do not blame them. I have been on more than one project where I was put in the position of having to decrypt over 100 pages of poorly written code, without a single comment in the entire code. They are trying to insure the code is maintainable, because a lot of programmers do not write maintainable code.
For myself, I find that my favorite scene in the movir for FOTR is different than my favorite scene in the book. My favorite scene in the book was the scene at the end of the chapter "Flight to the Ford". My favorite scene in the movie is the scene at the end of the chapter "A Knife in the Dark"; probably because the cute girl I saw the movie with snuggled against me in fear at this particular scene.
Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.
I remember, back in 1993, Eric Allmann (The original Sendmail devloper), in an interview, was lamenting that if he had a nickel for every Sendmail installation, he would have become a very rich man.
Of course, this would have never have happened. We are looking at traditional market economics: The less something costs, the more people will purchase (or use) the item in question.
The only reason that Berkeley's TCP/IP stack and that Sendmail caught on was because they were the most open-source implementations out there. If Berkeley listened to the likes of Bill Hoskins, people would have simply used some other more open codebase, or have implemented their own open codebase.
For example, when somebody tried to extract licensing fees out of people using his MP3 decoding codebase, people simply re-implemented an MP3 decoder, not using his code. When Fraunhoffer started mumbling about MP3s being patented, people implemented OGG Vorbis.
The same thing would have happened with a Bill-Hoskins-license code base. The code would be forgotten today, and some other free implementation would be the one everyone is using today.
To recap: The original discussion was saying that
the VIM license has the "advantage" over the GPL of allowing people to distribute a modified binary-only release, after giving a copy of the source code of this release to Bram.
The rebuttal presented was that, well, one can do the same with GPL software: Simply re-release the same code base under a different license, such as what Tuc Racer; Sourceforge; Openoffice; and the QT developers have done.
My rebuttal was that, unless the original license holder accepts no third party patches, or has everyone that sends a third party patch dual-license their patch, or hands the copyright of the patch over to the original devloper, the original author gives up their right to distribute a non-GPL version of their program.
In other words, if Bram GPL'd his code, and was not extremely careful with how he accepted patches, he would essentially give up his right to give someone a non-GPL version of VIM.
This is what GPL opponents refer to as the "viral" nature of the GPL: Once a significant number of people have developed a GPL piece of software, it is impossible to de-GPL it.
When someone resorts to personal attacks when making an argument, this usually indicates that their arguments are not strong enough to stand on their own merits.
he can effect that decision by licensing Vim to person Y under some other license which specifically grants that permission.
However, keep in mind that VIM is, like a lot of open-source software, an internet collaberative project. If VIM was GPL, Bram would need to get the permission of every single person who has ever made a patch for VIM available before releasing a non-GPL version of VIM.
This is why the GPL is a "viral" license. Once an author adds third-party patches to his GPL software, the author in effect gives up his right to release a non-GPL version of his software.
300 words for snow? Yup, if you are from the north
While I enjoyed this excellent post, I do need to be pedantic and point out that the old "The eskimos had 3 zillion words for snow" line is actually an urban legend.
Why don't you break it down yourself? Probably the vast majority of educated people outside the U.S. speak at least one other language
While I do not completely appreciate the somewhat confrontational tone of this posting, I do feel that the decision I made to learn a foreign language is possibly the best decision I have ever made.
Here are just some of the benefits:
Expanding my appreciation of literature; Learning to think more about what I say and how I say it in my native language
An appreciation of the beauty in the diversity of grammatical structure that exists in languages
Seeing how much is the same with people who speak a different language
most importantly, the ability to have friends today (including some really beautiful women) that I would not otherwise have.
Any geek [1] skilled enough to learn, say, C and Perl and Python, has the ability to learn a foreign language--of course the words which break the "rules" of a human language are rather annoying (English example: "I read today" and "I read yesterday") compared to the elegance of a human language.
- Sam
[1] It is interesting that a word used to describe a sub-group of people is often considered a derogatory word by people outside the group; but it is not derogatory for people part of the group in question.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what I like the most about open source software; the diversity that is a natural consequence of the open-source model has resulted in a number of browsers:
- Mozilla
- Galeon
- Konqueror
- SkipStone
Note that all of these, with the exception of Konqueror, use the same "Gecko" rendering engine.There are also some proprietary browsers:
- Netscape. All of the browsers can be freely downloaded, and Netscape Communicator will work fine on the Pentium 100 machine.
- Opera
This only lists the browsers which will give a reasonable browsing experience with the majority of web sites out there. There are some other open-source browsers, too, such as Amaya (still being updated, it may even be usable for normal web browsing), Grail, among others. And, of course, for the remote ssh or non-X connection, there is Lynx, W3M, and Links.- Sam
I agree that the type of compromises that people have to make to make software that runs well on older hardware are sometimes less than ideal; things like memory protection, true security between applications, and a nice fancy GUI user interface take system resources; in order to program so that less user resources are used, one either had to give up stability (look at the stability of Windows 3.1 or MacOS from the same era) or user interface (The days of the TWM X user interface).
That said, there are legitimate reasons to have older computers. I remember talking to a technical support rep who had just spent nearly an hour helping a customer run our software on a system with only two megabytes of ram (this was early 1996; 16 megs of ram was the norm; 32 megs of ram cost $350 at the time). I asked him "Why didn't the customer buy more memory?" His reply: "Because she was a single mom." This lady, after feeding her kid and paying for the babysitter, plain simply did not have the money to upgrade her computer.
Another example: Foreign countries. I was recently in Mexico, in an area where the economy was thriving because people earn a whopping six dollars an hour at a Volkwagen factory down there. Now, six dollars does not seem like a lot to the average American. With $20,000 houses and $3 meals at nice restuarants, however, that six dollars can go a long way. One thing that does not change price is computing hardware; in fact, computing hardware actually costa little bit more, thanks to a 15% sales tax (IVA) which Mexico has. I am sure these people would appreciate anything they can do to not have to spend a lot of money on (to them) expensive computer upgrades. (Since labor is cheap, people who finally need to upgrade their computers take their computers to shops where people do motherboard swaps and what not).
Another example is students on universities living on student loans.
Also, from a programmer's perspective, it is often not that difficult to make sure the code runs fine on older hardware. Simpler software, in general, uses less hardware resources.
- Sam
Laptop users. My previous laptop, which I finally replaced nine months ago, had only 24 megs of RAM on it, and could only be expanded up to 40 megs of RAM total.
KDE 1.x was too heavy to run on it; I did not even try putting KDE 2.x or Gnome on that beast. In fact, I used FVWM 1.x and Netscape 4.x (Mozilla was also too heavy to run on it) until I finally upgraded my laptop.
- Sam
- Sam
It is far easier to critcize what someone else is doing than to do it better oneself. I know that I could not have accomplished what Scott accomplished: the existence on Linux of games which I thought I would always have to boot in to Windows to play.
Scott Draker and Loki entertainment have made my life just a little bit better. I have only one computer right now; an older (circa 1999) ThinkPad which only runs Linux (the hard disk is too small to fit more than one OS), which I use for open-source development.
A good friend of mine and myself both enjoy playing Heroes of Might & Magic III together. Because of Scott Draker putting his neck on the line and making Loki games a reality, we are able to play this game together wherever I can put down my laptop (The game has a "hotseat" mode which allows multiple people to play the game on the same computer).
For this alone, I am glad that Scott had the courage to make a dream a reality.
I am saddened that it had to end so soon. I hope that, when the economy picks up again, we can make the dream a reality again.
There is one thing which I am certain of: Linux will survive these hard times that we are in right now. Its open source nature means that it can survive in a time which has killed BeOS. I will continue my own open-source development; it is only proprietary software that suffers in these tough times.
- Sam
I don't find the "tried and true" argument very convincing, because it usually translates to "I do not want the world to change". A world that does not change is not a very interesting world.
- Sam
A system based on software libre (free speech software), on the other hand, is much less likely to have spyware. First of all, since there are "more eyeballs" looking at the source code, people who make libre software are less likely to add features to the software which the end user may not like. Second of all, the mindset behind making libre software is different than the mindset behind gratis software; there is more desire to give people features they want and less desire to make software which has undesirable features to increase one's bottom line.
While I do feel that propritary software works better than libre software for many things, such as video games, I am glad that I have a system that is over 90% libre software; this minimizes the chances that there is undesirable spyware on my system.
This may be why the editors are reluctant to post spyware stories; people using software libre instead of proprietary software do not need to worry about this kind of thing.
- Sam
Alas, that particular expansion was never released for Linux, which means that the version of Heroes III you have is running on Windows; or possibly with Wine.
(If it is somehow possible to hack the Armageddon Blade LODs soo that they will run under Linux, this is news to use)
- Sam
That depends on whether Lindows code is directly linked to the KDE code or not.
Contrary to popular belivef, people are not required to make all software on a GPL system GPL; it is perfectly acceptable in the GPL to have a GPL system that runs proprietary software.
- Sam
Yep. I once worked at a similar operation. Once, we had a long-term power outage, so we had to lock up, even though we were 24x7x365.
As it turned out, the store across the street, also 24x7x365, did not have a functioning lock on their door (they may not have had a lock at all), so the poor clerk had to stay inside the store and call the police to protect people entering the store to loot things.
- Sam
I find it very interesting that you feel that using Linux means doing without gaming nor coding. Let me guess: You live in the United States (more details on why I have this theory below).
Linux has had a large number of games ported to it; I believe Loki ported 20 or so before going under. I find that this is enough games for me to waste far too much time playing; my open source coding project would not be in its current state if I spent any more time playing games on Linux; and I only have two games which I regularily play on my Linux laptop. I have not had time to finish either game.
As for coding, I find the coding environments of Linux extremely usable and powerful. For example, the Perl interpreter allowed me to create, within one day, a new unified documentation format for all of my program's documentation when people who translate my documentation requested this.
When someone says "Linux does not have a usable coding environment" what that person is saying, in effect, is "I am not willing to take the time and effort to learn the excellent coding environments the Linux has". Which I find very strange.
Programming, after all, is not like playing a video game. Programming is a discipline which takes time and effort to learn. The effort to learn, say, the Emacs environment or the most common Vi commands, is trivial compared to the effort required to learn how to write a usable and maintainable computer program.
My general experience is that Europians are generally more willing to take the time and effort to learn the language of Linux; most of the people who are helping me out with my open-source project are from Europe. I think this is because most Europians have had to learn one or more foreign languages; learning a foreign language makes one intently aware of the time and effort needed to accomplish something truly worth accomplishing.
Programming code is not like watching "Allie McBeal" on TV; my general experience is that people who need automated tools to generate code write code that is inefficient, difficult to read, and unmaintainable.
Linux is not a charity case
The free software foundation is, in fact, a charity.
- Sam
Another thing: Combining imps, unicorns, and water elementals will cause a morale penalty--3 or more town creature types together; or does this not apply when an army has elementals?
And, yes, I can see why a little girl would like the unicorn (especially the non-upgraded kind), the imp (the way it jumps around is cute), and the water elemental (the blue color of that critter is cute for a kid also). If she likes horsies, there is also, of course, the cavilers, the centaur captains, and the pegusi.
- Sam
I beg to differ (this is Slashdot, after all).
For the majority of systems out there, Xconfigurator makes configuring X as painless as configuring graphics on Windows--more painless, actually. For starters, I get dizzy looking at 640x480x16 being refreshed at 60hz. Secondly, there is a greter chance that a given graphics card will work fine in Linux "out of the box" at full resolution than it will in Windows.
Also, it is easy to change the resolution in X; once it is set up, it is as simple as CNTL+ALT+'+' or CNTL+ALT+'-'.
Then again, I agree with you that Linux can become very difficult to work with if one has to get "off the beaten path". For example, when I was down in México, there was this old Panasonic printer there that I wanted to print to. It took me literally two hours of me offending the Latinas because I was cussing in Spanish (Cultural note: The Spanish word for 'computer' has a really obscene Spanish cuss word in the middle of it) to get that printer to work under Linux. However, once I got the printer to work, that printer worked without fail every time I needed to use it.
- Sam
I would like to say that, of all of the games that Loki ported to Linux,
the one that was good enough for me to use a Windows computer to play
before Loki's port was Heroes of Might and Magic III. As it turns out,
the games in the Heroes series were the only games that I ever considered
good enough to use Windows to play. Loki's port of Heroes III meant that
I can now get all of my gaming needs met without having to dual boot;
significant when my computer only has a 3 gig hard disk.
This game wastes hours of my time on my Linux laptop, and hours of my
friend's time when we play hotseat together. The game still has hours of
my time to waste, since I have not yet finished the campaigns; and, even
after finishing the campaigns, there are the single senerio maps and, of
course, the third party maps over at astral wizards.
I only have a small number of dissapointments with the Linux version of
Heroes III. One is that Loki never finished the map editor; one still
needs to use Windows to make a decent Heroes III map. The other is that
the expansion packs were never (and never will be, now) ported to Linux;
while Loki wanted to do it, New World Computing would not give them the
source code to make it possible. And, finally, I am dissapointed that
Loki will not be around when Heroes 4 gets released; Heroes III without
the expansion packs is all the Linux community gets of the excellent
Heroes series.
I am not a hard core gamer; but I am an open source developer who
appreciates having some good games on Linux to blow off steam after
dealing with a frustrating programming problem. Loki has made enough
games to meet this need. I hope I do not offend anyone by saying that
people who feel that Linux does not have enough games need to find other
things to do with their time than play video games.
Now, to the people at Loki, I wish them the utmost of luck.
And, who knows, maybe one of the other Linux game publishers will port
Heroes IV to Linux.
- Sam
- Sam
The person who posted the parent to this posting has a signature which points to a site with the url islinux4you.com. Among other things, this web site has the following inaccurate assertions:
Looking at this, I come up with three possiblities:- This person is seriously ignorant of the GPL.
- This person is a troll (e.g. someone who enjoys getting other people angry because they are too pathetic to accomplish anything else)
- This person is being paid by some company that perceives Linux to be a threat.
For the Windows users here, the quoted text is simply incorrect. The GPL allows modified versions for internal use without requiring the modified source to be distributed; the GPL allows people to compile anything they want with GCC; using any license; the only time the GPL is an issue is if someone wants to distribute a binary of a product which uses GPL source code.The problem with a technique like this it is unfair to the webmail and large ISPs who have, for the most part, large quantities of legitimate email traffic coming out of their mail servers. Then again, most "From fakename@yahoo.com" spam is sent from other servers, with a forged return address; we can add a "outgoing mail exchanger" record to DNS; mail that claims to be from "name@exmaple.com" but does not come from a listed outgoing mail exchanger for name@example.com is rejected.
Then again, this makes it inconvenient for travellers who may want to send out legitimate name@yahoo.com email from a non-Yahoo connection.
- Sam
In the context being discussed, "which" and "that" are syonyms--they are both clauses which indicate that we are specifying or describing in more detail a noun. "Which" is a little less common and a little more formal.
In paragraphs which a lot of these kinds of subordinate clauses, it is a good idea to switch between "that" and "which", so that the paragraph does not use the same word too frequently. In addition, it is better to use the word "which" in a sentance which already uses "that" as a descriptive pronoun (e.g. this book and that book)
Finally, 'which' is never placed after a verb, e.g. one can say "I think that Slashdot has too many trolls", but one can not say "I think which Slashdot...".
I fantasize about, one of these days, moving to a foreign country and becoming an English teacher for the foreigners there.
- Sam
And I do not blame them. I have been on more than one project where I was put in the position of having to decrypt over 100 pages of poorly written code, without a single comment in the entire code. They are trying to insure the code is maintainable, because a lot of programmers do not write maintainable code.
- Sam
- Sam
I remember, back in 1993, Eric Allmann (The original Sendmail devloper), in an interview, was lamenting that if he had a nickel for every Sendmail installation, he would have become a very rich man.
Of course, this would have never have happened. We are looking at traditional market economics: The less something costs, the more people will purchase (or use) the item in question.
The only reason that Berkeley's TCP/IP stack and that Sendmail caught on was because they were the most open-source implementations out there. If Berkeley listened to the likes of Bill Hoskins, people would have simply used some other more open codebase, or have implemented their own open codebase.
For example, when somebody tried to extract licensing fees out of people using his MP3 decoding codebase, people simply re-implemented an MP3 decoder, not using his code. When Fraunhoffer started mumbling about MP3s being patented, people implemented OGG Vorbis.
The same thing would have happened with a Bill-Hoskins-license code base. The code would be forgotten today, and some other free implementation would be the one everyone is using today.
- Sam
To recap: The original discussion was saying that the VIM license has the "advantage" over the GPL of allowing people to distribute a modified binary-only release, after giving a copy of the source code of this release to Bram.
The rebuttal presented was that, well, one can do the same with GPL software: Simply re-release the same code base under a different license, such as what Tuc Racer; Sourceforge; Openoffice; and the QT developers have done.
My rebuttal was that, unless the original license holder accepts no third party patches, or has everyone that sends a third party patch dual-license their patch, or hands the copyright of the patch over to the original devloper, the original author gives up their right to distribute a non-GPL version of their program.
In other words, if Bram GPL'd his code, and was not extremely careful with how he accepted patches, he would essentially give up his right to give someone a non-GPL version of VIM.
This is what GPL opponents refer to as the "viral" nature of the GPL: Once a significant number of people have developed a GPL piece of software, it is impossible to de-GPL it.
- Sam
When someone resorts to personal attacks when making an argument, this usually indicates that their arguments are not strong enough to stand on their own merits.
he can effect that decision by licensing Vim to person Y under some other license which specifically grants that permission.
However, keep in mind that VIM is, like a lot of open-source software, an internet collaberative project. If VIM was GPL, Bram would need to get the permission of every single person who has ever made a patch for VIM available before releasing a non-GPL version of VIM.
This is why the GPL is a "viral" license. Once an author adds third-party patches to his GPL software, the author in effect gives up his right to release a non-GPL version of his software.
- Sam
More infomation can be found at http://www.urbanlegends.com/language/eskimo_words_ for_snow_derby.html
- Sam
While I do not completely appreciate the somewhat confrontational tone of this posting, I do feel that the decision I made to learn a foreign language is possibly the best decision I have ever made.
Here are just some of the benefits:
Any geek [1] skilled enough to learn, say, C and Perl and Python, has the ability to learn a foreign language--of course the words which break the "rules" of a human language are rather annoying (English example: "I read today" and "I read yesterday") compared to the elegance of a human language.
- Sam
[1] It is interesting that a word used to describe a sub-group of people is often considered a derogatory word by people outside the group; but it is not derogatory for people part of the group in question.