Then stick to writing software that nobody will use
Thanks for allowing me to spend my personal time doing what I like. And you may stick to complaining that no-one does it the way you want it and doing nothing to get off your own arse to make it better.
This "shut up and be grateful that you're getting it for free" attitude is yet another in the lost list of reasons why the "open source" community is destined to remain a fringe group at best
Two things.
First is - so what if it remains a fringe group thing? Most of the Open Source projects are there because people enjoy what they do, and others appreciate them. World domination is not on the agenda
Second, you are getting it for free, and are under no obligation to use it. If you don't like the way it works, or don't like the politics behind it, or don't agree with it's license, or think the code is substandard, whatever; then don't use it. If you preferred an older version, then don't upgrade. If enough people feel like you then fork the code. Look at the transition from gcc to egcs to see how this can be a successful approach.
The benefit of the Open Source UNIX environment is that it is all about choice. Granted the OP is merely presenting an informed (albeit one sided) opinion. But I have little time for people who don't actively contribute to projects but seem to have little problem with pointing out where the people doing all the work are failing. Esepecially when they are posting anonymously and aren't prepared to stand by their statements
What you say is interesting, but the fact that you post anonymously makes the reader think you have an anonymous agenda. If you give your name we can read whether you have a particular axe to grind with the GNOME project, or whether you have an objective argument.
But you're still off-topic anyway
You're free to choose to be idealistically rigid in what you run. Or you're free to just run Linux / FreeBSD / whatever just cos u like it and you don't really care about the politics behind it.
Considering it's just a computer though, it does amuse me how people get so aggitated and vocal about there only being the One True Way to run a machine. This thread is for the most part a well reasoned debate, shame more of the threads on/. aren't more like it.
I don't think that Soko was saying he/she prefers a binary only driver, but merely accepts a binary driver as opposed to no driver. Personally I agree.
In a private situtation, it's easy to pick and choose hardware based on whether there are Linux drivers or not, and in nathanh's case, whether there are OSS Linux drivers or not.
Consider the corporate environment where you don't build a server / laptop from components, but instead receive a package from a supplier. You can't choose all of the componenents in this situation. So you are left with a dilema. Either run Linux with binary drivers, or don't run Linux at all. Surely it is better to run a system which is mostly open source than a system which is completely closed source (be it Solaris, MacOS X or Windows). The reason my company uses Linux instead of FreeBSD is that Dell certifies their servers for Linux and I know I can get drivers and support for my servers.
There's 3 aspects to this though. You can already get Doom for the Nokia 7650, and Quake for the iPaq. So 3D gaming for portables is already here. I've also heard a lot of games developers saying that they are looking at bluetooth to do multiplayer games on mobiles.
As far as wireless broadband goes, (and this is probably massive flamebait), but it does amuse me how far behind the US is compared to the rest of the world on this. Already in the UK, GPRS is enabling up to 33,6k (or even maybe 56k, I'm not totally sure) for mobile phones. Which may not sound a lot, but in my experience 56k is plenty enough bandwidth for web browsing. And on the form factor of a mobile phone it's probably enough for streaming video.
The only technology that is currently not available is the AI Avatar. To be honest I agree with the rest of the posts on here, after initial amusement that would just get plan irritating.
I personally think that the best mobile technology to come out recently (after bluetooth) is the video phones that have just come on sale. Right now though it seems that no single device has the 3d gaming ability, bluetooth, videophone, PDA abilities. Lots of devices have some of these (plus some other useless crap) but nothing seems to completely fit the bill. Which is pretty cool because manufacturers are trying out lots of new ideas. I think in twelve months we are going to have an absolutely rocking mobile platform as the gimmicks fall by the wayside and the good ideas converge into the mainstream. Well, in the UK anyway.:)
No amount of "M$ is teh devil!!!" rhetoric will change their minds. They don't care. And you can't unseat MS as the King Of The Desktop
Ha Ha. No one (aside from corporates like RedHat) cares about this. If Linux gets really popular, cool. If it stays in the "techie geek" niche it has flourished in, so what? The whole point of OSS is not to bankrupt Microsoft.
OSS is about saying - I don't like that and I can do better.
OSS is about - I'm interested in that. Could I do it? Could I do it better? Let's have a go and find out.
And in my experience when I'm using a tool and I mail the developer and say "I've tried this but it's throwing an error. Have I misunderstood your instructions?", I get a reply saying "tell me more about what you are doing." And either I am being a spaz, or his software doesn't work, or I'm trying to do something with it that he didn't expect.
Anyway, my point is that OSS isn't about world domination, it's about fun. You say that you've tried Linux, don't like it and end up going back to Windows. Fine. Many of us tried Linux, liked it, and carried on using it. You are welcome to your own opinion. Just don't expect OSS to be something it isn't.
And you should have read the posts on/. The article misses the point. OSS developers really couldn't give a rats @$$ about market share. They are doing what they enjoy, and it just so happens that a lot of other people appreciate the work that they have done and find it very useful.
I am a little confused by what you are saying here. How is mozilla.org streamlining and organising it's development process going to cause anyone problems? I fail to see what resemblance this has to having rugs pulled out from under you.
From what I read of the roadmap, if anything this will actually make mozilla more attractive to corporates. What they are proposing looks like it will help focus on bug resolution, interface consistency and performance of the browser. Furthermore it will help those trying to build upon the mozilla platform by making it the code base smaller and easier to understand. The only things that mozilla.org are proposing dropping are XPFE and unused code modules that no one is maintaining or using. And they've asked for companies to provide feedback if anything they are proposing causes said comapany issues.
I have to agree with the original poster and say that (IMHO) "This is a Good Thing"
The Blackdown folks did release their code back to Sun you know. And, the Blackdown project is not an open source project, they license the reference implementation of the JDK from Sun and modify it to run on Linux. Thats why its called the "Java Linux Porting project".
OpenOffice is based on StarOffice which was a commercial product. Java is a program language designed and built by Sun Microsystems.
In what way is that "a company takes work that is done gratis by the community and then patents it to claim authorship"? Perhaps you should check your facts before posting
In which case it might have prompted you to take a closer look at your corporate security. It's not like this guy spent hours tring to find a backdoor into the system.
You wouldn't leave you house unlocked all day then complain when someone wandered in and stole the milk from your fridge. Your house may come with locks or even an alarm - but you still need to lock it yourself and work out how to set the alarm.
So why should your computer system be any different?
you need a central syslog server. Syslogd can automatically send it's logs to a central syslog server using udp. Just look in your syslog.conf.
We've got a nifty setup where we have syslog-ng running on our central syslog server. syslog-ng then squirts the data directly into a MySQL database. We've then got a custom PHP interface which sorts the errors by severity and colour codes them so we can always see what is going on. Our switches write to it. Our nokia firewalls write to it. Even the F5 load balancers and the Network Applicance NAS systems. It's so useful that we have installed ntsyslog onto our win2k servers so that all the info is in one place.
I think what I was trying to make 2 separate points. The first is that the record industry has devalued music, so that people no longer consider pop music to have any worth. They may still want to listen to it, perhaps because of seeing it on MTV all hours of the day. But they are less and less willing to shell out their money for (for example) the new Backstreet Boys single which isn't that much different from New Kids on the Block or even the Osmonds (certainly here in the UK, we see a lot of manufactured bands remaking the same old songs and the kids who listen to them obviously aren't aware that the material isn't knew). Obviously I am only using my own anecdotal evidence (although I would take the evidence of the record labels with a pinch of salt considering the have an agenda to promote). What I was trying to say was that pop music has reduced to a lowest common denominator and people don't see any value in it.
My seond point was that my own experience is that P2P has resparked my own interest in music, to a point where I pay for CDs as a direct result of experiencing new music from downloaded mp3's. Your own music is probably a good example for me. I listen to a lot of House music and Drum and Bass. But I also like Alternative music, Blues and Hiphop. I have heard some Jazz on the radio, but (my impression of) Jazz is that it's a large medium with many different styles and I wouldn't know where to start to try it - and I'm loath to spend £100 on 10 or less CD's to find that I only really like 1 or 2 of the 8 CD's I've bought. Personally I am very likely to experiment a bit, do a bit of googling then download some stuff from fasttrack. And if I like it then I'm very likely to go and buy some stuff from amazon.
I was probably not very eloquent in trying to make these 2 separate points.
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. My understanding of the RIAA argument is "Record sales are down, therefore that must be caused by filesharing". Perhaps they miss the point that the general public is bored and disinterested with the bland repetitive "product" which these companies provide. Today, the music industry is not about music but about product. When was the last time you saw a fat ugly woman with a beautiful voice in the Billboard charts. Pop music isn't my taste, but I'm not being snobbish about it - it has it's place. But the fact that it is mainly marketted to 11 year olds surely tells a lot about how adult interests aren't being considered.
The RIAA was borne out of the fact that these companies were able to utilise vinyl record technology to fulfill a service which the general public wanted, to provide popular music to the mass market. Today they've stepped away from that original premise. Mainstream music today is bland because it is easier to sell music that everyone finds inoffensive than sell music which some people think is great (and obviously others will hate).
For the record, I download mp3s from filesharing networks. And what I have found is that it has instroduced me to music I wasn't aware of before and I have purchased CD's off the back of those downloads. Those people who decry filesharing have obviously never used it. mp3 quality is ok for basic PC speakers, but usually sounds poor on a decent stereo. Downloaded mp3s are freqeuently incomplete. So it doesn't replace any other medium, but is an addition. I can't use my local radio station as a sampler for the sort of music I like. filesharing lets me do that.
I think the problem with the RedHat 8.0 implementation of KDE is that it actually breaks KDE and makes it incompatible with standard KDE.
I remember reading an interview with the guy who runs The Kompany and he basically said that with RedHat 8 you are effectively supporting a thrid platform (KDE, GNOME and then RedHat 8). I believe it's something along the lines of RedHat had to make significant changes to some key KDE stuff to get not just the look of the apps to be the same, but to get them to behave as if they were written under the same toolkit.
Which is probably (amongst other reasons) why you can't download RedHat RPMS from www.kde.org.
Yeah but this is like sticking Linux on an Ipaq. Everyone knows it's possible, but seeing it is still cool.
/. is titled "news for nerds . . . . " but it has also historically ran articles which are just plan cool (if you are a geek). For example - the dude who built a lifesize millenium falcon in his back garden. We all know it's possible, but it's still neat to actually see someone do it.
Not a popular recommendation on/. I know, but the microsoft reader does what you want. It remembers the last page in an ebook you read, and lets you continue reading from that point next time you read that doc.
Most of the new kit I buy today is USB. There is no need for this legacy kit. Having just visited a supplier, I was able to walk away (with their knowledge & consent) with 35M of data including beta software and pdf's. All on a 64M USB pendrive which cost me £35. Try using floppy disks for that.
I have just got rid of a Dell laptop which had no serial port. So I got a USB -> serial converter to use a console on the back of hardware.
There's no need for old kit that was has been superceded by newer more functoinal technology. I'm not one for buying new stuff cos it's new, but also there's no point hanging on to old kit just cos you are familiar with it when there is newer and better kit which is more appropriate to today's environment.
This isn't a personal dig at you, but I don't understand why people seem to think that getting Linux to be used by grandma's or some dude named Joe Six-Pack is important.
Windows and Linux are different things. Windows is a great out of the box solution which can be set up with minimal knowledge, as long as the user doesn't mind doing persistent housekeeping on their PC / Server.
Linux is a better solution for people who want to understand what their computer is actually doing, and are prepared to spend the time involved to gain that knowledge and get the computer running 'properly'.
If you try and get Linux to be super easy to use for newbies, and at the same time retain it's configurability, flexibility and reliablility, then at some point the project will come unstuck.
Remember Lincoln: "you can please some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time. but you can't please all the people all of the time".
Instead of trying to turn the Linux desktop into a windows clone, perhaps we would benefit more by expanding upons it's strengths instead of trying to turn it into something it's not.
This is what concerns me about Windows Media Player 9. I've got a win2k fileserver with all my mp3's on it. And until I buy an ADSL router, I need a windows box for my USB ADSL modem. And I am concerned that even if I set the ownership on my media to Full Control to the Administrator and allow everyone read only access, the WM9 will still be able to get around this. (which I guess shows how much faith I have in the win32 server platform)
The difference now is all down to Sony. Today software houses see the massive market created by the PS and it's brand successor's. When XBox was due to be released I had people asking me about Microsoft's new Playstation. Same as the way people don't say 'personal cassette player' but say Walkman, Playstation is synonymous in the general public's mind with console's and gaming.
The clue's that PC gaming is on the decline? Let's look at recent release schedules. GTA Vice City was out in early december on PS2. Still no confirmed PC release date (different to GTA3 cos it's little more than a levels disk). Splinter Cell, out before XMAS on XBox, probably due out end of Jan on PC. Colin McRae 3 & Toca 3, out mid-late November on XBox / PS2. Still no confirmed release dates for PC. Which platforms did EA decide to release 'LOTR The Two Towers' on, and which platform did it decide was not worth the development effort (PC incase you didn't know). Take a look at E3 and, aside from Doom 3, which of the killer titles were console based and how many were PC based.
Technology is not the decider on whether consumers purchase a games platform, it's brand awareness. And it's installed userbase that dictates which platforms third party developers support. Dreamcast is a prime example of this.
And as a side argument, development costs are lower as it's easier to develop and test for a single console platform than for the miriad of different hardware combinations that exist with PC.
And do you not think that being able to pick up Warcraft 3 and the Brady strategy guide for less than half what the game was selling for two months ago indicates that the game was over printed and stores have more stock than they can sell?
I'm not saying that the PC market is dead, I'm saying that if you look objectively, the signs are there to indicate that the market is starting to lose interest and move towards console gaming.
And btw, go play Mario sunshine (or mario 64), have a think about level design, character control and pacing. And then come back and tell me how much better Warcraft 3 is than it's predecessor's because it's now in 3d.
The fact is, if anyone wants games, they use Windows . . . . Any gamer worth their salt knows XP is where it's at for games
I beg to differ. Anyone wants games they get a console. Any gamer worth their salt knows Gamecube is where your hardcore gamer sits, and PS2 is where your casual gamer sits. Your XBox gamer sits somewhere in the middle and is usually an ex-PC gamer. I will admit that the only thing which keeps XP on my home machine is the lack of commercial quality games under Linux.
The PC gaming market is on the decline anyway. With the cost of a console at about the same price of an average 3d graphics card (£150 for a GeFrorce4 Ti4200, ~£160 for an XBox with 2 games), PC gaming is rapidly becoming uneconomical. With the gap between PC and console games visual tricks diminshing, PC gameing will soon go the way of the arcade. And the Dodo
Slashdot Mirror
Then stick to writing software that nobody will use
Thanks for allowing me to spend my personal time doing what I like. And you may stick to complaining that no-one does it the way you want it and doing nothing to get off your own arse to make it better.
This "shut up and be grateful that you're getting it for free" attitude is yet another in the lost list of reasons why the "open source" community is destined to remain a fringe group at best
Two things.
First is - so what if it remains a fringe group thing? Most of the Open Source projects are there because people enjoy what they do, and others appreciate them. World domination is not on the agenda
Second, you are getting it for free, and are under no obligation to use it. If you don't like the way it works, or don't like the politics behind it, or don't agree with it's license, or think the code is substandard, whatever; then don't use it. If you preferred an older version, then don't upgrade. If enough people feel like you then fork the code. Look at the transition from gcc to egcs to see how this can be a successful approach.
The benefit of the Open Source UNIX environment is that it is all about choice. Granted the OP is merely presenting an informed (albeit one sided) opinion. But I have little time for people who don't actively contribute to projects but seem to have little problem with pointing out where the people doing all the work are failing. Esepecially when they are posting anonymously and aren't prepared to stand by their statements
What you say is interesting, but the fact that you post anonymously makes the reader think you have an anonymous agenda. If you give your name we can read whether you have a particular axe to grind with the GNOME project, or whether you have an objective argument. But you're still off-topic anyway
I guess that the thing with choosing an OSS OS.
/. aren't more like it.
Freedom and Choice.
You're free to choose to be idealistically rigid in what you run. Or you're free to just run Linux / FreeBSD / whatever just cos u like it and you don't really care about the politics behind it.
Considering it's just a computer though, it does amuse me how people get so aggitated and vocal about there only being the One True Way to run a machine. This thread is for the most part a well reasoned debate, shame more of the threads on
I don't think that Soko was saying he/she prefers a binary only driver, but merely accepts a binary driver as opposed to no driver. Personally I agree.
In a private situtation, it's easy to pick and choose hardware based on whether there are Linux drivers or not, and in nathanh's case, whether there are OSS Linux drivers or not.
Consider the corporate environment where you don't build a server / laptop from components, but instead receive a package from a supplier. You can't choose all of the componenents in this situation. So you are left with a dilema. Either run Linux with binary drivers, or don't run Linux at all. Surely it is better to run a system which is mostly open source than a system which is completely closed source (be it Solaris, MacOS X or Windows). The reason my company uses Linux instead of FreeBSD is that Dell certifies their servers for Linux and I know I can get drivers and support for my servers.
Good Grief!!
/. forum. Wonders never cease.
;-)
A well reasoned grown up debate between two intellectual adults on a
There's 3 aspects to this though. You can already get Doom for the Nokia 7650, and Quake for the iPaq. So 3D gaming for portables is already here. I've also heard a lot of games developers saying that they are looking at bluetooth to do multiplayer games on mobiles.
:)
As far as wireless broadband goes, (and this is probably massive flamebait), but it does amuse me how far behind the US is compared to the rest of the world on this. Already in the UK, GPRS is enabling up to 33,6k (or even maybe 56k, I'm not totally sure) for mobile phones. Which may not sound a lot, but in my experience 56k is plenty enough bandwidth for web browsing. And on the form factor of a mobile phone it's probably enough for streaming video.
The only technology that is currently not available is the AI Avatar. To be honest I agree with the rest of the posts on here, after initial amusement that would just get plan irritating.
I personally think that the best mobile technology to come out recently (after bluetooth) is the video phones that have just come on sale. Right now though it seems that no single device has the 3d gaming ability, bluetooth, videophone, PDA abilities. Lots of devices have some of these (plus some other useless crap) but nothing seems to completely fit the bill. Which is pretty cool because manufacturers are trying out lots of new ideas. I think in twelve months we are going to have an absolutely rocking mobile platform as the gimmicks fall by the wayside and the good ideas converge into the mainstream. Well, in the UK anyway.
No amount of "M$ is teh devil!!!" rhetoric will change their minds. They don't care.
And you can't unseat MS as the King Of The Desktop
Ha Ha. No one (aside from corporates like RedHat) cares about this. If Linux gets really popular, cool. If it stays in the "techie geek" niche it has flourished in, so what? The whole point of OSS is not to bankrupt Microsoft.
OSS is about saying - I don't like that and I can do better.
OSS is about - I'm interested in that. Could I do it? Could I do it better? Let's have a go and find out.
And in my experience when I'm using a tool and I mail the developer and say "I've tried this but it's throwing an error. Have I misunderstood your instructions?", I get a reply saying "tell me more about what you are doing." And either I am being a spaz, or his software doesn't work, or I'm trying to do something with it that he didn't expect.
Anyway, my point is that OSS isn't about world domination, it's about fun. You say that you've tried Linux, don't like it and end up going back to Windows. Fine. Many of us tried Linux, liked it, and carried on using it. You are welcome to your own opinion. Just don't expect OSS to be something it isn't.
And you should have read the posts on /. The article misses the point. OSS developers really couldn't give a rats @$$ about market share. They are doing what they enjoy, and it just so happens that a lot of other people appreciate the work that they have done and find it very useful.
end of chat
I am a little confused by what you are saying here. How is mozilla.org streamlining and organising it's development process going to cause anyone problems? I fail to see what resemblance this has to having rugs pulled out from under you.
From what I read of the roadmap, if anything this will actually make mozilla more attractive to corporates. What they are proposing looks like it will help focus on bug resolution, interface consistency and performance of the browser. Furthermore it will help those trying to build upon the mozilla platform by making it the code base smaller and easier to understand. The only things that mozilla.org are proposing dropping are XPFE and unused code modules that no one is maintaining or using. And they've asked for companies to provide feedback if anything they are proposing causes said comapany issues.
I have to agree with the original poster and say that (IMHO) "This is a Good Thing"
to quote jrwilk01,
The Blackdown folks did release their code back to Sun you know. And, the Blackdown project is not an open source project, they license the reference implementation of the JDK from Sun and modify it to run on Linux. Thats why its called the "Java Linux Porting project".
whatchoo been smokin?
OpenOffice is based on StarOffice which was a commercial product. Java is a program language designed and built by Sun Microsystems.
In what way is that "a company takes work that is done gratis by the community and then patents it to claim authorship"? Perhaps you should check your facts before posting
In which case it might have prompted you to take a closer look at your corporate security. It's not like this guy spent hours tring to find a backdoor into the system.
You wouldn't leave you house unlocked all day then complain when someone wandered in and stole the milk from your fridge. Your house may come with locks or even an alarm - but you still need to lock it yourself and work out how to set the alarm.
So why should your computer system be any different?
you need a central syslog server. Syslogd can automatically send it's logs to a central syslog server using udp. Just look in your syslog.conf.
We've got a nifty setup where we have syslog-ng running on our central syslog server. syslog-ng then squirts the data directly into a MySQL database. We've then got a custom PHP interface which sorts the errors by severity and colour codes them so we can always see what is going on. Our switches write to it. Our nokia firewalls write to it. Even the F5 load balancers and the Network Applicance NAS systems. It's so useful that we have installed ntsyslog onto our win2k servers so that all the info is in one place.
I think what I was trying to make 2 separate points. The first is that the record industry has devalued music, so that people no longer consider pop music to have any worth. They may still want to listen to it, perhaps because of seeing it on MTV all hours of the day. But they are less and less willing to shell out their money for (for example) the new Backstreet Boys single which isn't that much different from New Kids on the Block or even the Osmonds (certainly here in the UK, we see a lot of manufactured bands remaking the same old songs and the kids who listen to them obviously aren't aware that the material isn't knew). Obviously I am only using my own anecdotal evidence (although I would take the evidence of the record labels with a pinch of salt considering the have an agenda to promote). What I was trying to say was that pop music has reduced to a lowest common denominator and people don't see any value in it.
My seond point was that my own experience is that P2P has resparked my own interest in music, to a point where I pay for CDs as a direct result of experiencing new music from downloaded mp3's. Your own music is probably a good example for me. I listen to a lot of House music and Drum and Bass. But I also like Alternative music, Blues and Hiphop. I have heard some Jazz on the radio, but (my impression of) Jazz is that it's a large medium with many different styles and I wouldn't know where to start to try it - and I'm loath to spend £100 on 10 or less CD's to find that I only really like 1 or 2 of the 8 CD's I've bought. Personally I am very likely to experiment a bit, do a bit of googling then download some stuff from fasttrack. And if I like it then I'm very likely to go and buy some stuff from amazon.
I was probably not very eloquent in trying to make these 2 separate points.
I agree wholeheartedly with your comments. My understanding of the RIAA argument is "Record sales are down, therefore that must be caused by filesharing". Perhaps they miss the point that the general public is bored and disinterested with the bland repetitive "product" which these companies provide. Today, the music industry is not about music but about product. When was the last time you saw a fat ugly woman with a beautiful voice in the Billboard charts. Pop music isn't my taste, but I'm not being snobbish about it - it has it's place. But the fact that it is mainly marketted to 11 year olds surely tells a lot about how adult interests aren't being considered.
The RIAA was borne out of the fact that these companies were able to utilise vinyl record technology to fulfill a service which the general public wanted, to provide popular music to the mass market. Today they've stepped away from that original premise. Mainstream music today is bland because it is easier to sell music that everyone finds inoffensive than sell music which some people think is great (and obviously others will hate).
For the record, I download mp3s from filesharing networks. And what I have found is that it has instroduced me to music I wasn't aware of before and I have purchased CD's off the back of those downloads. Those people who decry filesharing have obviously never used it. mp3 quality is ok for basic PC speakers, but usually sounds poor on a decent stereo. Downloaded mp3s are freqeuently incomplete. So it doesn't replace any other medium, but is an addition. I can't use my local radio station as a sampler for the sort of music I like. filesharing lets me do that.
I think the problem with the RedHat 8.0 implementation of KDE is that it actually breaks KDE and makes it incompatible with standard KDE.
I remember reading an interview with the guy who runs The Kompany and he basically said that with RedHat 8 you are effectively supporting a thrid platform (KDE, GNOME and then RedHat 8). I believe it's something along the lines of RedHat had to make significant changes to some key KDE stuff to get not just the look of the apps to be the same, but to get them to behave as if they were written under the same toolkit.
Which is probably (amongst other reasons) why you can't download RedHat RPMS from www.kde.org.
Yeah but this is like sticking Linux on an Ipaq. Everyone knows it's possible, but seeing it is still cool.
/. is titled "news for nerds . . . . " but it has also historically ran articles which are just plan cool (if you are a geek). For example - the dude who built a lifesize millenium falcon in his back garden. We all know it's possible, but it's still neat to actually see someone do it.
Not a popular recommendation on /. I know, but the microsoft reader does what you want. It remembers the last page in an ebook you read, and lets you continue reading from that point next time you read that doc.
Most of the new kit I buy today is USB. There is no need for this legacy kit. Having just visited a supplier, I was able to walk away (with their knowledge & consent) with 35M of data including beta software and pdf's. All on a 64M USB pendrive which cost me £35. Try using floppy disks for that.
I have just got rid of a Dell laptop which had no serial port. So I got a USB -> serial converter to use a console on the back of hardware.
There's no need for old kit that was has been superceded by newer more functoinal technology. I'm not one for buying new stuff cos it's new, but also there's no point hanging on to old kit just cos you are familiar with it when there is newer and better kit which is more appropriate to today's environment.
This isn't a personal dig at you, but I don't understand why people seem to think that getting Linux to be used by grandma's or some dude named Joe Six-Pack is important.
Windows and Linux are different things. Windows is a great out of the box solution which can be set up with minimal knowledge, as long as the user doesn't mind doing persistent housekeeping on their PC / Server.
Linux is a better solution for people who want to understand what their computer is actually doing, and are prepared to spend the time involved to gain that knowledge and get the computer running 'properly'.
If you try and get Linux to be super easy to use for newbies, and at the same time retain it's configurability, flexibility and reliablility, then at some point the project will come unstuck.
Remember Lincoln: "you can please some of the people all of the time, or all of the people some of the time. but you can't please all the people all of the time".
Instead of trying to turn the Linux desktop into a windows clone, perhaps we would benefit more by expanding upons it's strengths instead of trying to turn it into something it's not.
Try this for a mouse you can authenticate with. Not sure if there are Linnu drivers for the fingerprint stuff though
This is what concerns me about Windows Media Player 9. I've got a win2k fileserver with all my mp3's on it. And until I buy an ADSL router, I need a windows box for my USB ADSL modem. And I am concerned that even if I set the ownership on my media to Full Control to the Administrator and allow everyone read only access, the WM9 will still be able to get around this. (which I guess shows how much faith I have in the win32 server platform)
In response to goldberg,
The difference now is all down to Sony. Today software houses see the massive market created by the PS and it's brand successor's. When XBox was due to be released I had people asking me about Microsoft's new Playstation. Same as the way people don't say 'personal cassette player' but say Walkman, Playstation is synonymous in the general public's mind with console's and gaming.
The clue's that PC gaming is on the decline? Let's look at recent release schedules. GTA Vice City was out in early december on PS2. Still no confirmed PC release date (different to GTA3 cos it's little more than a levels disk). Splinter Cell, out before XMAS on XBox, probably due out end of Jan on PC. Colin McRae 3 & Toca 3, out mid-late November on XBox / PS2. Still no confirmed release dates for PC. Which platforms did EA decide to release 'LOTR The Two Towers' on, and which platform did it decide was not worth the development effort (PC incase you didn't know). Take a look at E3 and, aside from Doom 3, which of the killer titles were console based and how many were PC based.
Technology is not the decider on whether consumers purchase a games platform, it's brand awareness. And it's installed userbase that dictates which platforms third party developers support. Dreamcast is a prime example of this. And as a side argument, development costs are lower as it's easier to develop and test for a single console platform than for the miriad of different hardware combinations that exist with PC.
And do you not think that being able to pick up Warcraft 3 and the Brady strategy guide for less than half what the game was selling for two months ago indicates that the game was over printed and stores have more stock than they can sell?
I'm not saying that the PC market is dead, I'm saying that if you look objectively, the signs are there to indicate that the market is starting to lose interest and move towards console gaming.
And btw, go play Mario sunshine (or mario 64), have a think about level design, character control and pacing. And then come back and tell me how much better Warcraft 3 is than it's predecessor's because it's now in 3d.
The fact is, if anyone wants games, they use Windows . . . . Any gamer worth their salt knows XP is where it's at for games
I beg to differ. Anyone wants games they get a console. Any gamer worth their salt knows Gamecube is where your hardcore gamer sits, and PS2 is where your casual gamer sits. Your XBox gamer sits somewhere in the middle and is usually an ex-PC gamer. I will admit that the only thing which keeps XP on my home machine is the lack of commercial quality games under Linux.
The PC gaming market is on the decline anyway. With the cost of a console at about the same price of an average 3d graphics card (£150 for a GeFrorce4 Ti4200, ~£160 for an XBox with 2 games), PC gaming is rapidly becoming uneconomical. With the gap between PC and console games visual tricks diminshing, PC gameing will soon go the way of the arcade. And the Dodo