the only thing that might make the PC platform attractive are the rumors that HP will be releasing an Opteron soon
Hmm? What about stuff like price point, compatability, vendor independance etc etc, ie the stuff you can't simply market away. These are the reasons why businesses and often home users choose the PC platform time and time again.
Oh sure. So the legendary Apple marketing machine will whip up a hyped frenzy in its followers. But other than being in the running again, nothing will have really changed.
It's not a G5, it's a PPC970, completely different beasts.
It is? I was under the impression that nobody was actually certain that this would be used. Everybody is simply assuming it will be, but there has been no confirmation from anybody.
Alternatively of course, buy CrossOver 2, in which it works out of the box. And you support the wine project as well:) For less than the price of Win4Lin you get hassle free emulation....
Thank you for declaring your financial BIAS toward a competing solution.
My point is that while Win4Lin may be fine for home users, it's not fine for businesses. That's why I get paid to do it - they need a solution that integrates well with the desktop (things like system tray icons etc) and that frees them from Windows dependancies, and that also allows them to port parts individually.
They are both hacks from my standpoint
Well, Wine does what Windows does, ie load and relink the app to the DLLs that implement the APIs. The app expects this, it's how the system was designed to work. Win4Lin plays tricks with the kernels to run it on top of Linux, in a way that it was never designed to run, so in my view that makes it a hack. That's not to do it down, it's a very useful hack. But not a long term solution to the problem.
Installing it is the hard part, once it's installed running it is pretty trivial and mostly works well. Suitable for light usage, for instance favourites doesn't work. The rest does however, as far as I know (not an expert on IEs features in depth).
Basically I use the CrossOver 1.3 config file and a few command line switches. Installing IE is something that should become easier to do soonish, it's definately one of the hardest apps to get installed unfortunately.
In brief, install DCOM (itself a bit broken, been meaning to fix that lately, there is a simple workaround though). Then install IE using the ie6setup tool. There will be a few errors along the way, but they are harmless. They are also fixed in CodeWeavers CVS apparently. Remember to run wineboot to simulate a reboot.
One tip, choose custom and uncheck everything except IE, Offline Browsing pack and VB Scripting support. Don't install Windows Media Player, it will try and install DirectX and stuff.
Once it's installed, running it should just be a case of wine "c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe".
Like I said, IE is kind of an advanced app to run, though I do it all the time it's still a bit rough for newbies. I showed those screenshots because the AC seemed to think it wasn't possible:)
i couldn't imagine a production type environment where a linux user (server or desktop) were in dire need of a windows application that they wouldn't just run windows.
Really? I know of many. I get paid by them to ensure their software works on Wine, WITHOUT Windows.
Why use Linux and Windows at the same time? You'd still need to pay licensing for Windows.
If anything, Win4Lin is the hack. An awfully good one, but still a clever hack regardless. Wine is actually a solid solution that actually poses a threat to Microsoft.
Uh, you define "serious programing project" as something that invokes callbacks across network boundaries? So the Linux kernel isn't serious? Gnome isn't serious? Windows isn't serious?
Object remoting is rarely used. And you can obviously do that as well if you like using sunrpc or CORBA.
It's crazy how much time people put into making Windows emulators for GNU/Linux.
Why? The demand is there. We get a constant flow of people, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in #winehq asking about just this very thing.
The most important thing is that it's critical for businesses with custom apps to be able to run them on a Linux desktop without Windows licensing fees.
The ability to access the printer port from win32 apps
Well I'm pretty sure Wine has this ability. At least it can be used with scanners via the parallel port iirc.
WINE seems to be a very useful "meta project" -- take the bits of WINE you need to get the specific windows functionality you need, but you'll never get 100% of it. I'm not sure why.
-1 Myth. Of course Wine can implement 100% of the Windows APIs (or rather so much that nobody cares about the remainder). It's just a question of when. So, the number of people working on Wine increases roughly linearly with the growth of desktop Linux (and recently things like CrossOver have helped). There's no reason why one day WineHQ might not be moving faster than Microsoft do. Of course they'll always be one step behind the latest APIs, but that's OK because no apps immediately start depending on new functionality as soon as a new OS is released. In fact, it often takes years.
So basically Wine is The Right Solution(tm), as it means you don't need any legal ties to Microsoft. It also lets you do lots of nice integration. Its only problem really is being starved of manpower, and the fact that it's not yet perfect (but then again there are apps that Win4Lin won't run either).
Just build a custom Jabber server that saves everything serverside!
Or use the premade ones from Tipic, Jabber Inc etc.
I mean, this problem just screams "JABBER!!!" as a solution. Log it all server side. Transports for when employees need access to the proprietary networks. Server side logging is trivial. No worries:)
Note that this will use SOCKS if available, and integrate with your main loop.
Personally, I find the C version far more readable, though obviously familiarity plays a part in that. I also defined a handler for incoming connections, which I can't see in the ObjC example.
Unfortunately that's a port of GTK1, which has been obsoleted and is rapidly being phased out on Linux. The next stable release of the GIMP, which should be happening in the next few months, will eliminate one of the last remaining major GTK1 apps (with xmms being the other one).
It's more amusing when you consider the size of KWQ, Apples mini-clone of Qt they wrote to port Konqueror.
Still, they clearly didn't want to license Qt itself for whatever reason, and they don't want to make Safari free software, again for no real apparant reason, so this release of Qt means little for Safari anyway.
One thing that bears thinking about, however, is whether this release will drive the world of free software to be more and more Mac driven, and at least somewhat less Linux driven.
The vast majority of free software is written on Linux and then ported to other platforms. If you think being able to run KDE/Qt on a Mac will change this, then I'd point you towards the presence of KDE on Windows - how many new developers did that bring to KDE? AFAIK none.
It's fairly apparent that Safari is the driving force behind KHTML now -- with this release, will OSX become the driving force behind other elements of KDE? What will this mean for Linux?
Unlikely. Apple aren't working on KDE for one. Secondly, I doubt many people will use KDE itself, rather perhaps they will use a few of its apps. But then again, perhaps not. I know many people (and I am included in that) who don't use any KDE apps at all on Linux. No real bias or anything, it just so happens that the apps we use on a daily basis aren't based on Qt.
In short, it will mean about as much for Linux as any other port of software to other platforms will - basically jack all.
Take, for instance, a typical University or ISP helpdesk.
The kind of support Red Hat provide is not the same kind as the kind a helpdesk provides.
Red Hat are there to support the help desk. An answer of, "Umm, dunno" is not acceptable. If they don't know the answer, they have to be able to say, "we'll get our engineers right on it, you'll have an answer soon". They can't do that for a piece of code they have no expertise on.
Support in this context also means patches and updates. Obviously if you install your own stuff, and then get rooted because of a bug in that, you can't expect Red Hat to take the fall for it, hence, no support for you. Maybe they could be more flexible about it.
Your examples are not valid here.
Why not? If RH have no expertise on a piece of code, what difference does it make where it came from?
It is not fair for a distribution, who should be promoting competition rather than inhibiting it, to disallow use of software because of personal issues.
Personal issues? What personal issues? Yeah, some RH employees have (technical) doubts about the reliability of ReiserFS. That's not personal, if they don't trust Hans' work for whatever reason, he should try and convince them (or customers choose somebody less conservative).
I'm glad Linus has enough foresight to include it in the kernel.
If Linus includes it in the kernel and people use it and it goes wrong, they have nothing on Linus. On the other hand, Red Hat is there partially to take the blame for things like that. It's a whole different set of rules.
There was another reply about Mandrake and SuSE, which I'll answer here as well. Red Hat make ALL their money from support, as (virtually) all their software is GPLd and always has been. Mandrake and SuSE on the other hand both sell their distro and are far more reliant upon support from home users. And I think you'll find that they are similarly inflexible with respect to "bending" your support contract, if they choose different components to do so then the market will decide.
Now, I agree it'd be nice to include ReiserFS in RH Linux, ie the unsupported version meant for hackers and hobbyists. The relevant bug is here, so why not go and vote for it (but try not to spam the bug with "me too" comments). The reason given there for not including it is lack of time to integrate with the installer. BS or the truth? You decide, nobody forces you to use Red Hat.
Competition is important. Hans is exactly right when he says that no support contract should tie a customer to a specific piece of software. Free software is all about choice!
So if a company doesn't support your software, go find somebody who will. I'm sure various trolls will turn this into a "Red Hat are EVILLLLL!" issue, but of course the reality isn't like that.
Support is hard, because software has a nearly infinite number of combinations. If you're going to provide reliable, accurate support, you can only have expertise in a small subset of those configurations.
Can YOU imagine being on the end of the phone, trying to help somebody recover a server and every few minutes find that they were running with experimental kernel patches, or ancient/buggy software, or that a fault seemed to be caused by a random frob off SourceForge that you'd never heard of? Total nightmare! You have to draw the line somewhere.
This is why CodeWeavers only support a subset of the available Win32 applications, and don't support you if you hack CrossOver to use a pre-existing Windows installation etc, the number of unknowns gets so high that it's not only not profitable, but you run the risk of giving the customer bad advice.
Re:They still haven't fixed the a huge issue
on
Mozilla 1.4RC2 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Witness the recent Taco IRC interview where his response to "when will Slashdot validate at the W3c" was "Whatever. Next."
Where does it say that? I read the entire interview just now, and don't remember anybody asking that question, and I can't find the words "valid" nor "w3c" in the page. Please tell me I'm being blind and show me the relevant quote.
The Adobe plugin appears to be frozen in time, focus now appears to be on a Corel plugin. I don't know if that works with Mozilla or not.
For those who don't know, Adobe used unfrozen APIs, which Mozilla then scrapped entirely, rendering their work useless. Unsurprisingly, they never updated it.
So, if you want SVG in Mozilla, you need to hack on the Moz native support, which has more potential anyway. Be warned, it's a LARGE spec:( I'm not really sure what has been happening on it lately, but iirc there have not been any updates for a long time now.
I mean if I told my boss I was going to take a week off and go to Electronics Expo in Vegas he'd have a fit. Sounds like a great conference, but who get's to attend?
Well, people who work for slightly more understanding bosses:) When I went to FOSDEM it took place over a weekend, so I took a day off to recover and went along. I'm hardly a neo-efficient coder (which is what, exactly), but it was great fun regardless.
If you look at the people going, it's basically:
a) Professional GNOME hackers from Red Hat, Ximian, Sun etc
b) Volunteers who have taken time off/combined it with a holiday to Dublin.
So you don't actually need any job at all, just a bit of spare cash and an interest.
That is a horrible comparason, MacOS X can be uninstalled from your mac, and you can install somthing different, you can't uninstall internet explorer and put in Mozilla though, you have to keep IE.
Not really. Whether you can remove or not remove IE is really irrelevant, you don't have to use it, just like you don't have to use MacOS on a Mac.
The important thing is what comes with it by default. Can you buy a Mac without MacOS? No, of course not (excluding 2nd hand stuff). Can you buy Windows without IE? No.
Now Microsoft got rapped for that as they are a monopoly, whereas Apple are not. That makes all the difference legally. Of course in reality the techniques are identical, and people who praise Apple for integration while slamming MS for being a monopoly in the same sentance are guilty of the worst kind of doublethink.
You've got to draw the line somewhere. You can be sued for all kinds of crazy stuff, especially in America. If somebody claims your work is "derived" from theirs, but you haven't copied their work, just tell them to piss off. Yes, it might go to court, but if they want to take you to court nothing you can say will stop them.
SCO is an entirely different matter - they are making wild claims that would never hold up in court, even if everything they said happened, had actually happened.
Irrelevant. The ability of a plaintiff to sue does not affect my need to work within legal limits. Besides, it almost sounds like you're saying we might as well really violate the GPL anyway since they're so unlikely to sue.
Of course I'm not saying that. You should always respect the license of the code you are working with - what I'm saying is that people spreading rumours that just looking at code "contaminates" you is ridiculous, and no coder in their right mind would sue on such a shaky pretense. Being scared of the GPL, despite it being worded extremely clearly, is just silly in my view.
Are you a lawyer, and has a case of this sort been prosecuted in court?
No, this is slashdot, IANAL:) I don't know what you mean by "case of this sort", if you has anybody taken another company to court because an employee looked at GPLd code then I wouldn't know, but I'd be willing to bet a lot that the answer is no. Nobody has ever gone to court even when found to be copying vast chunks, or entire programs exactly.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm? What about stuff like price point, compatability, vendor independance etc etc, ie the stuff you can't simply market away. These are the reasons why businesses and often home users choose the PC platform time and time again.
Oh sure. So the legendary Apple marketing machine will whip up a hyped frenzy in its followers. But other than being in the running again, nothing will have really changed.
It is? I was under the impression that nobody was actually certain that this would be used. Everybody is simply assuming it will be, but there has been no confirmation from anybody.
Alternatively of course, buy CrossOver 2, in which it works out of the box. And you support the wine project as well :) For less than the price of Win4Lin you get hassle free emulation....
My point is that while Win4Lin may be fine for home users, it's not fine for businesses. That's why I get paid to do it - they need a solution that integrates well with the desktop (things like system tray icons etc) and that frees them from Windows dependancies, and that also allows them to port parts individually.
They are both hacks from my standpoint
Well, Wine does what Windows does, ie load and relink the app to the DLLs that implement the APIs. The app expects this, it's how the system was designed to work. Win4Lin plays tricks with the kernels to run it on top of Linux, in a way that it was never designed to run, so in my view that makes it a hack. That's not to do it down, it's a very useful hack. But not a long term solution to the problem.
Basically I use the CrossOver 1.3 config file and a few command line switches. Installing IE is something that should become easier to do soonish, it's definately one of the hardest apps to get installed unfortunately.
In brief, install DCOM (itself a bit broken, been meaning to fix that lately, there is a simple workaround though). Then install IE using the ie6setup tool. There will be a few errors along the way, but they are harmless. They are also fixed in CodeWeavers CVS apparently. Remember to run wineboot to simulate a reboot.
One tip, choose custom and uncheck everything except IE, Offline Browsing pack and VB Scripting support. Don't install Windows Media Player, it will try and install DirectX and stuff.
Once it's installed, running it should just be a case of wine "c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe".
Like I said, IE is kind of an advanced app to run, though I do it all the time it's still a bit rough for newbies. I showed those screenshots because the AC seemed to think it wasn't possible :)
Really? I know of many. I get paid by them to ensure their software works on Wine, WITHOUT Windows.
Why use Linux and Windows at the same time? You'd still need to pay licensing for Windows.
If anything, Win4Lin is the hack. An awfully good one, but still a clever hack regardless. Wine is actually a solid solution that actually poses a threat to Microsoft.
Object remoting is rarely used. And you can obviously do that as well if you like using sunrpc or CORBA.
What, you mean like RhymBox?
Are you sure about that?
I mean, people like to rag on the gimp, like "oh we need photoshop, we are so leeeet", but 99.9% of the time they are just ego pumping I've found.
Why? The demand is there. We get a constant flow of people, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in #winehq asking about just this very thing.
The most important thing is that it's critical for businesses with custom apps to be able to run them on a Linux desktop without Windows licensing fees.
Well I'm pretty sure Wine has this ability. At least it can be used with scanners via the parallel port iirc.
WINE seems to be a very useful "meta project" -- take the bits of WINE you need to get the specific windows functionality you need, but you'll never get 100% of it. I'm not sure why.
-1 Myth. Of course Wine can implement 100% of the Windows APIs (or rather so much that nobody cares about the remainder). It's just a question of when. So, the number of people working on Wine increases roughly linearly with the growth of desktop Linux (and recently things like CrossOver have helped). There's no reason why one day WineHQ might not be moving faster than Microsoft do. Of course they'll always be one step behind the latest APIs, but that's OK because no apps immediately start depending on new functionality as soon as a new OS is released. In fact, it often takes years.
So basically Wine is The Right Solution(tm), as it means you don't need any legal ties to Microsoft. It also lets you do lots of nice integration. Its only problem really is being starved of manpower, and the fact that it's not yet perfect (but then again there are apps that Win4Lin won't run either).
Or use the premade ones from Tipic, Jabber Inc etc.
I mean, this problem just screams "JABBER!!!" as a solution. Log it all server side. Transports for when employees need access to the proprietary networks. Server side logging is trivial. No worries :)
Note that this will use SOCKS if available, and integrate with your main loop.
Personally, I find the C version far more readable, though obviously familiarity plays a part in that. I also defined a handler for incoming connections, which I can't see in the ObjC example.
Unfortunately that's a port of GTK1, which has been obsoleted and is rapidly being phased out on Linux. The next stable release of the GIMP, which should be happening in the next few months, will eliminate one of the last remaining major GTK1 apps (with xmms being the other one).
Still, they clearly didn't want to license Qt itself for whatever reason, and they don't want to make Safari free software, again for no real apparant reason, so this release of Qt means little for Safari anyway.
The vast majority of free software is written on Linux and then ported to other platforms. If you think being able to run KDE/Qt on a Mac will change this, then I'd point you towards the presence of KDE on Windows - how many new developers did that bring to KDE? AFAIK none.
It's fairly apparent that Safari is the driving force behind KHTML now -- with this release, will OSX become the driving force behind other elements of KDE? What will this mean for Linux?
Unlikely. Apple aren't working on KDE for one. Secondly, I doubt many people will use KDE itself, rather perhaps they will use a few of its apps. But then again, perhaps not. I know many people (and I am included in that) who don't use any KDE apps at all on Linux. No real bias or anything, it just so happens that the apps we use on a daily basis aren't based on Qt.
In short, it will mean about as much for Linux as any other port of software to other platforms will - basically jack all.
Huh? He doesn't? Wierd, he accepted one of my patches.
I hope it gets in soon, but I'm not going to crucify Red Hat for this omission.
The kind of support Red Hat provide is not the same kind as the kind a helpdesk provides.
Red Hat are there to support the help desk. An answer of, "Umm, dunno" is not acceptable. If they don't know the answer, they have to be able to say, "we'll get our engineers right on it, you'll have an answer soon". They can't do that for a piece of code they have no expertise on.
Support in this context also means patches and updates. Obviously if you install your own stuff, and then get rooted because of a bug in that, you can't expect Red Hat to take the fall for it, hence, no support for you. Maybe they could be more flexible about it.
Your examples are not valid here.
Why not? If RH have no expertise on a piece of code, what difference does it make where it came from?
It is not fair for a distribution, who should be promoting competition rather than inhibiting it, to disallow use of software because of personal issues.
Personal issues? What personal issues? Yeah, some RH employees have (technical) doubts about the reliability of ReiserFS. That's not personal, if they don't trust Hans' work for whatever reason, he should try and convince them (or customers choose somebody less conservative).
I'm glad Linus has enough foresight to include it in the kernel.
If Linus includes it in the kernel and people use it and it goes wrong, they have nothing on Linus. On the other hand, Red Hat is there partially to take the blame for things like that. It's a whole different set of rules.
There was another reply about Mandrake and SuSE, which I'll answer here as well. Red Hat make ALL their money from support, as (virtually) all their software is GPLd and always has been. Mandrake and SuSE on the other hand both sell their distro and are far more reliant upon support from home users. And I think you'll find that they are similarly inflexible with respect to "bending" your support contract, if they choose different components to do so then the market will decide.
Now, I agree it'd be nice to include ReiserFS in RH Linux, ie the unsupported version meant for hackers and hobbyists. The relevant bug is here, so why not go and vote for it (but try not to spam the bug with "me too" comments). The reason given there for not including it is lack of time to integrate with the installer. BS or the truth? You decide, nobody forces you to use Red Hat.
So if a company doesn't support your software, go find somebody who will. I'm sure various trolls will turn this into a "Red Hat are EVILLLLL!" issue, but of course the reality isn't like that.
Support is hard, because software has a nearly infinite number of combinations. If you're going to provide reliable, accurate support, you can only have expertise in a small subset of those configurations.
Can YOU imagine being on the end of the phone, trying to help somebody recover a server and every few minutes find that they were running with experimental kernel patches, or ancient/buggy software, or that a fault seemed to be caused by a random frob off SourceForge that you'd never heard of? Total nightmare! You have to draw the line somewhere.
This is why CodeWeavers only support a subset of the available Win32 applications, and don't support you if you hack CrossOver to use a pre-existing Windows installation etc, the number of unknowns gets so high that it's not only not profitable, but you run the risk of giving the customer bad advice.
Where does it say that? I read the entire interview just now, and don't remember anybody asking that question, and I can't find the words "valid" nor "w3c" in the page. Please tell me I'm being blind and show me the relevant quote.
For those who don't know, Adobe used unfrozen APIs, which Mozilla then scrapped entirely, rendering their work useless. Unsurprisingly, they never updated it.
So, if you want SVG in Mozilla, you need to hack on the Moz native support, which has more potential anyway. Be warned, it's a LARGE spec :( I'm not really sure what has been happening on it lately, but iirc there have not been any updates for a long time now.
Well, people who work for slightly more understanding bosses :) When I went to FOSDEM it took place over a weekend, so I took a day off to recover and went along. I'm hardly a neo-efficient coder (which is what, exactly), but it was great fun regardless.
If you look at the people going, it's basically:
a) Professional GNOME hackers from Red Hat, Ximian, Sun etc
b) Volunteers who have taken time off/combined it with a holiday to Dublin.
So you don't actually need any job at all, just a bit of spare cash and an interest.
Not really. Whether you can remove or not remove IE is really irrelevant, you don't have to use it, just like you don't have to use MacOS on a Mac.
The important thing is what comes with it by default. Can you buy a Mac without MacOS? No, of course not (excluding 2nd hand stuff). Can you buy Windows without IE? No.
Now Microsoft got rapped for that as they are a monopoly, whereas Apple are not. That makes all the difference legally. Of course in reality the techniques are identical, and people who praise Apple for integration while slamming MS for being a monopoly in the same sentance are guilty of the worst kind of doublethink.
SCO is an entirely different matter - they are making wild claims that would never hold up in court, even if everything they said happened, had actually happened.
Irrelevant. The ability of a plaintiff to sue does not affect my need to work within legal limits. Besides, it almost sounds like you're saying we might as well really violate the GPL anyway since they're so unlikely to sue.
Of course I'm not saying that. You should always respect the license of the code you are working with - what I'm saying is that people spreading rumours that just looking at code "contaminates" you is ridiculous, and no coder in their right mind would sue on such a shaky pretense. Being scared of the GPL, despite it being worded extremely clearly, is just silly in my view.
Are you a lawyer, and has a case of this sort been prosecuted in court?
No, this is slashdot, IANAL :) I don't know what you mean by "case of this sort", if you has anybody taken another company to court because an employee looked at GPLd code then I wouldn't know, but I'd be willing to bet a lot that the answer is no. Nobody has ever gone to court even when found to be copying vast chunks, or entire programs exactly.