Apple provides an "Installer" app for apps which *need* installation, and look how many people use it. Almost nobody.
Actually, Apple use it for nearly all their apps don't they?
Speaking as an OS X developer, another thing this style of packaging tends to result in is devs who *want* the app to be easily installed.
But yes. This is crucial. Right now Linux devs treat easy installs as a "not my problem" thing. Windows and Mac developers treat it as a critical part of the whole. We need a mindset change.
What we'd need would be something as easily managed as #define _HAVE_SDL, only at runtime. There is no way to ensure its adoption if you don't make it as efficient to use as possible.
2) Agree on a common set of libraries -- think DirectX, only system-wide, not just for games
Ding ding ding! This man wins a prize, he has exactly nailed the problems in a way most people in this thread have not. It took me a long time to reach this level of insight into the issue. Go read the NOTES file to get some more ideas for such a Linux desktop platform. Nothing solid has been started yet, there are other tasks that need to be done first. But this is one of the most important ones.
That file also touches on the security updates problem, at least peripherally. The idea is to use the PAL to allow for generic upgrade scripts/plugins to be run. You'd have one for apt, one for autopackages, others for custom installers etc all abstracted by the PAL.
They already can. Investigate passing paths to ELF binaries to/lib/ld-linux.so.2, and if you figure out how to disable that (have a cookie if you can, it is possible!) then investigate ul_exec, LD_PRELOAD and ELF constructor functions.
Basically if a user has shell access to a box they can run whatever code they like. Deal with it.
Unfortunately it comes at a price. Out of date and broken packages are common, moreso than you might think. I've personally had to deal with this sort of breakage on Debian and Gentoo, and it's very frustrating.
Well not really. This project seems to be about simply improving the apt/yum dependency resolution algorithms: a worthy goal indeed. The Slashdot headline is misleading as usual, this project won't be "unifying" anything anytime soon except maybe the command line UI for each tool; hardly a big deal.
Actually fixing Linux software installation is going to be very tricky indeed. I wrote some notes on it. That document also talks about what's wrong with apt et al and why "Just use Debian!" is not a suitable answer to peoples criticisms.
autopackage is a good start but it's only one component of many that will be needed. OpenPKG has rather different goals and it's not quite fair to compare them.
They are "themed" searches, if I remember correctly.
The IE page is simply there for the search bar.
The google.com/firefox page is actually the default start page for the browser, negotiated by the Mozilla Foundation. They're deliberately taking the bandwidth load off of mozilla.org, and that's a business relationship. Dunno about "embracing" it, but there's definitely some friendship there. Why would Google help pay Mozilla Foundations bandwidth bill otherwise?
Nonetheless, Domino Administrator does work on Crossover at least. I worked on it a bit. The admin console crashes apparently but the rest works. Notes itself also works pretty well.
Funny how virtually every other country in the world appears to think it's not horribly flawed.
I guess Americans are just a lot smarter than everybody else. After all, they can see it's flawed, but the people in other developed nations can't. That explanation makes perfect sense.
The bible thumpers hold critical numbers in strategic areas of the United States, and any plan to change the composition of the US government will have to include them.
Unfortunately it's difficult to see how you can change an agenda dominated by right-wing Christian fundamentalists: you cannot argue with these people, they are quite happy to choose their president based on only one issue (abortion) because the Church tells them to do so. Hate to say it, but they are apparently as impossible to reason with as Islamic terrorists.
The situation with America is very tricky indeed: the country appears to be deeply divided politically and worse, that division is split cleanly between geographic regions with the coastal city (more educated) areas blue and the middle states voting red.
Deep political divisions along geographical lines is historically a recipe for civil war. I think it's very unlikely to happen, but there's no denying the lessons of history. May we all hope that it is not so.
Not if "something" hurts our economy while doing nothing to curb global greenhouse gas emissions.
Why does it do nothing? Many countries have already reduced CO2 emissions because of Kyoto.
If we don't apply the same pollution-control standards to *all* WTO countries, then the multinationals will just move their manufacturing operations to the countries where the Kyoto standards are weakest so that they can keep producing as much CO2 as they feel like.
The rationale behind this IIRC is that the 3rd world countries have extremely outdated and underdeveloped (read: inefficient) technology. Infusions of cash from foreign companies make the country richer so increasing their obligations under the Kyoto protocol. They can only meet these by becoming more efficient by retooling their factories and power stations with 1st world technology - see?
Good for you, I'm glad to hear that. Better to vote independent if you don't agree with their policies than try and pick the least-worst candidate. Long term, people voting for those they actually agree with (rather than, eg those most aligned with their religion) is the only way American democracy can actually become democratic again as opposed to a personality pissing match.
You could use that logic to veto pretty much anything.
Abolish slavery? But the slave drivers would just move somewhere else and take our jobs!
No, Bushs position is total BS and is yet another reason why pretty much everybody in Europe loathes him and can't believe middle America was dumb enough to vote for him.
Everyone: "Bush, we need you to help us save the world!"
Bush: "That would cost at least one American job, I'd rather we all die in massive floods and freak weather events instead"
Europe is hardly a saint when it comes to pollution and environmental policies but at least it's not heading full steam in the wrong direction.
In England we've been hearing for the past week about how Bush makes "moral stands" and "does what is right not popular". So even if the bad guys move abroad, wouldn't that be morally preferable to keeping them here?
Nearly there. Wine actually links Win32 binaries to the native libGL via a set of calling convention thunks. As a result there's little to no overhead involved.
Since when did a little competition in the marketplace cause the ones first to market to simply up and leave?
Since it was called "bundling", the power of which has been demonstrated time and time again. Please don't pretend having your product included with the OS is like normal 'competition'. It's not.
As in lots of web apps written by Microsoft or Microsoft-shops require IE. Firefox compatibility isn't good enough to run these, so they continue to use IE.
There's absolutely zero technical data on what this product supports. Direct3D 8? 9? DirectPlay (protocol is undocumented, afaik)? DirectSound? DirectMusic?
I can't take this credibly when the link for the technical data sheet PDF is a 404. This says to me they aren't doing much business.
Counterexamples include considering that Linux is a fer more popular internet server than Windows is, but still gets fewer total exploits in that field.
You're thinking of IIS not Linux - Windows is a statistically more popular net server platform than Linux especially if you take into account intranet servers.
Sadly, most of Europe does not understand this. They sit back in their ivory towers and think smug little thoughts about using diplomacy to solve all of the world's problems. They don't understand the terrorist threat. They never heard the sound of machine gun fire in their streets.
WTF was the IRA then? Or have you forgotten that for the longest time a non-negligable fraction of the US population supported Irish Republican terrorists?
The name of the app appears in the menu bar so all the menus are constantly moving, defeating whatever usability value a fixed menubar had in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Apple use it for nearly all their apps don't they?
Speaking as an OS X developer, another thing this style of packaging tends to result in is devs who *want* the app to be easily installed.
But yes. This is crucial. Right now Linux devs treat easy installs as a "not my problem" thing. Windows and Mac developers treat it as a critical part of the whole. We need a mindset change.
Ask and you shall receive
Ding ding ding! This man wins a prize, he has exactly nailed the problems in a way most people in this thread have not. It took me a long time to reach this level of insight into the issue. Go read the NOTES file to get some more ideas for such a Linux desktop platform. Nothing solid has been started yet, there are other tasks that need to be done first. But this is one of the most important ones.
That file also touches on the security updates problem, at least peripherally. The idea is to use the PAL to allow for generic upgrade scripts/plugins to be run. You'd have one for apt, one for autopackages, others for custom installers etc all abstracted by the PAL.
Basically if a user has shell access to a box they can run whatever code they like. Deal with it.
Unfortunately it comes at a price. Out of date and broken packages are common, moreso than you might think. I've personally had to deal with this sort of breakage on Debian and Gentoo, and it's very frustrating.
Actually fixing Linux software installation is going to be very tricky indeed. I wrote some notes on it. That document also talks about what's wrong with apt et al and why "Just use Debian!" is not a suitable answer to peoples criticisms.
autopackage is a good start but it's only one component of many that will be needed. OpenPKG has rather different goals and it's not quite fair to compare them.
The difference being that these days there are humans around, and we'd quite like to survive.
The IE page is simply there for the search bar.
The google.com/firefox page is actually the default start page for the browser, negotiated by the Mozilla Foundation. They're deliberately taking the bandwidth load off of mozilla.org, and that's a business relationship. Dunno about "embracing" it, but there's definitely some friendship there. Why would Google help pay Mozilla Foundations bandwidth bill otherwise?
Nonetheless, Domino Administrator does work on Crossover at least. I worked on it a bit. The admin console crashes apparently but the rest works. Notes itself also works pretty well.
I bet that'll go down like a lead balloon ...
Just NIH syndrome. I wish Fedora used apt-rpm as well.
Funny how virtually every other country in the world appears to think it's not horribly flawed.
I guess Americans are just a lot smarter than everybody else. After all, they can see it's flawed, but the people in other developed nations can't. That explanation makes perfect sense.
Unfortunately it's difficult to see how you can change an agenda dominated by right-wing Christian fundamentalists: you cannot argue with these people, they are quite happy to choose their president based on only one issue (abortion) because the Church tells them to do so. Hate to say it, but they are apparently as impossible to reason with as Islamic terrorists.
The situation with America is very tricky indeed: the country appears to be deeply divided politically and worse, that division is split cleanly between geographic regions with the coastal city (more educated) areas blue and the middle states voting red.
Deep political divisions along geographical lines is historically a recipe for civil war. I think it's very unlikely to happen, but there's no denying the lessons of history. May we all hope that it is not so.
Why does it do nothing? Many countries have already reduced CO2 emissions because of Kyoto.
The rationale behind this IIRC is that the 3rd world countries have extremely outdated and underdeveloped (read: inefficient) technology. Infusions of cash from foreign companies make the country richer so increasing their obligations under the Kyoto protocol. They can only meet these by becoming more efficient by retooling their factories and power stations with 1st world technology - see?
Good for you, I'm glad to hear that. Better to vote independent if you don't agree with their policies than try and pick the least-worst candidate. Long term, people voting for those they actually agree with (rather than, eg those most aligned with their religion) is the only way American democracy can actually become democratic again as opposed to a personality pissing match.
Abolish slavery? But the slave drivers would just move somewhere else and take our jobs!
No, Bushs position is total BS and is yet another reason why pretty much everybody in Europe loathes him and can't believe middle America was dumb enough to vote for him.
Everyone: "Bush, we need you to help us save the world!"
Bush: "That would cost at least one American job, I'd rather we all die in massive floods and freak weather events instead"
Europe is hardly a saint when it comes to pollution and environmental policies but at least it's not heading full steam in the wrong direction.
In England we've been hearing for the past week about how Bush makes "moral stands" and "does what is right not popular". So even if the bad guys move abroad, wouldn't that be morally preferable to keeping them here?
Me, bitter? Why yes. I think I am.
Nearly there. Wine actually links Win32 binaries to the native libGL via a set of calling convention thunks. As a result there's little to no overhead involved.
Since it was called "bundling", the power of which has been demonstrated time and time again. Please don't pretend having your product included with the OS is like normal 'competition'. It's not.
As in lots of web apps written by Microsoft or Microsoft-shops require IE. Firefox compatibility isn't good enough to run these, so they continue to use IE.
I can't take this credibly when the link for the technical data sheet PDF is a 404. This says to me they aren't doing much business.
You're thinking of IIS not Linux - Windows is a statistically more popular net server platform than Linux especially if you take into account intranet servers.
WTF was the IRA then? Or have you forgotten that for the longest time a non-negligable fraction of the US population supported Irish Republican terrorists?
Oh how the wheel turns ...
Last time I checked there was no DirectX implementation for the Mac. That makes a big difference.
The name of the app appears in the menu bar so all the menus are constantly moving, defeating whatever usability value a fixed menubar had in the first place.
Because they're different code. For instance, check out the telnet:/ vulnerability some time ago.
I'm 99% certain gcc/linux/x86 uses a zero overhead table-based exception ABI. Try dumping a C++ binary some time and check out the .eh_header section.