The GNOME philosophy "release often" is better than KDE approach because developers can get feedback from users more frecuently
I love the release often philosophy, but it does mean that the GNOME stuff is in a state of constant flux. The October GNOME release addressed this to some extent, but for the casual user upgrading must be confusing. The KDE Krash and 1.9x releases are an attempt at the release often approach by the KDE team. Given that many people see KDE as an ideal way of moving from Windows, the apparent infrequency of releases must be reassuringly like the release schedule of Windows service packs.
On the other hand, if you download the nightly KDE 2.0 snapshots, you can get a "release very often" KDE experience!
looks to be a very nice upgrade, one worthy of bumping the major version number
It's almost a rewrite - so definitely worth the bump from 1.x to 2.x.
The inclusion of a lightweight distributed object system is a bonus (early work with the MICO Orb showed that it was simply too heavyweight for a desktop environment), and removes a dependency on a large third party package.
All in all, KDE seems to represent an ideological alternative to GNOME. GNOME is ideal for hackers and others who love expermentation, tweaking, etc. KDE offers a more consistent and 'monolithic' environment, reflected in their infrequent releases versus the 'release often' philosophy of GNOME.
I reckon KDE is going to be the 'killer app' of the free software movement - not because it is better or worse than GNOME, but because it meets the needs of ordinary computer users perfectly.
I have a dual boot machine with OpenBSD on the first drive and Linux on the second. This reflects our server setup - a combination of Linux database servers and OpenBSD webservers. As the connection to our ISP is awful and I'm only blessed with one development machine, I do all programming and testing on the one machine.
I've found OpenBSD to be an excellent alternative to Linux. The install is quick - just follow the instructions carefully the first time - and the man pages are very good.
As a reflection of OpenBSD's stripped down philosophy all I have installed above and beyond the core OS is:
NEdit (statically linked against Lesstif) Gimp (development version and required libs) Blackbox window manager Netscape (the BSDI version - seems far more stable than on any other platform I've used it on)
Ironically, you failed to mention the only episode when French troops actually engaged American troops, that is, the invasion of North Africa in 1942
The US and Britain also sank a large part of the French fleet anchored in Algeria to stop it falling into German hands. This created serious resentment of the Allies in France at the time - compounded by careless Allied bombing of targets in France which resulted in civilian deaths.
In fact, several thousand French troops fought on the side of the Germans as members of the SS. This is rarely recorded for several reasons. The French are very embarassed about their role in WWII (French museums have exhibitions on the resistance and liberation - but ignore the massive collabaration with the occupying German forces). The men who fought in the SS are virtually all dead, having been handed over to the Free French forces by the US Army who they had surrendered to. When a French general asked why the men were wearing German uniforms, one responded asking why the general was wearing a US uniform. Consequently they were shot.
It is estimated that 250,000 people died in France as a consequence of the purge (which was largely rooted in guilt brought on by French collabaration). It should come as no surprise that the most vociferous condemnation of collabarators came from those suspected of it themselves. It is also a sad fact that those who received the worst treatment were women suspected of sleeping with German troops, while others saw it as a great opportunity to settle old scores. Meanwhile, most if not all of those responsible for colluding in things like the rounding up of Jews for liquidation went unpunished. Many became important in political life later, especially under the Gaulist administration.
It appears that German army orders to treat the French populace with respect paid off - the resistance was a tiny and ineffectual, while collabaration was endemic. As many historians and contemporary French people observed, few of those who claimed to be members of the resistance really were.
It all goes to show that no side is free of guilt when it comes to acts of inhumaity during wartime. The victors simply benefit from their ability to write history how they see fit. Occasional glimpses of a more unclouded past are provided by declassification of documents, but many will never see the light of day having been destroyed or indefinitely restricted.
France has fought against the US - remember that in certain parts of the Southern United States people still speak a dialect based on French. French troops also fought against the US in the disputed regions of Mexico and Texas.
French Canadians may also have fought against the US. My knowledge of the history of Canada is hazier than that of the US, so I can only recall the Canadian/British incursions into the US (which famously resulted in the burning of the Whitehouse).
Regardless, your inference that CIA spying is acceptable simply because the US has been at war with those countries in the distant past - what kind of justification is that? You sound like a George Bush Jr voter to me. This kind of xenophobic bullshit is redolent of the 1920's when the US retreated into isolationaism, leaving the League of Nations without a very important member state...
This narrow view that US interests both economically and politically should take precedence over all else is dangerous. The often partisan nature of US foreign policy has resulted in tragedies like the bombing of US embassies by Islamic extremists. Unless the US adopts a more ethical worldview it is going to become a pariah nation. An economy based on espionage (and you want to look at US national debt before making assumptions about how strong it currently is) will not result in long term security. The globalisation of economics, and incredible amount of US econimic concerns that are foreign owned means that the US is only viable as long as it doesn't alienate foreign capital. Upsetting entities like the European Union, India and Russia will not help.
Many in the US like to scoff at the notion that countries like India and Russia are threats to US economic security - but in the long term these countries have more economic potential than the US. They may be 'late starters', but they can avoid the teething troubles of older high-tech economies like those in the US and UK. If they begin to realise their economic potential then the US is going to become marginalised... something that regularily threatens to happen in the UK as well. The xenophobic jingoism of US politicians is readily apparent in the right wing of UK politics - and it's clear that nationalist bullshit ("save the pound", "no to Europe") is just short-term attempts to win political power at the expense of long-term economic stability.
My comment to which this is attached has a rather out of context subject line. In fact it has the subject line from my previous Slashdot post... all thanks to Mozilla on Linux mimicking that bullshit on Windwows where browsers prefill forms based on previous entries.
RealAudio is a joke anyway, so the player being a pile of clinker is no great loss. The real lingua-franca for audio on the web, MP3, is very well supported under Linux.
As for IE5, I have to admit it is a pleasant experience using it... Mozilla has a lot to catch up with in this department, but I'm confident that it will. At that point it will be MicroSoft who will be playing catch up, as I'm sure IE is going to be held up by it's origins in the pre-HTML 4.0 era. Chris Wareham
I would be very suprised if Dave Cutler's early designs for NT didn't feature a number of ideas from VMS. You don't design such a thing as an operating system and then ignore those ideas for the next one.
As for the stablility of VMS - I have never seen a Vax crash. They still grind away at the back of many major companies because it would be too difficult and pointless to replace them. The only companies I know of that have switched from VMS had the following reasons:
1) The vendor had stopped supporting a key application they were using on VMS.
2) Ignorant managers felt a change was needed.
In the second category was one of my former employers. The company had an enormous database on a single Vax. Management decided to move it NT - as VMS programmers are a scarce resource, and in the words of the boss 'we should consolidate on Microsoft'. There's nothing like putting all your eggs in one (incompatible) basket.
Several colleagues spent many frustrating months trying to get a dual Pentium Pro 200 Compaq server to replicate the performance and reliability of the Vax. Two years later the Vax is still chugging away serving the whole company, and the Compaq is being used as a file server for 15 people... between the near daily reboots due to NT's joke implementation of SMP.
1) Complacency on IBM's part. They knew they had an excellent product on their hands, but failed to encourage develoers to produce applications for it. Most application developers were locked into early versions of Windows already.
2) Microsoft's superb marketing skill. Don't forget that this is the company who redesigned the look and feel of Windows 3.11 and convinced the world that does was no longer part of Windows 95.
3) NT had a design goal which stated it should look like Windows 3.11. This meant people assumed it was an easy transition from Windows 3.11 to Windows NT. The 'object oriented' interface (pioneered by Smalltalk and Stepstone engineers years before) came later.
You are a fool if you mean to imply that NT outsold OS/2 on technical merit. NT 3.51 was an enourmous resource hog that ran on a very restricted list of hardware. NT 4.0 broke the original design of NT and OS/2 to improve performance but in doing so threw stability out of the window.
Now don't bother replying. If your the Anonymous Coward responsible for most of the pro-NT remarks in this thread then you are either very ill-informed or simply deluded.
I assume you are the author of the first post in thos thread - if so I didn't realise you were being serious.
Having programmed on OS/2, Windows NT (briefly under 3.51) and a number of Unix flavours, I found your assertions laughable. OS/2 came on floppies because nearly all software did at the time. I've never seen a software locker with a copy of Windows 3 that wasn't on floppies. Even the copy of Windows NT 3.51 came on floppies. The last version of OS/2 that I used came on a CD-ROM though.
Anyway comparing Windows `today' (your word) to OS/2 1.2 is totally bogus. It's also wrong. Windows 95 and 98 do not feature pre-emptive multi tasking, but the shitty co-operative kind. NT was a rehash of VMS commisioned by Microsoft when they fell out with IBM.
I've long thought that Dave Cutler (the designer of VMS and NT) must have left MS shortly after NT 3.51 was released. It's been a dog of an operating system ever since. The early reviews of Windows 2000 I have seen don't suggest it's going to get much better either.
So the GCHQ is going all touchy-feely. Whatever next, Spys-R-Us with a nice line in assasination tools for the discerning would be spy? Although I suppose that's more MI5's department. Perhaps this is all part of the government's attempt to give state agencies a purpose in the new economically driven Britain.
Yes, I have been to Quebec. I wouldn't have made the kind of comments I did unless they were from *personal* experience. I noticed that a lot of the locals were cordial to my girlfriend (who obviously spoke French without an accent), but were far less friendly towards me. I also noticed a curious counterpart to this attitude when an Canadian friend went to France and was given the third-degree by customs. The rest of the people he was with all had British passports, but they only picked on him... odd.
I'm sorry if the subtlety of my phrasing infers that I found all Quebec citizens unfriendly. My use of the word *often* was not intended as a gross generalisation - but I have to admit the majority of people I met would insist on speaking French when they knew I was English, and then become very terse if I spoke French to them.
Not particularily suprising that the page expresses racist sentiments. The citizens of Quebec are often intolerant of foreigners, especially English speakers. This resentment, directed towards the more affluent English speaking territories, started in Canada's colonial past. And before anyone accuses me of bigotry I'll just add that my girlfriend is French - although politics is something we agree to differ on. I vote Liberal and she votes National Front... it's worth remembering that one of the earliest 'fascist' political parties originated in France, and the National Front is still a credible force there.
Your comments are a little bit daft, as there are already laws in place to cope with people jerking off in public. There called decency laws, and they seem to extend to public lavatories in some countries (George Michael springs to mind for some reason). The issue is freedom of speech and opposing censorship - the imposition of one person's world view on others. The biggest problem with Internet blacklisting software is stated clearly in the article. We have no way of knowing what is being blocked. This is tantamount to the censorship practised in the Eastern bloc during the Soviet era.
The scary possibililty that the Time/Warner and AOL merger suggests is this:
AOL has control of the access to one medium for a huge number of people. Time/Warner will be providing the content for AOL, and it opens up the possiblility of manipulating people via that content. Compuserve useed to make it difficult to access the web, in the hope of restricting their subscribers to their own 'value added' sites. With such a huge media organisation this becomes must more easily accomplished.
Chris Wareham
Media monopoly time ...
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 4
I wonder how much of the Western world's media is now concentrated into the hands of Time/Warner and News International. Forget monopolies based on commodities(Microsoft, etc), domination of information dissemination is the *really* scary prospect.
Given the partisan nature of newspapers like The Sun (backed up by a slightly more erudite Times that sings the same tune), it's got to the point where media moguls can swing the outcome of elections... And if you don't believe me, look at UK elections following the Falklands war. The jingoism and patriotic bullshit spouted by the media ensured Margaret Thatchers's return to power despite the appaling state of the economy.
This is a very level and concise view of the issues involved with mandatiry censorware, but I fear you are preaching to the converted. The people who really count in this are the politicians desperate for a soapbox and the tabloid newspapers looking for an emotive headline.
Here in the UK, it is only in the last year that newspaper articles have started to shift their empasis towards a pro-Internet view. Prior to that, newspapers like The Sun and Daily Mail as a great opportunity for shrill editorials about Internet porn, etc.
What's strange is that there seems to be a growing acceptance that the Interenet is a powerfull and unstoppable medium. Government acts aimed at controlling it's content are falling by the wayside due to the lack of controls that *could* be put in place.
Hopefully the stifling of Internet access in public places (schools, libraries, etc) will be the high-tide of net censorship. As computers become more and more ubiquitous in the home, and web access forms part of digital TV content, we'll see the pro-censorship lobby marginalised to the fringes of knee-jerk politics.
The original authors of Rosegarden have recently issued a patched up release that fixes a number of bugs. Personally I haven't had it crash on me, but I do agree that aRts/Brahms is a bit buggy at present. There again, I stopped using Cubase because Steinberg seem more interested in adding new features than sorting stablility issues. Thank god for the decent hardware sequencer in my W-30!
There's aRts and Brahms for KDE which provide a virtual synthesiser and sequencer respectively. There is even talk of adding direct to disk recording (think Cubase VST) as aRts provides the means to do this. The URL's are:
For the GNOME fans among us, there is Beast which has been in devlopment for a long time but only recently saw the light of day. This gives similar functionality as aRts/Brahms. It's URL is:
http://beats.gtk.org/
Also check out news.gnome.org for the official announcement of a Beast snapshot.
There is also a venerable package called Rosegarden. Development has been a little bit spradic in the last couple of years, and it may be a little bit archaic to those used to GNOME or KDE interfaces. It is IMHO the best looking X Window application that doesn't rely on a true toolkit. Check it out at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/rose.html
There was talk of a new Rosegarden using the GNOME framework, but it hasn't progressed beyond the conceptual stage yet.
There are three Objective C compilers I know of. The GCC frontend resulted from work by NeXTSTEP to add ObjC support. Stepstone had the original compiler, (Brad Cox, the creator of Objective C, owned Stepstone). Finally, there is the portable objective compiler (POC), which many on comp.lang.objective-c seem to use. I haven't used Stepstone's compiler, but the POC seems to stick to Brad Cox's book on Objective C more closely than GCC's Objc frontend.
Slashdot Mirror
You wont be able to use the dynamically linked Netscape, because it's linked against Motif 1.2 not 2.1.
Chris Wareham
The GNOME philosophy "release often" is better than KDE approach because developers can get feedback from users more frecuently
I love the release often philosophy, but it does mean that the GNOME stuff is in a state of constant flux. The October GNOME release addressed this to some extent, but for the casual user upgrading must be confusing. The KDE Krash and 1.9x releases are an attempt at the release often approach by the KDE team. Given that many people see KDE as an ideal way of moving from Windows, the apparent infrequency of releases must be reassuringly like the release schedule of Windows service packs.
On the other hand, if you download the nightly KDE 2.0 snapshots, you can get a "release very often" KDE experience!
Chris Wareham
looks to be a very nice upgrade, one worthy of bumping the major version number
It's almost a rewrite - so definitely worth the bump from 1.x to 2.x.
The inclusion of a lightweight distributed object system is a bonus (early work with the MICO Orb showed that it was simply too heavyweight for a desktop environment), and removes a dependency on a large third party package.
All in all, KDE seems to represent an ideological alternative to GNOME. GNOME is ideal for hackers and others who love expermentation, tweaking, etc. KDE offers a more consistent and 'monolithic' environment, reflected in their infrequent releases versus the 'release often' philosophy of GNOME.
I reckon KDE is going to be the 'killer app' of the free software movement - not because it is better or worse than GNOME, but because it meets the needs of ordinary computer users perfectly.
Here's to version 2.0 of both KDE and GNOME!
Chris
Chris Wareham
I have a dual boot machine with OpenBSD on the first drive and Linux on the second. This reflects our server setup - a combination of Linux database servers and OpenBSD webservers. As the connection to our ISP is awful and I'm only blessed with one development machine, I do all programming and testing on the one machine.
I've found OpenBSD to be an excellent alternative to Linux. The install is quick - just follow the instructions carefully the first time - and the man pages are very good.
As a reflection of OpenBSD's stripped down philosophy all I have installed above and beyond the core OS is:
NEdit (statically linked against Lesstif)
Gimp (development version and required libs)
Blackbox window manager
Netscape (the BSDI version - seems far more stable
than on any other platform I've used it on)
Chris Wareham
Ironically, you failed to mention the only episode when French troops actually engaged American troops, that is, the invasion of North Africa in 1942
The US and Britain also sank a large part of the French fleet anchored in Algeria to stop it falling into German hands. This created serious resentment of the Allies in France at the time - compounded by careless Allied bombing of targets in France which resulted in civilian deaths.
In fact, several thousand French troops fought on the side of the Germans as members of the SS. This is rarely recorded for several reasons. The French are very embarassed about their role in WWII (French museums have exhibitions on the resistance and liberation - but ignore the massive collabaration with the occupying German forces). The men who fought in the SS are virtually all dead, having been handed over to the Free French forces by the US Army who they had surrendered to. When a French general asked why the men were wearing German uniforms, one responded asking why the general was wearing a US uniform. Consequently they were shot.
It is estimated that 250,000 people died in France as a consequence of the purge (which was largely rooted in guilt brought on by French collabaration). It should come as no surprise that the most vociferous condemnation of collabarators came from those suspected of it themselves. It is also a sad fact that those who received the worst treatment were women suspected of sleeping with German troops, while others saw it as a great opportunity to settle old scores. Meanwhile, most if not all of those responsible for colluding in things like the rounding up of Jews for liquidation went unpunished. Many became important in political life later, especially under the Gaulist administration.
It appears that German army orders to treat the French populace with respect paid off - the resistance was a tiny and ineffectual, while collabaration was endemic. As many historians and contemporary French people observed, few of those who claimed to be members of the resistance really were.
It all goes to show that no side is free of guilt when it comes to acts of inhumaity during wartime. The victors simply benefit from their ability to write history how they see fit. Occasional glimpses of a more unclouded past are provided by declassification of documents, but many will never see the light of day having been destroyed or indefinitely restricted.
Chris Wareham
France has fought against the US - remember that in certain parts of the Southern United States people still speak a dialect based on French. French troops also fought against the US in the disputed regions of Mexico and Texas.
...
... something that regularily threatens to happen in the UK as well. The xenophobic jingoism of US politicians is readily apparent in the right wing of UK politics - and it's clear that nationalist bullshit ("save the pound", "no to Europe") is just short-term attempts to win political power at the expense of long-term economic stability.
French Canadians may also have fought against the US. My knowledge of the history of Canada is hazier than that of the US, so I can only recall the Canadian/British incursions into the US (which famously resulted in the burning of the Whitehouse).
Regardless, your inference that CIA spying is acceptable simply because the US has been at war with those countries in the distant past - what kind of justification is that? You sound like a George Bush Jr voter to me. This kind of xenophobic bullshit is redolent of the 1920's when the US retreated into isolationaism, leaving the League of Nations without a very important member state
This narrow view that US interests both economically and politically should take precedence over all else is dangerous. The often partisan nature of US foreign policy has resulted in tragedies like the bombing of US embassies by Islamic extremists. Unless the US adopts a more ethical worldview it is going to become a pariah nation. An economy based on espionage (and you want to look at US national debt before making assumptions about how strong it currently is) will not result in long term security. The globalisation of economics, and incredible amount of US econimic concerns that are foreign owned means that the US is only viable as long as it doesn't alienate foreign capital. Upsetting entities like the European Union, India and Russia will not help.
Many in the US like to scoff at the notion that countries like India and Russia are threats to US economic security - but in the long term these countries have more economic potential than the US. They may be 'late starters', but they can avoid the teething troubles of older high-tech economies like those in the US and UK. If they begin to realise their economic potential then the US is going to become marginalised
Chris Wareham
Although the Mozilla coders have disabled all other theme support in favour of XUL, the scrollbars on my copy use the GTKStep theme ...
Chris Wareham
My comment to which this is attached has a rather out of context subject line. In fact it has the subject line from my previous Slashdot post ... all thanks to Mozilla on Linux mimicking that bullshit on Windwows where browsers prefill forms based on previous entries.
Well, I'm going back to Navigator 3.04.
Chris Wareham
Try starting up a shop to build cars with the classic lines of a Ferrari, and see how many seconds you last.
Companies do just that. Look on the web for replica Ferraris, Jaguars and Lamborghinis.
Chris Wareham
(see subject line)
Chris Wareham
RealPlayer on linux is a joke
RealAudio is a joke anyway, so the player being a pile of clinker is no great loss. The real lingua-franca for audio on the web, MP3, is very well supported under Linux.
As for IE5, I have to admit it is a pleasant experience using it ... Mozilla has a lot to catch up with in this department, but I'm confident that it will. At that point it will be MicroSoft who will be playing catch up, as I'm sure IE is going to be held up by it's origins in the pre-HTML 4.0 era.
Chris Wareham
I would be very suprised if Dave Cutler's early designs for NT didn't feature a number of ideas from VMS. You don't design such a thing as an operating system and then ignore those ideas for the next one.
... between the near daily reboots due to NT's joke implementation of SMP.
As for the stablility of VMS - I have never seen a Vax crash. They still grind away at the back of many major companies because it would be too difficult and pointless to replace them. The only companies I know of that have switched from VMS had the following reasons:
1) The vendor had stopped supporting a key application they were using on VMS.
2) Ignorant managers felt a change was needed.
In the second category was one of my former employers. The company had an enormous database on a single Vax. Management decided to move it NT - as VMS programmers are a scarce resource, and in the words of the boss 'we should consolidate on Microsoft'. There's nothing like putting all your eggs in one (incompatible) basket.
Several colleagues spent many frustrating months trying to get a dual Pentium Pro 200 Compaq server to replicate the performance and reliability of the Vax. Two years later the Vax is still chugging away serving the whole company, and the Compaq is being used as a file server for 15 people
Chris Wareham
The reasons for NT being successfull are:
1) Complacency on IBM's part. They knew they had an excellent product on their hands, but failed to encourage develoers to produce applications for it. Most application developers were locked into early versions of Windows already.
2) Microsoft's superb marketing skill. Don't forget that this is the company who redesigned the look and feel of Windows 3.11 and convinced the world that does was no longer part of Windows 95.
3) NT had a design goal which stated it should look like Windows 3.11. This meant people assumed it was an easy transition from Windows 3.11 to Windows NT. The 'object oriented' interface (pioneered by Smalltalk and Stepstone engineers years before) came later.
You are a fool if you mean to imply that NT outsold OS/2 on technical merit. NT 3.51 was an enourmous resource hog that ran on a very restricted list of hardware. NT 4.0 broke the original design of NT and OS/2 to improve performance but in doing so threw stability out of the window.
Now don't bother replying. If your the Anonymous Coward responsible for most of the pro-NT remarks in this thread then you are either very ill-informed or simply deluded.
Chris Wareham
I assume you are the author of the first post in thos thread - if so I didn't realise you were being serious.
Having programmed on OS/2, Windows NT (briefly under 3.51) and a number of Unix flavours, I found your assertions laughable. OS/2 came on floppies because nearly all software did at the time. I've never seen a software locker with a copy of Windows 3 that wasn't on floppies. Even the copy of Windows NT 3.51 came on floppies. The last version of OS/2 that I used came on a CD-ROM though.
Anyway comparing Windows `today' (your word) to OS/2 1.2 is totally bogus. It's also wrong. Windows 95 and 98 do not feature pre-emptive multi tasking, but the shitty co-operative kind. NT was a rehash of VMS commisioned by Microsoft when they fell out with IBM.
I've long thought that Dave Cutler (the designer of VMS and NT) must have left MS shortly after NT 3.51 was released. It's been a dog of an operating system ever since. The early reviews of Windows 2000 I have seen don't suggest it's going to get much better either.
Chris Wareham
I think you mean MI6, MI5
You're probably right, although who knows whether MI5 doesn't resort to assasination at times? (That should get the conspuracy theorists going).
Chris Wareham
So the GCHQ is going all touchy-feely. Whatever next, Spys-R-Us with a nice line in assasination tools for the discerning would be spy? Although I suppose that's more MI5's department. Perhaps this is all part of the government's attempt to give state agencies a purpose in the new economically driven Britain.
Chris Wareham
Yes, I have been to Quebec. I wouldn't have made the kind of comments I did unless they were from *personal* experience. I noticed that a lot of the locals were cordial to my girlfriend (who obviously spoke French without an accent), but were far less friendly towards me. I also noticed a curious counterpart to this attitude when an Canadian friend went to France and was given the third-degree by customs. The rest of the people he was with all had British passports, but they only picked on him ... odd.
...
I'm sorry if the subtlety of my phrasing infers that I found all Quebec citizens unfriendly. My use of the word *often* was not intended as a gross generalisation - but I have to admit the majority of people I met would insist on speaking French when they knew I was English, and then become very terse if I spoke French to them.
Go figure
Chris Wareham
Not particularily suprising that the page expresses racist sentiments. The citizens of Quebec are often intolerant of foreigners, especially English speakers. This resentment, directed towards the more affluent English speaking territories, started in Canada's colonial past. And before anyone accuses me of bigotry I'll just add that my girlfriend is French - although politics is something we agree to differ on. I vote Liberal and she votes National Front ... it's worth remembering that one of the earliest 'fascist' political parties originated in France, and the National Front is still a credible force there.
Chris Wareham
Your comments are a little bit daft, as there are already laws in place to cope with people jerking off in public. There called decency laws, and they seem to extend to public lavatories in some countries (George Michael springs to mind for some reason). The issue is freedom of speech and opposing censorship - the imposition of one person's world view on others. The biggest problem with Internet blacklisting software is stated clearly in the article. We have no way of knowing what is being blocked. This is tantamount to the censorship practised in the Eastern bloc during the Soviet era.
Chris Wareham
The scary possibililty that the Time/Warner and AOL merger suggests is this:
AOL has control of the access to one medium for a huge number of people. Time/Warner will be providing the content for AOL, and it opens up the possiblility of manipulating people via that content. Compuserve useed to make it difficult to access the web, in the hope of restricting their subscribers to their own 'value added' sites. With such a huge media organisation this becomes must more easily accomplished.
Chris Wareham
I wonder how much of the Western world's media is now concentrated into the hands of Time/Warner and News International. Forget monopolies based on commodities(Microsoft, etc), domination of information dissemination is the *really* scary prospect.
... And if you don't believe me, look at UK elections following the Falklands war. The jingoism and patriotic bullshit spouted by the media ensured Margaret Thatchers's return to power despite the appaling state of the economy.
Given the partisan nature of newspapers like The Sun (backed up by a slightly more erudite Times that sings the same tune), it's got to the point where media moguls can swing the outcome of elections
Chris Wareham
This is a very level and concise view of the issues involved with mandatiry censorware, but I fear you are preaching to the converted. The people who really count in this are the politicians desperate for a soapbox and the tabloid newspapers looking for an emotive headline.
Here in the UK, it is only in the last year that newspaper articles have started to shift their empasis towards a pro-Internet view. Prior to that, newspapers like The Sun and Daily Mail as a great opportunity for shrill editorials about Internet porn, etc.
What's strange is that there seems to be a growing acceptance that the Interenet is a powerfull and unstoppable medium. Government acts aimed at controlling it's content are falling by the wayside due to the lack of controls that *could* be put in place.
Hopefully the stifling of Internet access in public places (schools, libraries, etc) will be the high-tide of net censorship. As computers become more and more ubiquitous in the home, and web access forms part of digital TV content, we'll see the pro-censorship lobby marginalised to the fringes of knee-jerk politics.
Chris Wareham
The original authors of Rosegarden have recently issued a patched up release that fixes a number of bugs. Personally I haven't had it crash on me, but I do agree that aRts/Brahms is a bit buggy at present. There again, I stopped using Cubase because Steinberg seem more interested in adding new features than sorting stablility issues. Thank god for the decent hardware sequencer in my W-30!
Chris Wareham
There's aRts and Brahms for KDE which provide a virtual synthesiser and sequencer respectively. There is even talk of adding direct to disk recording (think Cubase VST) as aRts provides the means to do this. The URL's are:
a hms/
http://www.arts-project.org/
http://lienhard.desy.de/mackag/homepages/jan/Br
For the GNOME fans among us, there is Beast which has been in devlopment for a long time but only recently saw the light of day. This gives similar functionality as aRts/Brahms. It's URL is:
http://beats.gtk.org/
Also check out news.gnome.org for the official announcement of a Beast snapshot.
There is also a venerable package called Rosegarden. Development has been a little bit spradic in the last couple of years, and it may be a little bit archaic to those used to GNOME or KDE interfaces. It is IMHO the best looking X Window application that doesn't rely on a true toolkit. Check it out at:
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~masjpf/rose.html
There was talk of a new Rosegarden using the GNOME framework, but it hasn't progressed beyond the conceptual stage yet.
Chris Wareham
There are three Objective C compilers I know of. The GCC frontend resulted from work by NeXTSTEP to add ObjC support. Stepstone had the original compiler, (Brad Cox, the creator of Objective C, owned Stepstone). Finally, there is the portable objective compiler (POC), which many on comp.lang.objective-c seem to use. I haven't used Stepstone's compiler, but the POC seems to stick to Brad Cox's book on Objective C more closely than GCC's Objc frontend.
Chris Wareham