I'd like to mention that the xbl binding in the flash-click-to-play plugin is outdated. The newer version blocks more flash correctly (some flash still got through with the old version), but it does require you to edit your config files manually.
Flash locks out the blind and the disabled. HTML doesn't. If it isn't illegal already for essential websites (banks, governments,...) to use flash, it should be.
The lack of Dreamweaver was one thing that kept me on windows for longer than I wanted. Ever since I finally made the move I have been searching freshmeat, hoping that somewhere there was that miracle program that would do what I needed, but no such luck.
Keep an eye on nvu. It's still early days, but it's making radical advances quickly. It is based on the mozilla composer, with functionality added to make it useful (frames, forms, tables, css, multiple file projects,...).
Too bad the current version munges php (which is a real blocker for me), but the next version supposedly will have that bug fixed.
You should try the user-friendly wine apps, like crossover office and winex. Yes, they cost money, but they do work. Winex plays every game I want it to play, and crossover office already runs office, photoshop and, to a degree, flash mx. You can look through the list of supported applications on both the transgaming and the codeweavers websites. Really not that shabby. My guess is macromedia will pay the codeweavers people to make it work perfectly, just like disney paid codeweavers to make adobe's photoshop work perfectly.
And, yes, the code from codeweavers does flow back into wine. In fact, they now don't even need to backport it since they work straight on the main wine codebase. Transgaming however chose to stay with the X license when wine switched to LGPL, so their code doesn't flow back as much (all the directx stuff in wine is a fresh implementation which has nothing to do with the one in winex).
The fonts and formatting all work splendidly in Rich Text mode, which is 200% less suck-tastic than HTML mail.
On the other hand, html mail (when sent to strangers) is already considered impolite according to netiquette, since it wastes bandwidth and is unreadable for a considerable part of email users.
RTF mail, viewed from that angle, is the email equivalent of walking up to someone and slapping them in the face.
Isn't the central idea of solitaire that it is played by oneself?
Ironically, msn's idea of multiplayer solitaire is surprisingly engaging. A friend of mine is absolutely addicted to it. Yeah, a friend, that's it, not me, no!
Ofcourse, it's not called solitaire in all languages. In dutch it's called "patience", which isn't even a dutch word, but anyway.
If you want a single 'client' at all locations, you probably want to use webmail.
Or you could do what I do and run your mail client remotely across X or VNC in an ssh tunnel. More secure than accessing the imap server directly (unless it supports ssl), and you can use and finetune whatever mailclient you want.
The cool thing is that if you do this with tight vnc, you can even use it across a modem line, without having to wait for your mail to download (supposing your mail machine is hooked to the internet with broadband).
it's not Volvo wanting to seal everyone's hood, just those of women. So they aren't attacking open source, they're attacking respect for women. Which is kind of worse if you stop and think about it.
Why do so many people assume sexism is always a negative thing? Last time I looked around women and men were not identical (thank God for that). If there is a difference (and there is), it serves no one to pretend there isn't. Products can be designed to suit women (or men) better. Just like products can be designed to fit some races better. Too bad the overzealous PC society of today can't deal with that little piece of reality.
It meant that you had to lug around a mail client, web page design program, etc that you might really not be interested in.
As long as I can remember the mozilla installer offered the option of not installing the mailnews component. If you don't want it, you don't have it. And the composer component doesn't get loaded until you actually use it.
It may surprise you, but mozilla's memory usage is only slightly higher than firefox's. It's just not the extra apps that cause the bloat, it's the don't-depend-on-the-OS-so-we're-truly-crossplatfor m philosophy. Mozilla has it's own networking engine (necko), it has it's own graphics layer (libpr0n), it has it's own UI programming language (xul). It's an entire development platform. To fit all that in the space it fits in is quite impressive.
Ofcourse, if you just want a browser, it is kind of overkill. But mozilla was never meant to be just a browser, because to conquer marketshare from IE you have to do something it doesn't. In other words, you have to be more than a browser.
Actually, this would be more akin to keeping a computer running for 20 years non-stop, without ever having to manually powercycle it, and without replacing a single piece of hardware, in the middle of antarctica. Much more impressive that just doing good car maintenance.
Still, I think it's pretty sad that computers are even more frail than we humans are. For ages most of what we built outlasted us; now the tables have turned.
Then after you extract it to a build tree, edit the debian/rules file and add your own optimization flags. Then do "debian/rules binary", and presto, you have an optimized package.
Packages usually are smart enough to detect what libraries you have on your system and compile them in if they are, so just ensure all the libraries and their dev packages you want are installed, and you won't need to add any extra compile time options.
In a normal application only a very small fraction of the code is performance sensitive. You do NOT need to optimise all the code, just the bottleneck parts of it. In practice, we're talking about a few tens of kilobytes of code bloat for a multi-megabyte project. Not noticeable at all.
Also, a good design will afford performance-sensitive code being split off into libraries, of which you can then distribute optimized version for various platforms.
As for libraries being available or not available... If you load them at runtime, they will or will not be available. You might have to include code that activates in case a library is unavailable, but that too can be split off into a library.
Basilisk runs macos classic on linux systems with X11. All you'd need is to install linux with an X environment on your pda, then port basilisk to it, which should be in the realm of the doable. As for actual speed, who knows, but it would be a cool hack indeed.
First of all, a well designed application shouldn't have that kind of conditional compile time dependancies. It's possible to do that all at runtime.
Secondly, debian supports building from source right in the debian package system. It's not possible yet to build the entire distribution (due to incomplete and circular build dependancies), but when you've installed a base platform, it's quite easy to rebuild the stuff you need with whatever optimizations you prefer, all while still making it easy to do binary only installs.
Admitted, that last bit of functionality didn't really take off until gentoo led the way, but I remember compiling my own optimised debian packages in the previous century, so...
I'm still trying to figure out how their going to ATTACH the damn thing. All buildings are essentially resting upon the Earth. This thing can't rest, it needs to be attached. For a cable this long, a "stupid hurricane" could set up a vibration is going to build to the point where the whole thing starts "walking" across Columbia.
Which is why it would be anchored to a huge ship, so you could move it out of the way of storms.
If access to space is much cheaper, the benefits to the world will be immense; though it'll take a few decades. Even back in the 70s when O'Neill advocated space colonies in the L5 orbits it was possible to make a case. With a much cheaper launch method it becomes compelling.
What would be the point behind this? A station at a lagrange point would be weightless, so long term inhabitation would essentially be impossible unless we invent a gravity generator. So, you could theoretically use it for weightlessness experiments (the excuse often given for the ISS), but once you have a space elevator, you can easily send up and bring back down whatever weightlessness experiments you might want to run. It would also be useless for offloading the population surplus, since it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to build vertically on earth to house that surplus than it would be to send them to a very costly space station.
Honestly, I see no useful purpose for a space station near earth. In fact, I see no useful purpose for a space station anywhere in space. One we have the capability to build space elevators, it becomes much more financially sane to build space stations on a planet surface and offer access to space through a space elevator. Maybe someone can point out a real use of an orbiting space station to me.
You're assuming that once someone builds the thing, it becomes impossible for someone else to build one as well. I think it'll be the reverse. Once someone actually builds one, the cold hard evidence that it is possible will create competition, because investors will be standing in line to fund a new space elevator company. It seems quite unlikely someone would buy a tether from an existing company, unless it is sold at a price lower than the development and launch cost of your very own tether.
Evil is being immoral. That is, doing a bad thing while you know it to be bad. Corporations are amoral, that is, when they do bad things, the corporation as a whole does not realise the badness of it, because it has no real mind or moral judgement. Certain officers may realise it though, which is why when corporations break the law, it's often the individuals responsible for making the corporation break the law that are punished. Humans are meant to keep the corporation from doing bad things.
However, the inherent problem is that corporations nowadays are considered persons. They have all the same rights and obligations. However, if you look at the behaviour of a corporation, it is psychotic. If a human being did the same things, he or she would be sent to the loonie bin. It's the ever expanding nature of what rights corporations have that is causing most problems. If corporations could be terminated or disabled when they cross the line between right and wrong, like human beings, there would be a lot less problems. However, corporations have all the rights of people, without having a lot of the responsibilities. In a sense, corporations are societally superior to humans. That's a breakdown of the capitalist economy, and sooner or later someone is going to have to fix that.
Sun has done a great job with Java so far. If they had opened it in the beginning, it would have been embraced, extended, and extinguished by you-know-who and we'd now have Microsoft Java.NET for Windows.
Not true. Sun owns the trademark on java. You can wield a trademark independantly from a copyright. They could have opensourced java under a bsd license (so ms could extend and redistribute it) and still forbid ms from naming their tech "java." Holding on to the code as tight as sun serves no one. Not sun, since they're not making any money on java itself. And not the java developers, who see sun as a bottleneck for java development.
Besides, if they had opensourced it, they could have released it under the gpl. Microsoft would have been unable to extend and extinguish it, since the gpl makes such tactics essentially impossible. This is the model trolltech follows with qt. The gpl'd version is invulnerable to people who might want to hijack it, and if someone wants to do something the gpl doesn't allow, trolltech is more than willing to sell them a license.
The reality is that sun didn't think open source was going to mean anything in their market. Open source is a disruptive technology, and sun realised that too late. They're eating humble pie now for their lack of vision. Sun did great things for the tech community, and continues to do them, but it's not like they didn't make strategic mistakes and paid the price for it. IBM realised what open source meant, went for it, and is raking in the dough, sun didn't, on either counts.
Buying at walmart is not as much about price as it is about instant gratification. About getting the most done with the least effort. Price is one factor in that, convenience another. Walmart sells everything, and all at a low price. People would still go to walmart if some other store showed up selling a small subset of products at an even lower price. Walmart plays into people's laziness. "Come buy with us, and you'll save both time and money, without doing any extra effort"
That webcam has no known drivers for linux. That creative put out a driver for windows and not for linux isn't the fault of linux developers, it's more of a sad statement on market realities.
I got a logitech 4000 pro. Works just fine in linux.
The nvidia drivers also DO NOT require a kernel recompile. They do require you to load a kernel module (but only if you want acceleration). I'm stumped as to what X tweaks were necessary to get your nvidia card running, since I don't even remember having spent any time messing with the XFree86Config-4 file to get my nvidia card to work. Also, zero documentation reading other than the step-by-step installation instructions that came with the debian nvidia driver package.
I do agree hardware config is a pita. It seems to consist of two parts: one is the unwillingness of hardware manufacturers to release linux drivers, even though linux desktop marketshare is overtaking mac marketshare. The second is the lack of a unified framework for graphical driver configuration. We need something like apt-get for drivers. Something that carries a live web-updated database of all hardware that is known, with ways to detect it, and an ability to download driver module source and build it for your system.
So, you're saying that every single app on linux does EXACTLY what you want it to, and needs no more improvement for you? Because if some apps don't satisfy your needs completely, your argument says that it is unfair of you to expect improvements, because the app already does what the developers want.
The reality is that for the majority of users the majority of apps is not sufficient. If developers only write a software package for themselves, they have a right to that, but they're screwing over the community, and they're keeping an attitude going that keeps usable software out of their own hands.
I bet the cups developers have usability issues with a number of apps. But, because they don't fix the ui issues with their own software, and because they say they have no interest in improving it, and because people like you back them up, they should not expect any improvements in the software packages they themselves have issues with.
At least, that's your argument taken to the logical (and sadly very real) extreme.
Linux won't outgrow it's geek toy status until the entire developer community bands together and actually makes it "just work". Being selfish developer and saying "I have no responsibilities to anyone" keeps your favourite OS down. Your essentially sabotaging your own efforts. Is that really what you want to do?
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Is 2D hardware acceleration enabled? That makes a mountain of difference for anything desktop performance related.
I'd like to mention that the xbl binding in the flash-click-to-play plugin is outdated. The newer version blocks more flash correctly (some flash still got through with the old version), but it does require you to edit your config files manually.
Flash locks out the blind and the disabled. HTML doesn't. If it isn't illegal already for essential websites (banks, governments, ...) to use flash, it should be.
The lack of Dreamweaver was one thing that kept me on windows for longer than I wanted. Ever since I finally made the move I have been searching freshmeat, hoping that somewhere there was that miracle program that would do what I needed, but no such luck.
...).
Keep an eye on nvu. It's still early days, but it's making radical advances quickly. It is based on the mozilla composer, with functionality added to make it useful (frames, forms, tables, css, multiple file projects,
Too bad the current version munges php (which is a real blocker for me), but the next version supposedly will have that bug fixed.
You should try the user-friendly wine apps, like crossover office and winex. Yes, they cost money, but they do work. Winex plays every game I want it to play, and crossover office already runs office, photoshop and, to a degree, flash mx. You can look through the list of supported applications on both the transgaming and the codeweavers websites. Really not that shabby. My guess is macromedia will pay the codeweavers people to make it work perfectly, just like disney paid codeweavers to make adobe's photoshop work perfectly.
And, yes, the code from codeweavers does flow back into wine. In fact, they now don't even need to backport it since they work straight on the main wine codebase. Transgaming however chose to stay with the X license when wine switched to LGPL, so their code doesn't flow back as much (all the directx stuff in wine is a fresh implementation which has nothing to do with the one in winex).
The fonts and formatting all work splendidly in Rich Text mode, which is 200% less suck-tastic than HTML mail.
On the other hand, html mail (when sent to strangers) is already considered impolite according to netiquette, since it wastes bandwidth and is unreadable for a considerable part of email users.
RTF mail, viewed from that angle, is the email equivalent of walking up to someone and slapping them in the face.
Well, outlook 2000 runs on linux. And if you're patient, it's just a matter of time before outlook 2003 does.
Isn't the central idea of solitaire that it is played by oneself?
Ironically, msn's idea of multiplayer solitaire is surprisingly engaging. A friend of mine is absolutely addicted to it. Yeah, a friend, that's it, not me, no!
Ofcourse, it's not called solitaire in all languages. In dutch it's called "patience", which isn't even a dutch word, but anyway.
If you want a single 'client' at all locations, you probably want to use webmail.
Or you could do what I do and run your mail client remotely across X or VNC in an ssh tunnel. More secure than accessing the imap server directly (unless it supports ssl), and you can use and finetune whatever mailclient you want.
The cool thing is that if you do this with tight vnc, you can even use it across a modem line, without having to wait for your mail to download (supposing your mail machine is hooked to the internet with broadband).
it's not Volvo wanting to seal everyone's hood, just those of women. So they aren't attacking open source, they're attacking respect for women. Which is kind of worse if you stop and think about it.
Why do so many people assume sexism is always a negative thing? Last time I looked around women and men were not identical (thank God for that). If there is a difference (and there is), it serves no one to pretend there isn't. Products can be designed to suit women (or men) better. Just like products can be designed to fit some races better. Too bad the overzealous PC society of today can't deal with that little piece of reality.
It meant that you had to lug around a mail client, web page design program, etc that you might really not be interested in.
r m philosophy. Mozilla has it's own networking engine (necko), it has it's own graphics layer (libpr0n), it has it's own UI programming language (xul). It's an entire development platform. To fit all that in the space it fits in is quite impressive.
As long as I can remember the mozilla installer offered the option of not installing the mailnews component. If you don't want it, you don't have it. And the composer component doesn't get loaded until you actually use it.
It may surprise you, but mozilla's memory usage is only slightly higher than firefox's. It's just not the extra apps that cause the bloat, it's the don't-depend-on-the-OS-so-we're-truly-crossplatfo
Ofcourse, if you just want a browser, it is kind of overkill. But mozilla was never meant to be just a browser, because to conquer marketshare from IE you have to do something it doesn't. In other words, you have to be more than a browser.
Actually, this would be more akin to keeping a computer running for 20 years non-stop, without ever having to manually powercycle it, and without replacing a single piece of hardware, in the middle of antarctica. Much more impressive that just doing good car maintenance.
Still, I think it's pretty sad that computers are even more frail than we humans are. For ages most of what we built outlasted us; now the tables have turned.
Install the source package.
Then after you extract it to a build tree, edit the debian/rules file and add your own optimization flags. Then do "debian/rules binary", and presto, you have an optimized package.
Packages usually are smart enough to detect what libraries you have on your system and compile them in if they are, so just ensure all the libraries and their dev packages you want are installed, and you won't need to add any extra compile time options.
In a normal application only a very small fraction of the code is performance sensitive. You do NOT need to optimise all the code, just the bottleneck parts of it. In practice, we're talking about a few tens of kilobytes of code bloat for a multi-megabyte project. Not noticeable at all.
Also, a good design will afford performance-sensitive code being split off into libraries, of which you can then distribute optimized version for various platforms.
As for libraries being available or not available... If you load them at runtime, they will or will not be available. You might have to include code that activates in case a library is unavailable, but that too can be split off into a library.
Basilisk runs macos classic on linux systems with X11. All you'd need is to install linux with an X environment on your pda, then port basilisk to it, which should be in the realm of the doable. As for actual speed, who knows, but it would be a cool hack indeed.
First of all, a well designed application shouldn't have that kind of conditional compile time dependancies. It's possible to do that all at runtime.
Secondly, debian supports building from source right in the debian package system. It's not possible yet to build the entire distribution (due to incomplete and circular build dependancies), but when you've installed a base platform, it's quite easy to rebuild the stuff you need with whatever optimizations you prefer, all while still making it easy to do binary only installs.
Admitted, that last bit of functionality didn't really take off until gentoo led the way, but I remember compiling my own optimised debian packages in the previous century, so...
I'm still trying to figure out how their going to ATTACH the damn thing. All buildings are essentially resting upon the Earth. This thing can't rest, it needs to be attached. For a cable this long, a "stupid hurricane" could set up a vibration is going to build to the point where the whole thing starts "walking" across Columbia.
Which is why it would be anchored to a huge ship, so you could move it out of the way of storms.
If access to space is much cheaper, the benefits to the world will be immense; though it'll take a few decades. Even back in the 70s when O'Neill advocated space colonies in the L5 orbits it was possible to make a case. With a much cheaper launch method it becomes compelling.
What would be the point behind this? A station at a lagrange point would be weightless, so long term inhabitation would essentially be impossible unless we invent a gravity generator. So, you could theoretically use it for weightlessness experiments (the excuse often given for the ISS), but once you have a space elevator, you can easily send up and bring back down whatever weightlessness experiments you might want to run. It would also be useless for offloading the population surplus, since it would be orders of magnitude cheaper to build vertically on earth to house that surplus than it would be to send them to a very costly space station.
Honestly, I see no useful purpose for a space station near earth. In fact, I see no useful purpose for a space station anywhere in space. One we have the capability to build space elevators, it becomes much more financially sane to build space stations on a planet surface and offer access to space through a space elevator. Maybe someone can point out a real use of an orbiting space station to me.
You're assuming that once someone builds the thing, it becomes impossible for someone else to build one as well. I think it'll be the reverse. Once someone actually builds one, the cold hard evidence that it is possible will create competition, because investors will be standing in line to fund a new space elevator company. It seems quite unlikely someone would buy a tether from an existing company, unless it is sold at a price lower than the development and launch cost of your very own tether.
I guess it depends on how you define "Evil."
Evil is being immoral. That is, doing a bad thing while you know it to be bad. Corporations are amoral, that is, when they do bad things, the corporation as a whole does not realise the badness of it, because it has no real mind or moral judgement. Certain officers may realise it though, which is why when corporations break the law, it's often the individuals responsible for making the corporation break the law that are punished. Humans are meant to keep the corporation from doing bad things.
However, the inherent problem is that corporations nowadays are considered persons. They have all the same rights and obligations. However, if you look at the behaviour of a corporation, it is psychotic. If a human being did the same things, he or she would be sent to the loonie bin. It's the ever expanding nature of what rights corporations have that is causing most problems. If corporations could be terminated or disabled when they cross the line between right and wrong, like human beings, there would be a lot less problems. However, corporations have all the rights of people, without having a lot of the responsibilities. In a sense, corporations are societally superior to humans. That's a breakdown of the capitalist economy, and sooner or later someone is going to have to fix that.
Sun has done a great job with Java so far. If they had opened it in the beginning, it would have been embraced, extended, and extinguished by you-know-who and we'd now have Microsoft Java.NET for Windows.
Not true. Sun owns the trademark on java. You can wield a trademark independantly from a copyright. They could have opensourced java under a bsd license (so ms could extend and redistribute it) and still forbid ms from naming their tech "java." Holding on to the code as tight as sun serves no one. Not sun, since they're not making any money on java itself. And not the java developers, who see sun as a bottleneck for java development.
Besides, if they had opensourced it, they could have released it under the gpl. Microsoft would have been unable to extend and extinguish it, since the gpl makes such tactics essentially impossible. This is the model trolltech follows with qt. The gpl'd version is invulnerable to people who might want to hijack it, and if someone wants to do something the gpl doesn't allow, trolltech is more than willing to sell them a license.
The reality is that sun didn't think open source was going to mean anything in their market. Open source is a disruptive technology, and sun realised that too late. They're eating humble pie now for their lack of vision. Sun did great things for the tech community, and continues to do them, but it's not like they didn't make strategic mistakes and paid the price for it. IBM realised what open source meant, went for it, and is raking in the dough, sun didn't, on either counts.
Buying at walmart is not as much about price as it is about instant gratification. About getting the most done with the least effort. Price is one factor in that, convenience another. Walmart sells everything, and all at a low price. People would still go to walmart if some other store showed up selling a small subset of products at an even lower price. Walmart plays into people's laziness. "Come buy with us, and you'll save both time and money, without doing any extra effort"
Handwriting recognition doesn't exist under linux?
That webcam has no known drivers for linux. That creative put out a driver for windows and not for linux isn't the fault of linux developers, it's more of a sad statement on market realities.
I got a logitech 4000 pro. Works just fine in linux.
The nvidia drivers also DO NOT require a kernel recompile. They do require you to load a kernel module (but only if you want acceleration). I'm stumped as to what X tweaks were necessary to get your nvidia card running, since I don't even remember having spent any time messing with the XFree86Config-4 file to get my nvidia card to work. Also, zero documentation reading other than the step-by-step installation instructions that came with the debian nvidia driver package.
I do agree hardware config is a pita. It seems to consist of two parts: one is the unwillingness of hardware manufacturers to release linux drivers, even though linux desktop marketshare is overtaking mac marketshare. The second is the lack of a unified framework for graphical driver configuration. We need something like apt-get for drivers. Something that carries a live web-updated database of all hardware that is known, with ways to detect it, and an ability to download driver module source and build it for your system.
So, you're saying that every single app on linux does EXACTLY what you want it to, and needs no more improvement for you? Because if some apps don't satisfy your needs completely, your argument says that it is unfair of you to expect improvements, because the app already does what the developers want.
The reality is that for the majority of users the majority of apps is not sufficient. If developers only write a software package for themselves, they have a right to that, but they're screwing over the community, and they're keeping an attitude going that keeps usable software out of their own hands.
I bet the cups developers have usability issues with a number of apps. But, because they don't fix the ui issues with their own software, and because they say they have no interest in improving it, and because people like you back them up, they should not expect any improvements in the software packages they themselves have issues with.
At least, that's your argument taken to the logical (and sadly very real) extreme.
Linux won't outgrow it's geek toy status until the entire developer community bands together and actually makes it "just work". Being selfish developer and saying "I have no responsibilities to anyone" keeps your favourite OS down. Your essentially sabotaging your own efforts. Is that really what you want to do?