So your whole OS can go down because of the video driver.
That's true on any interesting operating system.
I ask you though - can you name a way of accidentally deadlocking the GUI on Windows? There used to be a way, you could disable a window in such a way that the desktop window would be disabled and the GUI would hang, but that was fixed years ago.
Now can you name a way of doing it on Linux? Yes - it's about 10 lines of C and impossible to fix, as it's due to a fundamental design flaw in the X protocol, namely that any client can request that the server ignore requests from other clients. Almost every toolkit locks the server at some point even if it's only for a short period of time, but if the program hangs in that period your GUI is toast. This used to be a serious problem with Motif apps, as Motif held the server locked for long periods (while menus were open, etc). Sure, you can switch to a virtual console and kill the app from the command line, but how many people know how to do that? How many would even diagnose it? At least in Windows a hung fullscreen app shows up as "Not Responding" when you press Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
I don't think we should throw stones when we live in a glass house...
Non sequitur http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/non+sequ itur "A reply that has no relevance to what preceded it." Your reply neither refuted my position nor supported your's.
I don't see how. You claimed it was up to the people who sold the software to fix it, and I pointed out that much software was not written to be sold as a product. It was written by the people who had a problem to solve.
Given the number of zombie Windows machines, it seems that they're not applying them right now. But at least the option would be available to those who choose to.
Yes, and I just got back from the pub, where I was talking with a friend who claimed you don't need to bother applying security updates if you have a good firewall - in fact, he said, it's best not to because stuff might break. And this is with a huge amount of effort put into things like SP2 by Microsoft. He isn't the first person I've met with that attitude.
Look into a service contract from these people http://www.codeweavers.com/ they'd still be running that app, but they'd be on a modern, secured OS.
I work for Codeweavers and in fact this Windows 3.1 app (it was for a hospital) now runs quite well on Linux. We work hard to ensure Wine and CrossOver stay working on an incredibly unstable platform. Do you know that every single release from Red Hat 9 through to Fedora Core 3 has broken CrossOver/Wine in some way? Every single one? These typically weren't "bugs" and they weren't one line fixes. I myself put a lot of work into allowing Wine to run when exec-shield and prelink are active.
So, I'd like to think my opinion is an informed one because I work at the crossroads where Windows and Linux meet, and the differences in stability between them are like night and day.
Here's a posting about how to run ancient a.out binaries on an ELF-based version of Red Hat http://www.ofb.net/~jheiss/aout_redhat.shtml. Running ancient apps on Linux is simple. Everyone knows it is simple. Why do you try to claim that it is difficult?
Here's a simple experiment to try. Install IBM Domino Server and run it on any modern distribution. Any Fedora Core release will do. At least the release I have, won't run. It'll hang during startup in a way that looks like it's running, but actually it's not.
Now go to garagegames.com and download the Lore demo. Run it. It will fail to start with an error about libgcc_s.so. In fact most of the Loki games are now broken in some fashion.
Now try disabling NPTL, and they'll start working. Did you know about LD_ASSUME_KERNEL? Do you understand what it does?
Here's another experiment. Install a stock Red Hat 9 distribution and upgrade its copy of GTK+ to 2.4 - remember, this release is supposed to be backwards compatible. Observe that GNOME now hangs when it logs out due to a semantic change (bugfix) in GObject.
Final experiment. Write a program to create a menu heirarchy that works on every distribution out there. Actually, don't bother. The one that ships with CrossOver is over 3000 lines of Perl and covers the 6 or so different menu systems otu there as well as cases where a distro ships with more than one at once.
That's why Linux is the fastest growing server OS right now.
But which is dominant? I think you'll find it's Windows.
Sure. Stability and backwards compatibility don't matter much when you're selling a product that just has to serve web pages, or route mail. Everything you need comes out of the box. If stuff breaks it can be fixed by the distribution provider. The same is not true on the desktop which has a much less homogenous set of software in use.
Sure, and then what? Ask the authors kindly to stop? Post on a website about it? This is already done even for proprietary software and yet many peoples computers are still infected with Spyware because they don't Google for "programname + spyware" before installing stuff. Just because you can see the code doesn't mean you can change it.
Yep. Because the most popular games are new versions of old games. I don't care if DOOM no longer works on XP because of a service pack, but there is no reason why the next version of Quake wouldn't be patched to no longer depend upon that bug.
Quite a lot of people play games that are >12 months old. Breaking them isn't an option: they simply won't apply any more security updates from that point forward. Like it or not, in the Real World with the sort of end users who have fast machines on the end of fast home DSL, appcompat takes precendence over security. Every time.
f your company is running a critical app from 1996 without support, your company has bigger problems.
Welcome to the real world. I've already dealt with several in various test Linux migrations. One of them was written by a company that doesn't appear on Google and is apparently bust anyway. Actually this app was a Windows 3.1 program, from even earlier.
Think how much stuff is still written in COBOL.
Actually, it is. Just look at Linux development.
Linux is pretty much a textbook case of how not to maintain backwards compatibility. It's a serious problem. Some vendors are telling the LSB they won't start porting their apps to Linux until it becomes more stable (C++ in particular is an issue).
Due to the projects I'm involved with, I deal with the lack of stability on Linux all the time, and I can tell you it's one seriously fucked platform from that perspective. I've seen more than one open source developer get up and walk away (back to Windows) because the stuff they wrote simply didn't keep working.
Cry me a river. Look into the concept of "source code escrow".
It's easy to talk about source code escrow now. Too late, it's already happened. On a large scale. Deal with it.
I'm not worried about companies that didn't take basic precautions when they licensed software. They made the wrong decision, they suffer the consequences. That's business.
That's why you don't work for Microsoft, and therefore have no say in the matter. You don't sell many operating systems by telling your customers that they're screwed but it's OK because "that's business, it's harsh". People will just tell you to fuck off, and they will give their money to people who care about their software investments (like Microsoft).
Then the vendors can release patches for their apps so that they will work after the service pack is applied.
What vendors? You mean game vendors who stop caring 12 months after release? You mean vertical-market "vendors" where the company using the program is the same company that wrote it? You mean the vendors that went out of business in 1996?
Dude. Application compatibility is no joke, and it's not a simple matter of "communication" as you put it. A lot of the software out there will never be rewritten or changed. A disturbingly high number of programs no longer have any source code, as it was lost.
Hah, I was just thinking that. What's funny is that Todd Wanke was described in a previous WinSuperSite story as being a real tough case (shadowy former security-related job with the US govt) when running a previous "war room", and apparently people were terrified of him! It also said he was a likable guy in person (well, Paul "I want to be assimilated" Thurrott isn't going to say he's an arsehole is he?). So who knows. They made him look like a fluffy teddybear in those shots.
I notice they left out some photos of the other team members. Maybe they actually looked like operating systems geeks instead of models?
What makes you so sure that a free program which you use doesn't have a secret mode in which it obeys its coder, not you?
Can you read C fluently? What about C++? What about x86 assembly? What about when they're obfuscated? Most importantly, do you have an infinite amount of time?
I'd be willing to bet the number of people answering "yes" decreases with each question. There's nothing inherant in free software that says it must be free of malicious code.
What I will give you, is that it's a lot less likely not because the code is open but because free programs are typically not produced by companies reliant on Gator to provide their funding. Typically they don't have any funding.
Erm, "building 80 open source technologies"? You already said they only created 7. Go read the list. Can you name any of these "technologies" actually in use outside of Apple? I can only name one: the ZeroConf protocol, but Apples code isn't used as it's too poor quality.
The 73 "open source technologies" implemented by Apple include such amazing tools like emulations of POSIX features to cover up for the fact that their kernel/linker doesn't provide them. The other items in the list are simply libraries and programs they imported.
What's especially annoying is their blurb about KHTML - they "return their enhancements to the community" in the form of undocumented patch dumps. Yeah, real useful. Also check out how they're "the first computer company to make open source a key part of its ongoing software strategy". That is, if you ignore Cygnus, Red Hat, IBM, etc. It's that kind of not-quite-lying but not-quite-the-truth marketing schlick that I dislike about Apple. They talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.
You forgot that.NET code is JIT compiled. That means the code that is mapped and sharable isn't what's run: it's converted at the last minute to machine code which is not shared, so increasing memory pressure.
The newest JVMs from Sun use some fancy tricks to share the JITd code, but I don't think.NET implements this yet. Or I'd be surprised if it did. So it's perfectly possible that this app is using nearly 40mb of memory per process.
Re:"GIMP is also not meant to be like Photoshop"
on
Paint.NET: The Anti-GIMP?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I've not read such a load of bollocks in a very long time.
Do you really think the developers of the Gimp, who are in my experience universally reasonable and smart, have a "macho" attitude where they don't want the Gimp to be easy to use? You do? I guess you ignored all the usability improvements they made in each version released in the last few years then.
But it doesn't surprise me. I suspect you are not really a Gimp user, I suspect you are simply one of many Slashdotters who downloaded a Windows build, and went "eww no MDI" and then went back to using a warezd Photoshop copy you got from Kazaa.
Strangely, the Gimps interface works perfectly well on Linux which has decent window management.
There are hacks available to make the Gimp windows appear in one big container MDI-style on Windows, but they don't work very well. MDI itself doesn't work very well, actually, and GTK+ on Linux has never supported it and never will (because it's not needed).
I can tell you straight off that the reason the Gimp has the UI it does, is because this is the best UI for the job. It's developers are almost all Linux users, and the UI there is a good one. The reason they "reject" the standard crap that's thrown about in any story that mentions the Gimp is because it's just that - crap, which doesn't apply to the version of the Gimp they use, so why should they care? It's not like they get paid to take market share from Photoshop. I'd say that Gimp on Linux is for 90% of Photoshop users (I say users including all the random kiddies who downloaded it because they want to be "pros") an absolutely solid replacement. I know that in all the years I've used it for commercial web design, photo manipulation and UI development it has never yet left me wanting.
Well, OK, at least it's being maintained as a patchset. Still, that's over a meg of patches that have to be reapplied to each new upstream version... good luck
OK, look I want you to understand that I'm not doing your efforts down - it's great that you're actually writing code instead of whinging like so many others - but I read those emails and I have to admit I agree (for once) with Sander.
For starters, let's look at the so called "disinformation" spread here. I'm not sure what your 2.0 plans are, because neither of your websites (confusingly there are two, which look the same but aren't) seem to mention any on the front page or FAQ. So I don't know what your 2.0 plans are, but if you simply intend to do the work all over again for each major release of OpenOffice then sorry but I think that's nuts. It'd be a massive amount of work even for a full time team, and you only have volunteers.
The most likely outcome is that users of NeoOffice are constantly using an out of date version of OO and will be telling friends and relatives "oh, OpenOffice is OK but it's missing feature XYZ that I need" when that's actually been implemented in a later version. I can see why Sander thinks this would be harmful (though I would not have put it as bluntly).
I'm not sure what politics and scare tactics you're referring to, but that thread seems to imply that they can't fold your patches back because of licensing concerns which is totally reasonable. They also said you'd forked the project, which also appears to be correct from reading your website.
I would love to see OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X, but it probably isn't a small deal. In a project that big, I'm sure there's tons of code that needs to be changed. As someone that has only programed in PHP, Perl, Python and ANSI C, I don't completely understand what needs to be done, but I realise that it isn't a simple matter.
Rewrite the drawing/windowing layer to use Quartz instead of X
Either use a native theming engine (but this requires a ton of tweaking, Firefox is the only app I've see that pulls this trick off reliably) or go the AbiWord route and rewrite the whole GUI to use native MacOS widgets (means rewriting almost all the GUI code in OpenOffice)
Make sure the build system can spit out MacOS binaries
Make sure it integrates with the host system with things like clipboard support etc
Redraw all the artwork so it fits the Aqua "blue water" style
Optimize for the systems graphics/kernel/linker characteristics
and many many more things. All of those tasks are huge. The first wasn't an issue for Linux but the rest were, and the work has been done primarily by Red Hat and Novell working together, as well as volunteers from the Linux community.
It probably helps that on Linux, people just got down to work and started fixing things, with the result that OO now tracks native themes in both GNOME and KDE, has a complete native Industrial icon theme (by the same Ximian artists that did the original GTK+/GNOME artwork), integrates with the native file pickers, gnome-vfs, and starts quickly (prelink and the GCC symbol visibility work was motivated largely by OO).
In contrast, whenever OO is mentioned on Slashdot all I see are comments bitching at the developer team and stupid (wrong) statistics being thrown around in an attempt to convince Sun to do the work even though they have no interest or need for it. Because, you know, Mac users are special so they shouldn't need to do the work themselves. The NeoOffice guys are the only ones I know of that are actually getting serious stuff done, and they seem to be years away from getting something that works well.
Not quite - Red Hat have always poured huge amounts of money into Linux development. I suspect their profits have not kept pace with their revenues because their desktop team has grown enormously in 2004. It must have quadrupled in size, at least. At least that's my estimate taken by looking at the rate they were hiring community figures and knowledge of the size of their desktop team a few years ago.
They don't actually work with KDE upstream though, which makes it rather moot from the perspective of KDE users. Unless you fancy spending Christmas sorting through undocumented patch dumps, of course.
OS X won't get hacked in any big way. And even Microsoft hasn't been sued for engineering negligence, let alone Apple.
Erm, OS X is the operating system that automatically extracts code and links it to protocol handlers when the user clicks an internet enabled DMG link. That sort of security is basically ActiveX level but without, you know, those annoying and unfriendly security certificate things.
If the rest of MacOS X is designed with that sort of mentality then I'd say actually OS X has a more insecure design than Windows does. Sure, BSD may be secure, but there's a huge amount of code in there that isn't BSD.
OK, I pointed this out elsewhere in the thread, but I was one of the guys who worked on adding Notes 6.5.1 support to Codeweavers Crossover and I know for a fact that we have plenty of happy customers - including IBM employees - using it in their daily business. Several of them have signed up for our advocate program and ranked Notes as a "Gold" app which means they think it works perfectly.
Now, the NUL RPMs that IBM distribute internally are not produced by Wine developers. They are (as far as I'm aware) not produced by the Lotus Notes team either. They're simply a skunkworks project that some dudes hacked together - good for them, but the difference between a product made by a company of Wine experts and the NUL RPMs is significant.
I have personally got Notes installed here, and our bug database has remarkably few issues with it. The primary ones are with complex databases that embed Java - effectively you're running two apps at once here, one inside the other. The other issue is that you need 6.5.1 not 6.5.0, although if somebody was keen the issue preventing 6.5.0 from working is probably not too hard to fix (if you know C and want to work on it, let me know).
IBM don't talk about Wine generally, although nobody is really sure why not. In general they are remarkably vague about it, typically citing "legal issues" - it's so vague, in fact, that you could argue it amounts to (dare I say it) little more than FUD. In fact, in its 10+ year history the Wine project has never been made aware of any patents that it infringes (though I imagine some exist on the grounds that all non-trivial software infringes some patents), and as Jeremy White has pointed out elsewhere in this story, a convicted monopolist cannot use patent lawsuits to restrict the competition anyway.
As to why they take this stance, your guess is as good as mine. Lawyer paranoia, seeing the OS/2 Windows compatibility as a scapegoat for its failure, or [insert conspiracy theory here] - whatever the reason, such a glaring ommission from this Red Book does not do the Linux community any favours.
This is especially true as there are simply so many apps out there that are not migratable: eg the bazillion and one custom Visual Basic apps out there that either cannot or will not be rewritten in a portable framework. Even web apps can have serious portability issues, these cannot be addressed over night, and some will never be addressed. Think how many banks still use software written in COBOL, for instance.
Why not? Ad hoc experiments done on non-technical friends indicate that for a managed desktop (ie where an admin sets it up and controls it) Linux is easier to use than OS X given zero training or familiarity with Windows. I'd say Linux is getting very ready very quickly.
Streaming Server is only useful with the QuickTime client, which is Mac/Windows only.
Apple maintain their own GCC fork which adds support for new languages, and which can only be used on a Mac. But yes, they have contributed back to GCC - like many other companies selling proprietary hardware do (MIPS etc).
Kerberos - not sure what you mean here. I don't rememnber any open source software releases to do with this. Open Directory is a website as far as I'm concerned, what do you think it is?
OpenPlay isn't actually used by anybody, as far as I know.
CUPS has nothing to do with Apple. It was developed by Easy Software Products and I'm not aware of any significant contributions Apple made to it. They ship it with OSX along with some proprietary tools because it beat writing their own printer drivers.
Rendezvous - the code they released is so disgusting that nobody uses it. The Howl library is much preferred. I've actually read this mDNSResponder code from Apple and it's pretty atrocious. One huge C file where the biggest comment is some rambling justification of the bizarro indentation style it uses.
WebCore - they made no effort to work with the KDE community on this, preferring instead to fork KHTML so aggressively and quickly that the (undocumented) changes they made aren't getting back in. The "patches" come in the form of enormous patch dumps whenever a new WebCore release comes out, which is useless. I've worked with such patch dumps before and they typically have to be thrown away, or used at max as a reference.
X11 - what have they contributed to Xorg/Xfree beyond simple build/portability fixes? As far as I'm aware they simply took it and slapped a proprietary WM on top.
I never heard of the last two... in contrast Real have released an entire multimedia framework, native players, and an open source hosting site to the Linux community. IE they released something actually useful to Linux users. Shocking I know.
My MEP is none other than Arlene McCarthy herself. You can rest assured I have had correspondence with this democratically elected representative and she totally ignored me, handing back an obnoxious stock email that simply re-iterated some bogus rhetoric and whinged about the nasty people ringing her up to tell her software patents were bad. I don't think she even read my letter, none of the points I made were addressed. She just hit "Send -> Template -> SWPAT Stock Letter 2" or whatever.
Nothing has made me as cynical about politics as that did. Of all the people in the world, I'm supposed to have influence over her living as I do in her constituency, and it turned out that I had just as much influence as somebody living in Mexico.
No sorry, I did look but couldn't find it. I'd suggest getting the talkback trace (talkback.mozilla.org) then searching for one of the functions mentioned in the backtrace.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true on any interesting operating system.
I ask you though - can you name a way of accidentally deadlocking the GUI on Windows? There used to be a way, you could disable a window in such a way that the desktop window would be disabled and the GUI would hang, but that was fixed years ago.
Now can you name a way of doing it on Linux? Yes - it's about 10 lines of C and impossible to fix, as it's due to a fundamental design flaw in the X protocol, namely that any client can request that the server ignore requests from other clients. Almost every toolkit locks the server at some point even if it's only for a short period of time, but if the program hangs in that period your GUI is toast. This used to be a serious problem with Motif apps, as Motif held the server locked for long periods (while menus were open, etc). Sure, you can switch to a virtual console and kill the app from the command line, but how many people know how to do that? How many would even diagnose it? At least in Windows a hung fullscreen app shows up as "Not Responding" when you press Ctrl-Alt-Delete.
I don't think we should throw stones when we live in a glass house ...
I don't see how. You claimed it was up to the people who sold the software to fix it, and I pointed out that much software was not written to be sold as a product. It was written by the people who had a problem to solve.
Yes, and I just got back from the pub, where I was talking with a friend who claimed you don't need to bother applying security updates if you have a good firewall - in fact, he said, it's best not to because stuff might break. And this is with a huge amount of effort put into things like SP2 by Microsoft. He isn't the first person I've met with that attitude.
I work for Codeweavers and in fact this Windows 3.1 app (it was for a hospital) now runs quite well on Linux. We work hard to ensure Wine and CrossOver stay working on an incredibly unstable platform. Do you know that every single release from Red Hat 9 through to Fedora Core 3 has broken CrossOver/Wine in some way? Every single one? These typically weren't "bugs" and they weren't one line fixes. I myself put a lot of work into allowing Wine to run when exec-shield and prelink are active.
So, I'd like to think my opinion is an informed one because I work at the crossroads where Windows and Linux meet, and the differences in stability between them are like night and day.
Here's a simple experiment to try. Install IBM Domino Server and run it on any modern distribution. Any Fedora Core release will do. At least the release I have, won't run. It'll hang during startup in a way that looks like it's running, but actually it's not.
Now go to garagegames.com and download the Lore demo. Run it. It will fail to start with an error about libgcc_s.so. In fact most of the Loki games are now broken in some fashion.
Now try disabling NPTL, and they'll start working. Did you know about LD_ASSUME_KERNEL? Do you understand what it does?
Here's another experiment. Install a stock Red Hat 9 distribution and upgrade its copy of GTK+ to 2.4 - remember, this release is supposed to be backwards compatible. Observe that GNOME now hangs when it logs out due to a semantic change (bugfix) in GObject.
Final experiment. Write a program to create a menu heirarchy that works on every distribution out there. Actually, don't bother. The one that ships with CrossOver is over 3000 lines of Perl and covers the 6 or so different menu systems otu there as well as cases where a distro ships with more than one at once.
But which is dominant? I think you'll find it's Windows.
Sure. Stability and backwards compatibility don't matter much when you're selling a product that just has to serve web pages, or route mail. Everything you need comes out of the box. If stuff breaks it can be fixed by the distribution provider. The same is not true on the desktop which has a much less homogenous set of software in use.
Sure, and then what? Ask the authors kindly to stop? Post on a website about it? This is already done even for proprietary software and yet many peoples computers are still infected with Spyware because they don't Google for "programname + spyware" before installing stuff. Just because you can see the code doesn't mean you can change it.
Lot's of software isn't sold in the first place.
Yep. Because the most popular games are new versions of old games. I don't care if DOOM no longer works on XP because of a service pack, but there is no reason why the next version of Quake wouldn't be patched to no longer depend upon that bug.
Quite a lot of people play games that are >12 months old. Breaking them isn't an option: they simply won't apply any more security updates from that point forward. Like it or not, in the Real World with the sort of end users who have fast machines on the end of fast home DSL, appcompat takes precendence over security. Every time.
f your company is running a critical app from 1996 without support, your company has bigger problems.
Welcome to the real world. I've already dealt with several in various test Linux migrations. One of them was written by a company that doesn't appear on Google and is apparently bust anyway. Actually this app was a Windows 3.1 program, from even earlier.
Think how much stuff is still written in COBOL.
Actually, it is. Just look at Linux development.
Linux is pretty much a textbook case of how not to maintain backwards compatibility. It's a serious problem. Some vendors are telling the LSB they won't start porting their apps to Linux until it becomes more stable (C++ in particular is an issue).
Due to the projects I'm involved with, I deal with the lack of stability on Linux all the time, and I can tell you it's one seriously fucked platform from that perspective. I've seen more than one open source developer get up and walk away (back to Windows) because the stuff they wrote simply didn't keep working.
Cry me a river. Look into the concept of "source code escrow".
It's easy to talk about source code escrow now. Too late, it's already happened. On a large scale. Deal with it.
I'm not worried about companies that didn't take basic precautions when they licensed software. They made the wrong decision, they suffer the consequences. That's business.
That's why you don't work for Microsoft, and therefore have no say in the matter. You don't sell many operating systems by telling your customers that they're screwed but it's OK because "that's business, it's harsh". People will just tell you to fuck off, and they will give their money to people who care about their software investments (like Microsoft).
It doesn't even begin to work in a world which is partly composed of proprietary software. Therefore, these policies are stupid.
What vendors? You mean game vendors who stop caring 12 months after release? You mean vertical-market "vendors" where the company using the program is the same company that wrote it? You mean the vendors that went out of business in 1996?
Dude. Application compatibility is no joke, and it's not a simple matter of "communication" as you put it. A lot of the software out there will never be rewritten or changed. A disturbingly high number of programs no longer have any source code, as it was lost.
I notice they left out some photos of the other team members. Maybe they actually looked like operating systems geeks instead of models?
Can you read C fluently? What about C++? What about x86 assembly? What about when they're obfuscated? Most importantly, do you have an infinite amount of time?
I'd be willing to bet the number of people answering "yes" decreases with each question. There's nothing inherant in free software that says it must be free of malicious code.
What I will give you, is that it's a lot less likely not because the code is open but because free programs are typically not produced by companies reliant on Gator to provide their funding. Typically they don't have any funding.
The 73 "open source technologies" implemented by Apple include such amazing tools like emulations of POSIX features to cover up for the fact that their kernel/linker doesn't provide them. The other items in the list are simply libraries and programs they imported.
What's especially annoying is their blurb about KHTML - they "return their enhancements to the community" in the form of undocumented patch dumps. Yeah, real useful. Also check out how they're "the first computer company to make open source a key part of its ongoing software strategy". That is, if you ignore Cygnus, Red Hat, IBM, etc. It's that kind of not-quite-lying but not-quite-the-truth marketing schlick that I dislike about Apple. They talk the talk, but don't walk the walk.
The newest JVMs from Sun use some fancy tricks to share the JITd code, but I don't think .NET implements this yet. Or I'd be surprised if it did. So it's perfectly possible that this app is using nearly 40mb of memory per process.
Do you really think the developers of the Gimp, who are in my experience universally reasonable and smart, have a "macho" attitude where they don't want the Gimp to be easy to use? You do? I guess you ignored all the usability improvements they made in each version released in the last few years then.
But it doesn't surprise me. I suspect you are not really a Gimp user, I suspect you are simply one of many Slashdotters who downloaded a Windows build, and went "eww no MDI" and then went back to using a warezd Photoshop copy you got from Kazaa.
Strangely, the Gimps interface works perfectly well on Linux which has decent window management.
There are hacks available to make the Gimp windows appear in one big container MDI-style on Windows, but they don't work very well. MDI itself doesn't work very well, actually, and GTK+ on Linux has never supported it and never will (because it's not needed).
I can tell you straight off that the reason the Gimp has the UI it does, is because this is the best UI for the job. It's developers are almost all Linux users, and the UI there is a good one. The reason they "reject" the standard crap that's thrown about in any story that mentions the Gimp is because it's just that - crap, which doesn't apply to the version of the Gimp they use, so why should they care? It's not like they get paid to take market share from Photoshop. I'd say that Gimp on Linux is for 90% of Photoshop users (I say users including all the random kiddies who downloaded it because they want to be "pros") an absolutely solid replacement. I know that in all the years I've used it for commercial web design, photo manipulation and UI development it has never yet left me wanting.
Well, OK, at least it's being maintained as a patchset. Still, that's over a meg of patches that have to be reapplied to each new upstream version ... good luck
For starters, let's look at the so called "disinformation" spread here. I'm not sure what your 2.0 plans are, because neither of your websites (confusingly there are two, which look the same but aren't) seem to mention any on the front page or FAQ. So I don't know what your 2.0 plans are, but if you simply intend to do the work all over again for each major release of OpenOffice then sorry but I think that's nuts. It'd be a massive amount of work even for a full time team, and you only have volunteers.
The most likely outcome is that users of NeoOffice are constantly using an out of date version of OO and will be telling friends and relatives "oh, OpenOffice is OK but it's missing feature XYZ that I need" when that's actually been implemented in a later version. I can see why Sander thinks this would be harmful (though I would not have put it as bluntly).
What politics are you talking about?
and many many more things. All of those tasks are huge. The first wasn't an issue for Linux but the rest were, and the work has been done primarily by Red Hat and Novell working together, as well as volunteers from the Linux community.
It probably helps that on Linux, people just got down to work and started fixing things, with the result that OO now tracks native themes in both GNOME and KDE, has a complete native Industrial icon theme (by the same Ximian artists that did the original GTK+/GNOME artwork), integrates with the native file pickers, gnome-vfs, and starts quickly (prelink and the GCC symbol visibility work was motivated largely by OO).
In contrast, whenever OO is mentioned on Slashdot all I see are comments bitching at the developer team and stupid (wrong) statistics being thrown around in an attempt to convince Sun to do the work even though they have no interest or need for it. Because, you know, Mac users are special so they shouldn't need to do the work themselves. The NeoOffice guys are the only ones I know of that are actually getting serious stuff done, and they seem to be years away from getting something that works well.
So I wouldn't read too much into the RH figures.
They don't actually work with KDE upstream though, which makes it rather moot from the perspective of KDE users. Unless you fancy spending Christmas sorting through undocumented patch dumps, of course.
Erm, OS X is the operating system that automatically extracts code and links it to protocol handlers when the user clicks an internet enabled DMG link. That sort of security is basically ActiveX level but without, you know, those annoying and unfriendly security certificate things.
If the rest of MacOS X is designed with that sort of mentality then I'd say actually OS X has a more insecure design than Windows does. Sure, BSD may be secure, but there's a huge amount of code in there that isn't BSD.
Now, the NUL RPMs that IBM distribute internally are not produced by Wine developers. They are (as far as I'm aware) not produced by the Lotus Notes team either. They're simply a skunkworks project that some dudes hacked together - good for them, but the difference between a product made by a company of Wine experts and the NUL RPMs is significant.
I have personally got Notes installed here, and our bug database has remarkably few issues with it. The primary ones are with complex databases that embed Java - effectively you're running two apps at once here, one inside the other. The other issue is that you need 6.5.1 not 6.5.0, although if somebody was keen the issue preventing 6.5.0 from working is probably not too hard to fix (if you know C and want to work on it, let me know).
IBM don't talk about Wine generally, although nobody is really sure why not. In general they are remarkably vague about it, typically citing "legal issues" - it's so vague, in fact, that you could argue it amounts to (dare I say it) little more than FUD. In fact, in its 10+ year history the Wine project has never been made aware of any patents that it infringes (though I imagine some exist on the grounds that all non-trivial software infringes some patents), and as Jeremy White has pointed out elsewhere in this story, a convicted monopolist cannot use patent lawsuits to restrict the competition anyway.
As to why they take this stance, your guess is as good as mine. Lawyer paranoia, seeing the OS/2 Windows compatibility as a scapegoat for its failure, or [insert conspiracy theory here] - whatever the reason, such a glaring ommission from this Red Book does not do the Linux community any favours.
This is especially true as there are simply so many apps out there that are not migratable: eg the bazillion and one custom Visual Basic apps out there that either cannot or will not be rewritten in a portable framework. Even web apps can have serious portability issues, these cannot be addressed over night, and some will never be addressed. Think how many banks still use software written in COBOL, for instance.
Why won't they go with Wine? FWIW I did the Notes 6.5.1 support for Wine, and we have a lot of people happily using it.
Why not? Ad hoc experiments done on non-technical friends indicate that for a managed desktop (ie where an admin sets it up and controls it) Linux is easier to use than OS X given zero training or familiarity with Windows. I'd say Linux is getting very ready very quickly.
Apple maintain their own GCC fork which adds support for new languages, and which can only be used on a Mac. But yes, they have contributed back to GCC - like many other companies selling proprietary hardware do (MIPS etc).
Kerberos - not sure what you mean here. I don't rememnber any open source software releases to do with this. Open Directory is a website as far as I'm concerned, what do you think it is?
OpenPlay isn't actually used by anybody, as far as I know.
CUPS has nothing to do with Apple. It was developed by Easy Software Products and I'm not aware of any significant contributions Apple made to it. They ship it with OSX along with some proprietary tools because it beat writing their own printer drivers.
Rendezvous - the code they released is so disgusting that nobody uses it. The Howl library is much preferred. I've actually read this mDNSResponder code from Apple and it's pretty atrocious. One huge C file where the biggest comment is some rambling justification of the bizarro indentation style it uses.
WebCore - they made no effort to work with the KDE community on this, preferring instead to fork KHTML so aggressively and quickly that the (undocumented) changes they made aren't getting back in. The "patches" come in the form of enormous patch dumps whenever a new WebCore release comes out, which is useless. I've worked with such patch dumps before and they typically have to be thrown away, or used at max as a reference.
X11 - what have they contributed to Xorg/Xfree beyond simple build/portability fixes? As far as I'm aware they simply took it and slapped a proprietary WM on top.
I never heard of the last two ... in contrast Real have released an entire multimedia framework, native players, and an open source hosting site to the Linux community. IE they released something actually useful to Linux users. Shocking I know.
Nothing has made me as cynical about politics as that did. Of all the people in the world, I'm supposed to have influence over her living as I do in her constituency, and it turned out that I had just as much influence as somebody living in Mexico.
No sorry, I did look but couldn't find it. I'd suggest getting the talkback trace (talkback.mozilla.org) then searching for one of the functions mentioned in the backtrace.
Pretty much correct, but it's done partly for speed. Word is much, much faster at saving than OO is.