This is true currently, but it is set to change. Web based deployment is excellent for non-tech business in that there is very little support on the desktop (no rollouts etc).
Although I would like that too, I don't see that happening soon.
Reasons: - You need always-on broadband to credibly distribute apps that are rich enough in functionality to be useful, only a small percentage of web users and an even smaller percentage of pc users have this. - Unless we see an order of magnitude improvement in how broad broadband is (extremely unlikely), for adequate performance you would still need to download the entire app to the local system, which would take a while, meaning it would have to be able to persist between sessions, and therefore be installable on the local disk. At that point, you have no benefit whatsoever of web apps over locally installed setup.exe files downloaded from a website.
Ofcourse, if somehow someone manages to get a browser onto the vast majority of web-enabled systems that allows selective downloading of functionality as you use it without impacting performance much while you're downloading additional functionality (like simple html web apps), then my argument is invalidated. But then how likely is that to happen "soon"?
And if we still need somewhere to save our favourites, we can easily use such a VM to build a 'traditional' web browser, but genuinely based on standards.
What you're proposing sounds an awful lot like mozilla, but with a W3C rubberstamp on it. Mozilla after all is just a runtime running a traditional web browser on top of it.
It seems to me you just want the exact same thing as the new mozilla/opera group wants, but based on xforms instead of on html. Html has momentum, xforms doesn't. So if you say xforms should be the base for future web apps instead of html, you've got to explain why that is. Why is that?
Huh? How the heck has history shown we're an untrustworthy keeper of these things? The fact that we used two to avert an extremely costly and bloody land invasion of the Japanese home island?
The use of nuclear weapons on hiroshima and nagasaki was tactically unnecessary, it did not decide the war, it only speeded up the ending of it. Especially the second bomb was unnecessary, since the japanese had gotten the message after the first one.
They could have also dropped the bombs on low-populated areas, but instead they dropped it on civilian cities, knowing full well that the destruction and loss of human life would be massive. And they dropped them without warning, to make sure loss of civilian life would be maximized.
This massive civilian massacre was a constant factor in WWII-era allied campaigns. Japan and Germany saw constant nighttime firebombing in the later stages of the war, designed to kill as much civilians as possible to destroy enemy morale. Ofcourse, since the allied forces won, the history books were written in such a way as to obfuscate this fact.
I *do* recall the simple existence of them preventing war with the USSR and in the end, being partly responsible for the fall of that country when it couldn't keep up...
Exactly. What kept the cold war from becoming hot was the fact that both sides had nuclear weapons. That's the theory of nuclear detente: if everyone has them, no one can use them.
It would be great if they open-sourced java3d as a trial balloon. It would be really cool to be able to develop that further into a true gaming api in addition to the 3D visualization api that it is right now.
1. Will everyone follow. They are no authority, so if any party decide they're not going to follow it, we're back at our main problem.
KDE, GNOME, and the big independent projects like mozilla and oo.o are following, as well as the major distro's, so even if it won't be compulsory to follow that will create a de facto standard.
2. Who will port those gazillion apps that we do use, but have been developped before? Answer: No one. Because of general laziness, sure, but also because some of them aren't even open source!
That's indeed a problem. But I think when the desktop becomes this smoothly integrated environment with a few non-compliant apps sticking out of it like a sore thumb there will be enough user and developer pressure on those apps to get up to date. Like how apps on mac os x get slammed if they don't use apple's gui libraries but instead "roll their own", and as a result very few mac apps "roll their own."
Ah. How do you call that thing that gets launched when you type "startx" then? I think we just have a terminoloogy problem right here.
What the parent meant, and what I think is silly too, is that you're only supposed to call it the X Window System, X Window, X, X11, or basically any variation containing X except for X-Windows, which sounds a bit too much like windows, and some people have a visceral reaction to even just the name of a microsoft product.
There are PRIMARY, SECONDARY, CLIPBOARD. Actually, apps can ask for any clipboard by providing their own names. Too much liberty in the implementation and a lack of a properly defined standard is the main problem.
I disagree. There is a clearly defined standard on freedesktop.org, not everyone follows it though. The reality is that not prescribing default policy for anything was a really dumb idea. Still, that doesn't mean it's too late to prescribe that default policy now, and the freedesktop project seems to be doing that, with clear definitions for window managers, clipboards, mime types, app menu's, desktop icons, and so on...
It is quite clear that the market wants more music than they can afford to obtain legally from a store. I hate to break it to the RIAA, but we all know that recording a CD and distributing it costs practically nothing. How many CDs would you buy if they were $2 a piece? How many new artists would you try if they were $2 a piece? How many CDs would you pirate if they were $2 a piece?
Well, first of all, music stores require something on the order of a 4 to 5 dollar markup to turn enough of a profit to be a viable business, so that provides the low-end (if you accept that music stores are necessary to have sufficient access to music).
Then you factor in production costs of the physical cd and bundled artwork, and the cost of supplying cd's to the stores. You consider that to be $2. That seems too low to me. I'd say it's probably $3 at least.
So that's $7 to $8 minimum for a cd, not calculating in anything for the artist, or the label, or any music production costs.
So, then, the more copies a cd sells, the less profit you need to make per cd, but the problem is that to sell more copies, you need to get inside people's heads, and to do that, you have to do marketing, and marketing costs a lot of money. So to make money you've got to spend money.
I would guess when you calculate everything in that adds another $5-$7 to the cost, to cover production costs, marketing, and basic profit for the artist and the promoting label.
So, that puts it at $12 to $15. So, you say, why not lower prices to that point. But oh, the problem is that a lot of cd's totally fail, and guess who covers the cost on that? Depends on who you talk to, but if the artist can't pay it back, it's the label which has to cough it up. They fund thousands of failures every year on the back of hundreds of successes.
So, $20 / cd is indeed too much, but slashing it to $2 is just plain silly. I seriously doubt they'd be able to go lower than $15, and that would require a dramatic reorganization of how music gets made so that the cost of failure isn't so high.
By the way, it's "fair use" not "free use." The copyright holder still owns the work, not the public. There is a subtle difference, but an important one.
This is what the US constitution says about copyright:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
In other words, copyright doesn't necessarily have to extend to just the right to copy, it is an "exclusive right" that is unquantified. However, the current effectively infinite duration on copyright, and the lack of quantifiable progress of art imposed by the music industry flies in the face of what the constitution says. And yes, I know that the supreme court says limited means not literally infinite, but that's such B.S. I don't even know how to begin to respond to it.
And how would you track those licenses in a sensible way? Anything that is doable cost-wise will be vulnerable to forgery, and then you'll see license copying instead of medium copying.
It's been a while since I took Econ, but I will always remember the invisible hand theory. The market will ALWAYS force itself toward equilibrium.
Laws, unions, anything that unnaturally hinders the market breaks equilibrium. Forcing high prices on cds. Suing your customers into submission.
I took econ too, and that's not what I got out of it. The market does indeed find an equilibrium, but sometimes that equilibrium is a monopoly.
Scale effects and natural monopolies make it so that in almost every product category doubling your marketshare will more than double your profit. As a result, markets, over time, without law restricting them, inevitably tend towards monopoly or oligopoly through mergers, acquisitions and just plain old outcompeting the other guy.
Even adam smith, the guy who coined the invisible hand theory was clear about the necessity of antitrust law.
I'm personally also of the opinion that unions are a byproduct of market inefficiency. In a highly efficient free job market (with a sufficiently large number of equal job suppliers), the qualities of the jobs offered won't drop so low that unions become necessary.
Why not let the market do what it does best, and go to that point of equilibrium where profit is maximized naturally? They're holding onto a cartel-type model and it's just not going to work.
Incidentally, it's been shown that if a market is monopolized the overall market efficiency drops, but the individual profit of the monopolist increases. Monopolization (or cartelization) and profit-maximalization go hand in hand.
My guess is if debian changes to x.org, they'll make sure xfree upgrades automatically to it over time. And debian is the only distro which in my experience does the upgrade of existing systems right.
Since Coke isn't on the list, I can put in Coke and Diet Coke.
The problem with the coca-cola company is that they have supported assassination of union leaders/members in colombia. So either you stock coke, and are supporting people who support murder, or you stock pepsi, and are supporting george w. bush.
Sorry, if you had Open drivers for the 9500, it'd be trivial to get the 9600, 9700 & 9800s working since they're all using essentially the same core. I think what you really meant to say was to get a Radeon 8500 (and by extension the 9000 & 9200), which has respectable open drivers.
The parent typed "where x < 5", but slashdot stripped out the < because he didn't type it as <.
I'd just love to see X.org in unstable as soon as possible, but propably other debian users agree with me, that it too quite a while to see 4.3 in there too.. so might still take some "weeks":-)
The way I understand it, the big reason why debian always took so long to produce new X releases was because they had to port the new xfree release to the various debian-required architectures, and xfree had shown little interest in taking back the debian patches to make it more crossplatform. Xfree only supported half of the platforms debian did, so every new release was one big porting effort.
With x.org hopefully this will change as they'll likely be more receptive to taking patches from debian.
Micro distros don't have X, and do you know how hard it is to get a modern distro to fit in 20 MB of ram? I finally had to scrounge around for an old copy of RedHat, and then hack the install media to trick it into supporting my modern network card. Ugly.
I did that too, but I went with debian.
In my case it was a cd-rom less 486 laptop with 20 megs of ram and a pcmcia network card. I wrote debian boot floppy's, did a network install, compiled a tuned kernel package on a faster machine, installed it, and I was up and running.
By turning off all services except ssh (running from inetd), stripping down X, and using pwm, abiword and opera that machine became not just bearable, but usable too (my sister used it to write a paper).
I could have also just attached the hard disk to my desktop, installed the minimal system, reattached it to the laptop, and did the post-install configuration there, but I was too lazy to open up the laptop.
Because it is impossible that an 'older' lady would be interested in learning how to create programs. Let alone a mom!
Nice stereotyping there budy.
It is statistically not likely a mom would genuinely be interested in learning how to program. You can debate whether that is nature or nurture, but you can not deny that it is reality.
Besides, the guy says, and I quote "She expressed an interest in learning what I was doing". In other words, not in learning how to program, but in learning what he was doing.
It's a pretty good indication that mom does indeed want to understand her son a little better, make a closer connection.
Microsoft doesn't hate the Web. The Web has created a huge market for Microsoft in personal computers. Tons of PC sales are rooted in people wanting a computer to examine the "Internet" and "Web" things they've been hearing so much about. PC sales = Windows sales = Office sales. Microsoft doesn't hate the Web.
Actually, Microsoft may not hate the web, but they certainly view it as a threat to their business model. Microsoft's business model is based on owning the underlying platform. If the platform is commoditized, then they would have to compete on quality, something they've not historically been very good at.
The web is heading in the direction of becoming a commodity platform for building, distributing and running all software. That is something microsoft wants to avoid at all costs, because without the control their proprietary edge gives them, they couldn't keep up their profit margins. Microsoft has tried to kill every attempt at providing that web-based standardised platform. They've tried and mostly succeeded at killing desktop java. They've tried and mostly succeeded at killing any progress on web standards to the point they're actually useful for building complex apps. They're trying to move to longhorn, a new wholly proprietary web architecture, which doesn't just add to the web, but replaces it.
Microsoft's business model is based on monopoly pricing. If they couldn't price like a monopoly, their stock value would collapse. They MUST have control over the desktop market. It is imperative from a business point of view. That's why they're so ruthless in destroying anything that threatens to replace their platform. And that's why the author said microsoft hates the web. It's not that they hate it, it's that they fear it.
Whatever the reason there are still many (important) sites out there that still just don't work (properly) with non-IE browsers.
If there's an alternative, I suggest switching to the alternative and then mailing the site informaing them of the reason you switched. If there isn't an alternative, go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and file an evangelism bug explaining what the site is that doesn't work and how it is broken.
IE (If it had tabbed browsing, it would be better than Mozilla!)
What features is it specifically IE has that neither mozilla nor firefox can match that would make IE better if it had tabbed browsing?
The older one even thinks that Linux is cool, which came as a bit of a shock to me;)
Unsurprising, linux has three things going for it: - an X in the name (you can't have a cool product without an X in the name, even microsoft realized that) - Tux, a penguin who sits on his ass all day long and smokes weed (where else does that dopey expression come from?). He's sort of the ideal of what kids hope to be, looking cool while sitting on their ass getting high as a kite. - Linus. Women think he's a sex god, men think he's a geek god. He's THE MAN.
b) Have a separate and intelligent module for rendering badly coded websites that dont follow specs
That's the problem. You have to guess what the writer of the webpage meant when he wrote it. That is non-obvious. Most of those broken webpages depend on IE's behavior. So, the simple answer would seem to be to emulate IE when the pages doesn't comply to spec. However, first of all you would be trying to hit a moving target, and secondly, you would not only have to replicate all IE's bugs, but you would have to replicate its error handling, its internal timing, down to the very architecture it uses. It's too much work.
Konqueror does not use the Mozilla rendering engine (Gecko), but rather uses its own engine (khtml).
Except that both konqueror and safari tend to use gecko-like behavior when the standards are unclear about the right behavior, because gecko is reasonably well supported as a browser engine by popular websites due to the mozilla evangelism (advocacy) project.
Simply by NOT USING new MS technology if it alienates anyone on any platform.
What keeps surprising me is how people will still be suckered into building their stuff on top of ms's stuff. Using microsoft is like being a slavegirl in a hareem. Sure, you may think you live a life of luxury early on, but sooner or later you're going to get screwed, and it won't be a nice experience.
I can't count the number of times I've seen microsoft deprecate a useful piece of technology someone I knew depended on.
Well, its not often that you see this kind of comeback, and I take my hat off to SpecOpS for doing it.
What comeback? They don't address the claim that the screenshot on their site shows a bug only in crossover office and not in the main wine tree, other than by saying "no, we're not using it". So pay no attention to the bug behind that screenshot.
A comeback generally involves disputing the claims that you've been doing bad stuff with actual evidence that you haven't. That entire letter is full of nice words, but no actual content. Their position on what OSS code they use is summed up as "we might be using some OSS code, we might even one day tell you what it is, and then we might contribute back our changes to those projects, and we might not actually do any of the things we said we might."
They also still do not give credit to the wine project for what they're doing, despite overwhelming evidence that they are basing their stuff on wine. They're not legally required to, but it bodes ill when someone doesn't even want to admit what open source code they're using regarding how good a community member they'll be.
I must say that this is pretty much the same view I had when I read the story here on slashdot. A lot of people were lamenting the fact that they seemed to be using WINE derived code, which struck me as strange, since wasnt this the whole point of the GPL? In my view, they have embraced OpenSource pretty much fully, tho only time will tell if they succeed.
Embraced fully? Where's the source? Where's the community participation? Where's even the simple crediting of the shoulders on which they stand? They haven't done anything whatsoever to embrace open source, other than pay lip service to it.
Here on slashdot, we seem to have a strange "community thought" on the usage of GPL code in a commercial project, and this came out in full when this story broke.
Open source survives because of the community. Anything that damages the community, damages the very principle of open source.
Besides, look at the transgaming example. Transgaming's winex is closed source based on an open source project. They've been heckled over it, but at the very least they credit the wine project, and have contributed _some_ code back. This project david has done none of that. They seem to avoid participating in the OSS community. Why should they get treated nicely by the community then?
They state that they are using OSS code, and they also state that they will be contributing code back to the community
So they talk the talk. Big deal. I want to see them walk the walk.
I thought the requirement was simply for the source code for GPL projects used to be made available for download, and for any modified GPL code to also be made available. I wasn't aware that simply doing -lsome_gpl_library was enough to drag proprietary code under the terms of GPL. If it is I am surprised and concerned.
That's the way it works. It's meant to ensure that you don't just take pieces of GPL'd code, wrap them in a library, and build code on them that you don't open source. If you base your stuff on GPL'd code, your code has to be GPL'd too. That's the deal you agree to when you use GPL'd code in any way, even just by linking to it. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is true currently, but it is set to change. Web based deployment is excellent for non-tech business in that there is very little support on the desktop (no rollouts etc).
Although I would like that too, I don't see that happening soon.
Reasons:
- You need always-on broadband to credibly distribute apps that are rich enough in functionality to be useful, only a small percentage of web users and an even smaller percentage of pc users have this.
- Unless we see an order of magnitude improvement in how broad broadband is (extremely unlikely), for adequate performance you would still need to download the entire app to the local system, which would take a while, meaning it would have to be able to persist between sessions, and therefore be installable on the local disk. At that point, you have no benefit whatsoever of web apps over locally installed setup.exe files downloaded from a website.
Ofcourse, if somehow someone manages to get a browser onto the vast majority of web-enabled systems that allows selective downloading of functionality as you use it without impacting performance much while you're downloading additional functionality (like simple html web apps), then my argument is invalidated. But then how likely is that to happen "soon"?
And if we still need somewhere to save our favourites, we can easily use such a VM to build a 'traditional' web browser, but genuinely based on standards.
What you're proposing sounds an awful lot like mozilla, but with a W3C rubberstamp on it. Mozilla after all is just a runtime running a traditional web browser on top of it.
It seems to me you just want the exact same thing as the new mozilla/opera group wants, but based on xforms instead of on html. Html has momentum, xforms doesn't. So if you say xforms should be the base for future web apps instead of html, you've got to explain why that is. Why is that?
Huh? How the heck has history shown we're an untrustworthy keeper of these things? The fact that we used two to avert an extremely costly and bloody land invasion of the Japanese home island?
The use of nuclear weapons on hiroshima and nagasaki was tactically unnecessary, it did not decide the war, it only speeded up the ending of it. Especially the second bomb was unnecessary, since the japanese had gotten the message after the first one.
They could have also dropped the bombs on low-populated areas, but instead they dropped it on civilian cities, knowing full well that the destruction and loss of human life would be massive. And they dropped them without warning, to make sure loss of civilian life would be maximized.
This massive civilian massacre was a constant factor in WWII-era allied campaigns. Japan and Germany saw constant nighttime firebombing in the later stages of the war, designed to kill as much civilians as possible to destroy enemy morale. Ofcourse, since the allied forces won, the history books were written in such a way as to obfuscate this fact.
I *do* recall the simple existence of them preventing war with the USSR and in the end, being partly responsible for the fall of that country when it couldn't keep up...
Exactly. What kept the cold war from becoming hot was the fact that both sides had nuclear weapons. That's the theory of nuclear detente: if everyone has them, no one can use them.
open sourcing selective parts of the JDK
It would be great if they open-sourced java3d as a trial balloon. It would be really cool to be able to develop that further into a true gaming api in addition to the 3D visualization api that it is right now.
There will never be a single, universal ANYTHING for Linux...which is why it does not work as a platform (platforms are by nature universal).
And let's just forget that pesky democracy thing, because clearly you can not have a strong nation with such a lack of supreme authority.
1. Will everyone follow. They are no authority, so if any party decide they're not going to follow it, we're back at our main problem.
KDE, GNOME, and the big independent projects like mozilla and oo.o are following, as well as the major distro's, so even if it won't be compulsory to follow that will create a de facto standard.
2. Who will port those gazillion apps that we do use, but have been developped before? Answer: No one. Because of general laziness, sure, but also because some of them aren't even open source!
That's indeed a problem. But I think when the desktop becomes this smoothly integrated environment with a few non-compliant apps sticking out of it like a sore thumb there will be enough user and developer pressure on those apps to get up to date. Like how apps on mac os x get slammed if they don't use apple's gui libraries but instead "roll their own", and as a result very few mac apps "roll their own."
Ah. How do you call that thing that gets launched when you type "startx" then? I think we just have a terminoloogy problem right here.
What the parent meant, and what I think is silly too, is that you're only supposed to call it the X Window System, X Window, X, X11, or basically any variation containing X except for X-Windows, which sounds a bit too much like windows, and some people have a visceral reaction to even just the name of a microsoft product.
There are PRIMARY, SECONDARY, CLIPBOARD. Actually, apps can ask for any clipboard by providing their own names. Too much liberty in the implementation and a lack of a properly defined standard is the main problem.
I disagree. There is a clearly defined standard on freedesktop.org, not everyone follows it though. The reality is that not prescribing default policy for anything was a really dumb idea. Still, that doesn't mean it's too late to prescribe that default policy now, and the freedesktop project seems to be doing that, with clear definitions for window managers, clipboards, mime types, app menu's, desktop icons, and so on...
It is quite clear that the market wants more music than they can afford to obtain legally from a store. I hate to break it to the RIAA, but we all know that recording a CD and distributing it costs practically nothing. How many CDs would you buy if they were $2 a piece? How many new artists would you try if they were $2 a piece? How many CDs would you pirate if they were $2 a piece?
Well, first of all, music stores require something on the order of a 4 to 5 dollar markup to turn enough of a profit to be a viable business, so that provides the low-end (if you accept that music stores are necessary to have sufficient access to music).
Then you factor in production costs of the physical cd and bundled artwork, and the cost of supplying cd's to the stores. You consider that to be $2. That seems too low to me. I'd say it's probably $3 at least.
So that's $7 to $8 minimum for a cd, not calculating in anything for the artist, or the label, or any music production costs.
So, then, the more copies a cd sells, the less profit you need to make per cd, but the problem is that to sell more copies, you need to get inside people's heads, and to do that, you have to do marketing, and marketing costs a lot of money. So to make money you've got to spend money.
I would guess when you calculate everything in that adds another $5-$7 to the cost, to cover production costs, marketing, and basic profit for the artist and the promoting label.
So, that puts it at $12 to $15. So, you say, why not lower prices to that point. But oh, the problem is that a lot of cd's totally fail, and guess who covers the cost on that? Depends on who you talk to, but if the artist can't pay it back, it's the label which has to cough it up. They fund thousands of failures every year on the back of hundreds of successes.
So, $20 / cd is indeed too much, but slashing it to $2 is just plain silly. I seriously doubt they'd be able to go lower than $15, and that would require a dramatic reorganization of how music gets made so that the cost of failure isn't so high.
This is what the US constitution says about copyright:
In other words, copyright doesn't necessarily have to extend to just the right to copy, it is an "exclusive right" that is unquantified. However, the current effectively infinite duration on copyright, and the lack of quantifiable progress of art imposed by the music industry flies in the face of what the constitution says. And yes, I know that the supreme court says limited means not literally infinite, but that's such B.S. I don't even know how to begin to respond to it.
And how would you track those licenses in a sensible way? Anything that is doable cost-wise will be vulnerable to forgery, and then you'll see license copying instead of medium copying.
It's been a while since I took Econ, but I will always remember the invisible hand theory. The market will ALWAYS force itself toward equilibrium.
Laws, unions, anything that unnaturally hinders the market breaks equilibrium. Forcing high prices on cds. Suing your customers into submission.
I took econ too, and that's not what I got out of it. The market does indeed find an equilibrium, but sometimes that equilibrium is a monopoly.
Scale effects and natural monopolies make it so that in almost every product category doubling your marketshare will more than double your profit. As a result, markets, over time, without law restricting them, inevitably tend towards monopoly or oligopoly through mergers, acquisitions and just plain old outcompeting the other guy.
Even adam smith, the guy who coined the invisible hand theory was clear about the necessity of antitrust law.
I'm personally also of the opinion that unions are a byproduct of market inefficiency. In a highly efficient free job market (with a sufficiently large number of equal job suppliers), the qualities of the jobs offered won't drop so low that unions become necessary.
Why not let the market do what it does best, and go to that point of equilibrium where profit is maximized naturally? They're holding onto a cartel-type model and it's just not going to work.
Incidentally, it's been shown that if a market is monopolized the overall market efficiency drops, but the individual profit of the monopolist increases. Monopolization (or cartelization) and profit-maximalization go hand in hand.
My guess is if debian changes to x.org, they'll make sure xfree upgrades automatically to it over time. And debian is the only distro which in my experience does the upgrade of existing systems right.
Since Coke isn't on the list, I can put in Coke and Diet Coke.
The problem with the coca-cola company is that they have supported assassination of union leaders/members in colombia. So either you stock coke, and are supporting people who support murder, or you stock pepsi, and are supporting george w. bush.
Sorry, if you had Open drivers for the 9500, it'd be trivial to get the 9600, 9700 & 9800s working since they're all using essentially the same core. I think what you really meant to say was to get a Radeon 8500 (and by extension the 9000 & 9200), which has respectable open drivers.
The parent typed "where x < 5", but slashdot stripped out the < because he didn't type it as <.
I'd just love to see X.org in unstable as soon as possible, but propably other debian users agree with me, that it too quite a while to see 4.3 in there too.. so might still take some "weeks" :-)
The way I understand it, the big reason why debian always took so long to produce new X releases was because they had to port the new xfree release to the various debian-required architectures, and xfree had shown little interest in taking back the debian patches to make it more crossplatform. Xfree only supported half of the platforms debian did, so every new release was one big porting effort.
With x.org hopefully this will change as they'll likely be more receptive to taking patches from debian.
Micro distros don't have X, and do you know how hard it is to get a modern distro to fit in 20 MB of ram? I finally had to scrounge around for an old copy of RedHat, and then hack the install media to trick it into supporting my modern network card. Ugly.
I did that too, but I went with debian.
In my case it was a cd-rom less 486 laptop with 20 megs of ram and a pcmcia network card. I wrote debian boot floppy's, did a network install, compiled a tuned kernel package on a faster machine, installed it, and I was up and running.
By turning off all services except ssh (running from inetd), stripping down X, and using pwm, abiword and opera that machine became not just bearable, but usable too (my sister used it to write a paper).
I could have also just attached the hard disk to my desktop, installed the minimal system, reattached it to the laptop, and did the post-install configuration there, but I was too lazy to open up the laptop.
Because it is impossible that an 'older' lady would be interested in learning how to create programs. Let alone a mom!
Nice stereotyping there budy.
It is statistically not likely a mom would genuinely be interested in learning how to program. You can debate whether that is nature or nurture, but you can not deny that it is reality.
Besides, the guy says, and I quote "She expressed an interest in learning what I was doing". In other words, not in learning how to program, but in learning what he was doing.
It's a pretty good indication that mom does indeed want to understand her son a little better, make a closer connection.
Microsoft doesn't hate the Web. The Web has created a huge market for Microsoft in personal computers. Tons of PC sales are rooted in people wanting a computer to examine the "Internet" and "Web" things they've been hearing so much about. PC sales = Windows sales = Office sales. Microsoft doesn't hate the Web.
Actually, Microsoft may not hate the web, but they certainly view it as a threat to their business model. Microsoft's business model is based on owning the underlying platform. If the platform is commoditized, then they would have to compete on quality, something they've not historically been very good at.
The web is heading in the direction of becoming a commodity platform for building, distributing and running all software. That is something microsoft wants to avoid at all costs, because without the control their proprietary edge gives them, they couldn't keep up their profit margins. Microsoft has tried to kill every attempt at providing that web-based standardised platform. They've tried and mostly succeeded at killing desktop java. They've tried and mostly succeeded at killing any progress on web standards to the point they're actually useful for building complex apps. They're trying to move to longhorn, a new wholly proprietary web architecture, which doesn't just add to the web, but replaces it.
Microsoft's business model is based on monopoly pricing. If they couldn't price like a monopoly, their stock value would collapse. They MUST have control over the desktop market. It is imperative from a business point of view. That's why they're so ruthless in destroying anything that threatens to replace their platform. And that's why the author said microsoft hates the web. It's not that they hate it, it's that they fear it.
Whatever the reason there are still many (important) sites out there that still just don't work (properly) with non-IE browsers.
If there's an alternative, I suggest switching to the alternative and then mailing the site informaing them of the reason you switched. If there isn't an alternative, go to bugzilla.mozilla.org and file an evangelism bug explaining what the site is that doesn't work and how it is broken.
IE (If it had tabbed browsing, it would be better than Mozilla!)
What features is it specifically IE has that neither mozilla nor firefox can match that would make IE better if it had tabbed browsing?
Unsurprising, linux has three things going for it:
- an X in the name (you can't have a cool product without an X in the name, even microsoft realized that)
- Tux, a penguin who sits on his ass all day long and smokes weed (where else does that dopey expression come from?). He's sort of the ideal of what kids hope to be, looking cool while sitting on their ass getting high as a kite.
- Linus. Women think he's a sex god, men think he's a geek god. He's THE MAN.
/mostly kidding
b) Have a separate and intelligent module for rendering badly coded websites that dont follow specs
That's the problem. You have to guess what the writer of the webpage meant when he wrote it. That is non-obvious. Most of those broken webpages depend on IE's behavior. So, the simple answer would seem to be to emulate IE when the pages doesn't comply to spec. However, first of all you would be trying to hit a moving target, and secondly, you would not only have to replicate all IE's bugs, but you would have to replicate its error handling, its internal timing, down to the very architecture it uses. It's too much work.
Konqueror does not use the Mozilla rendering engine (Gecko), but rather uses its own engine (khtml).
Except that both konqueror and safari tend to use gecko-like behavior when the standards are unclear about the right behavior, because gecko is reasonably well supported as a browser engine by popular websites due to the mozilla evangelism (advocacy) project.
Simply by NOT USING new MS technology if it alienates anyone on any platform.
What keeps surprising me is how people will still be suckered into building their stuff on top of ms's stuff. Using microsoft is like being a slavegirl in a hareem. Sure, you may think you live a life of luxury early on, but sooner or later you're going to get screwed, and it won't be a nice experience.
I can't count the number of times I've seen microsoft deprecate a useful piece of technology someone I knew depended on.
Well, its not often that you see this kind of comeback, and I take my hat off to SpecOpS for doing it.
What comeback? They don't address the claim that the screenshot on their site shows a bug only in crossover office and not in the main wine tree, other than by saying "no, we're not using it". So pay no attention to the bug behind that screenshot.
A comeback generally involves disputing the claims that you've been doing bad stuff with actual evidence that you haven't. That entire letter is full of nice words, but no actual content. Their position on what OSS code they use is summed up as "we might be using some OSS code, we might even one day tell you what it is, and then we might contribute back our changes to those projects, and we might not actually do any of the things we said we might."
They also still do not give credit to the wine project for what they're doing, despite overwhelming evidence that they are basing their stuff on wine. They're not legally required to, but it bodes ill when someone doesn't even want to admit what open source code they're using regarding how good a community member they'll be.
I must say that this is pretty much the same view I had when I read the story here on slashdot. A lot of people were lamenting the fact that they seemed to be using WINE derived code, which struck me as strange, since wasnt this the whole point of the GPL? In my view, they have embraced OpenSource pretty much fully, tho only time will tell if they succeed.
Embraced fully? Where's the source? Where's the community participation? Where's even the simple crediting of the shoulders on which they stand? They haven't done anything whatsoever to embrace open source, other than pay lip service to it.
Here on slashdot, we seem to have a strange "community thought" on the usage of GPL code in a commercial project, and this came out in full when this story broke.
Open source survives because of the community. Anything that damages the community, damages the very principle of open source.
Besides, look at the transgaming example. Transgaming's winex is closed source based on an open source project. They've been heckled over it, but at the very least they credit the wine project, and have contributed _some_ code back. This project david has done none of that. They seem to avoid participating in the OSS community. Why should they get treated nicely by the community then?
They state that they are using OSS code, and they also state that they will be contributing code back to the community
So they talk the talk. Big deal. I want to see them walk the walk.
I thought the requirement was simply for the source code for GPL projects used to be made available for download, and for any modified GPL code to also be made available. I wasn't aware that simply doing -lsome_gpl_library was enough to drag proprietary code under the terms of GPL. If it is I am surprised and concerned.
That's the way it works. It's meant to ensure that you don't just take pieces of GPL'd code, wrap them in a library, and build code on them that you don't open source. If you base your stuff on GPL'd code, your code has to be GPL'd too. That's the deal you agree to when you use GPL'd code in any way, even just by linking to it. If you don't like it, don't use it.