As it's been run on Linux, IRIX, NT and 2000 I'd guess it's because it's offloaded to a 3rd party, same as when the anti-unix campaign was running on a unix webserver.
The whois contact is IDG World Expo, so it sounds like the running of the expo has been contracted out (which makes sense). But yes, a bit of a boo boo isn't it?
Well I'm pretty sure MS Office licenses aren't like the milk I accidentally poured onto my breakfast this morning - they don't go off if you forget to use them for a bit.
So keep a few office licenses around. Upgrade them even. On the rare occasions that OpenOffice or AbiWord/Gnumeric (which are also getting pretty good now) can't read Office files, fire up the real thing via CrossOver Server, or get Wine itself for free, sit down and beat it into submission yourself:)
Anyway, using OpenOffice isn't exactly obligatory. If you have already invested in MS Office and other pieces of Windows software, that's why we have Wine, so you don't "lose" that investment as such.
BTW, to the AC, are you based in the UK by any chance? I work at a scientific institution with about 6000 people and a month or so ago an email was sent around asking for anybody with good Linux desktp experience to step forward for evaluation......
This kind of shows how clueless Microsoft really is about competing with Linux
Actually I'm kind of wondering if some of their top level execs aren't in denial about the whole thing. I once came across an interview (well, sort of interview, actually a monologue) by an ex-MS veep. He was talking about Microsoft vs Linux, and he said similar things to what Peter Houston is saying now "Linux will probably take the proprietary UNIX market but will never be a threat on the desktop".
One person pointed out "Is Microsoft really going to make the same mistake they made with serverside Linux and write it off so soon?". To which he replied that he thought the community development model couldn't produce a viable desktop, it'd never be usable or integrated enough.
That sounds a lot like what they were saying about the serverside a few years ago, it'd never be reliable or supported enough.
And now Peter Houston is saying Linux will never be a threat on the desktop because it'll never be easy enough to use. In particular I think the "integration" point needs addressing. I can't decide whether this is FUD or not. I think not, all competitors say things about each others products. But I don't believe it's true - when I look at the Linux desktop, I see standards efforts, I see integration efforts, I see usability efforts. I see so many people working their asses off to make it happen.
I think Microsoft is selling the "integration" line because they sell all the parts. In theory, because all the parts come from the same company, they'll be better integrated right? Well, that's true in traditional capitalism, but the traditional rules were bent and broken a long time ago in computing. Why can Microsoft integrate things so well?
Because they have the source code of course! How many competitors have tried to integrate their stuff with Windows and failed because Microsoft kept the last few hooks needed to themselves? So, when all the source code is available, anybody can produce well integrated solutions. Look at what Redhat did with Psyche. It's still got rough edges of course, but it points the way forward.
These guys are clearly smart. So why do they put forward relatively weak arguments again and again. Why do even ex-employees deny that Linux could ever be a threat on the desktop, despite the fact that it's racing towards being such a thing at top speed?
Well, I dunno, but I'd bet anything that they are all acutely aware that Microsoft gets its power from Windows. That's where it all comes from. Even Office is supported by Windows (and supports it in return).
The vast majority of machines are desktop machines. So, the one thing that could bring it all crashing down is if they lost that market, and they simply cannot conceive that Redmond campus in all its hugeness, the Microsoft empire that spans the globe and employs hundreds of thousands could be brought down by the faceless, nameless "barbarian hordes".
I saw a comment earlier about the US and Rome. Really that analogy is quite apt - the nicely integrated but at the core rotten Roman empire was brought to its knees by infighting, oppression of the people and rampaging barbarian hordes who they thought were no match for the Roman army, but turned out to be a lot more sophisticated than they thought. Are we going to see it acted out all over again?
Oh too, to make a clarification, most of our work has been on FreeBSD (my specialty actually) because we recommend it for companies because of the more flexible license
That's an interesting perspective. Presumably if you make custom changes for companies then they wouldn't be redistributed so you wouldn't have to reveal the changes anyway. And what sort of things do you change or add that is so secret they can't be released back?
Yeah. So much for Stallmans vision of free software being wanted because you could control it and share it with friends. That sort of stuff is important only to a small fraction of the worlds people clearly.
These things are interesting to read, and overall I thought the article was pretty accurate, but it makes it feel very dry doesn't it? All the graphs, figures, and relentlessly the focus on cost, the bottom line. Other benefits like increased flexibility and lack of lockin weren't mentioned. Neither was the fact that the vast majority of people who work on Linux the OS as a whole are not employed by big tech companies.
It's also rather depressing how much the involvement of IBM means to people. IBM has done a hell of a lot of good work, but the "we didn't pay any attention 'till IBM did" line indicates supreme daftness to me - Linux hasn't changed that much. I guess it's just a case of sheeple following whoever is biggest.
any site for that matter that asks the user to "download something else" will force users away
Considering that WinAmp has had Vorbis support built in for ages now, and WinAmp is extremely popular even amongst all my non-geek friends, I doubt it'd actually "force" as many users away as you might think.
Anyway, last time I checked RealPlayer didn't come included with Windows either?
but when the mono team gets windows forms working correctly
Hrm. Are you sure? The Wine widget toolkit is still incomplete, suffers from visual glitches and is lacking (amongst other things) a RichEdit control.
In no way does the Wine/Windows toolkit compare to something like GTK. I think one good bet is actually GTK+ nowadays, especially as the windows port has come on so well lately. I've seen shots of AbiWord on Windows and it looks pretty native to me. Of course this is done via theming, so who knows how much it really matches up with what a Windows app should feel like, but GTK does have the advantage of being native on Linux and having plenty of language bindings available, as well as a free UI designer.
No, I'm perfectly aware of that thread and agree with it totally. That thread is full of utter crap, page widening posts, "me too", trolls, the works. You name it, the underbelly of slashdot is there. The original post was self-contradictory in places, confused fact with opinion and *was* offtopic.
If you think moderation is censorship by the way, you need to go live in a country where it's actually practiced. If they really were despots they'd have just deleted the thread from the databases, but no, it's there, for us to read in all its glory. The amount of garbage the editors put up with is incredible, if people were posting homo-erotic fantasies about me on my site I'd sure as hell do a lot more than mod them down.
So, I'm pretty glad slashdot does this stuff. Occasionally I put the threshold at -1 because it's amusing to see just how much free time some people have, but I rarely, if ever, see anything of value.
WebCore will remain a part of Safari, and not be migrated into the guts of the OS, you're wrong about that. Which brings me to...
I've read otherwise, but who knows? It'd make sense for WebCore to be a part of the OS, the name certainly suggests that - after all, the OS provides functionality to the apps and a renderign engine isn't to be sniffed at.
Sure I can run Mozilla beside IE, but IE is gonna get called, by all those insidious other hooks in 3rd party apps, and negate my browser choice, because they can. I want the option, dammit.
Well, the use of an embedded rendering engine is in fact academic, the app will function the same regardless of what engine is used. Replacing the WebBrowser control with Gecko (which is certainly doable) doesn't actually gain you any functionality. Switching web browsers does.
Switch over to a "safer" language (Java, Perl, whatever) and the commands to run the connection will be safer, but the server as a whole will suffer - and thus less people will use it.
I don't think that stacks up. Apache Tomcat is actually very high performance, nearly as fast as Apache itself I've been told by people who would know.
I was having this argument with a friend last night. He couldn't understand how Java could be faster than C, so I showed him the HotSpot whitepaper.
But getting back to the topic, the bug here isn't a memory management bug. It's a flawed PROGRAM design that RESULTS IN a memory management bug. Global variables are bad in general, and should only be used with due diligence - and here's simply a case where that diligence didn't work.
No, it's a memory management bug. If the CVS server has a poor design that's a separate issue, but manual memory management is a pain in the ass and very easy to get wrong. Considering how many servers are in fact written in Java and their ilk, I think a possible slight loss in speed is certainly worth the increased security.
KDE's inconsistent behaviour would have meant that a Windows user would have never been able to create a link.
You appear to have defeated your own argument. You clearly are a Windows user, as green as they come who expects everything to be identical and gets frustrated when it isn't - yet you still managed it.
I assume you were dragging from the filing system itself rather than the menus. Really the FS should be locked down by default - finding the actual executable is what you do on Windows yes, but not on Linux. The obvious way of doing it (dragging the menu item to the desktop) is not the Windows way.
Hate to break this to you, but I know a LOT of people that think IE is great. Mozilla has more features, but Chimera has more features than Safari. Outlook Express is a pretty good mail client, until the virus situation became untenable I used it all the time. Microsoft make some sucky apps, but many of them are quite good.
2. Apple apps are uninstallable.
So are Microsofts. Yes, you can uninstall IE. It's in Add/Remove Programs. No, that won't remove the WebBrowser control because apps need it to be there, just like Mac apps will when Apple start shipping WebCore as part of the OS. I fail to see the difference.
This is false logic anyway, you don't need to uninstall one product to use the competition. Mozilla and IE can sit side-by-side, so really how "uninstallable" an app is is basically academic.
3. Apple only extends itself where it feels it is needed. I could probably take some crap over that statement, but it seems to be true.
Yeah, you can. The quality of PowerPoint X was killing the Mac? I think not. Keynote is there because Jobs thought it was cool.
Plain and simple: Apple does not have the power to kill off the Chimera project. Apple can create another similar product, but it is up to the end user to decide.
So Microsoft didn't have the power to kill off Netscape?
I don't know for sure, so flame me if I'm wrong, but I doubt in future MacOS will come with Safari and Chimera both installed by default, both given equal prominance. Only those that know about it will use it and Chimera will end up to Safari what Mozilla is to IE on Windows.
Maybe I'm being a cynic and/or misunderstanding, but I'm not expecting some of these governments to actually contribute anything back to OSS.
They probably won't, but that's expected. Maybe one day everybody will use Linux and most of our software will be open source, but I don't expect Joe and Jane User to start sending me patches. Right through the history of open source software, the answer has always been "if you want something, do it yourself". That worked because if you were using open source software, you were probably also a programmer.
In the future, that won't work, because they'll just be users who even if they wanted to help out could not, because they don't have the skills.
So the idea that if you use open source software you should contribute back is unsustainable really. I mean I use the road network, but I'm not expected to take part in filling holes, that's somebody elses job. Via taxes I pay them to do that for me.
I think in the future maybe when users outnumber developers in linuxland you'll start seeing people scanning bugzillas for high voted bugs and offering to fix them in return for cash - you want CYMK in the GIMP? How much is it worth to you (and others). So, although I expect the majority of the work would still be done by volunteers, some of the other things would be contributed to by pure users, perhaps business and govt amongst them.
I've often thought I'd try it after I leave university, in about 3/4 years. But I don't really know what the user:developer ratio will be then, and I wouldn't want to ask money for a feature when probably most of the people who'd contribute were themselves volunteer developers. That'd feel wrong. So, we'll have to see how it goes.
Anyway, my point was that in the future very few users will actually be able to contribute back patches or docs or whatever directly, so I should think economic models will arise that let them do it indirectly. Governments probably will contribute back in this way.
Yet I appear to have been banned from ever moderating. It has been at least 6-9 months, and I read slashdot several times a day. Every day.
You're paranoid. I've been reading Slashdot for I think a couple of years now, and I read it quite a bit because, well, despite its flaws it's often one of the most entertaining and interesting reads around. I've had mod access once, which I blew because I didn't understand that thread == story. Never had them since, and I get modded up frequently.
You need to put your conspiracy theories away. Slashdot is mostly automated, do you really think Taco reads the comments and says, "Ah ha! User 233344 dares to go against the groupthink, I know, I'll make sure he NEVER has mod points". Er, no, he doesn't. Just running the site takes up all his time.
I just wish my relatively nonradical ideas didn't result is such obvious squelching of my voice here.
I've often posted unpopular viewpoints (usually posts pointing out Apple is not whatever hyperbolic adjectives have been applied today) but I still get modded up. If you aren't getting highly rated then either you need to post more interesting comments, or you need to change the way you write them. It has nothing to do with censorship or "squelching", just that there are hundreds of people posting but we all only have time to read a handful of the best ones.
This sounds damn cool, and I wish them luck. This sort of thing could be really significant - today democracy isn't working as well as it should because people feel out of touch with the decision making process, Labour/Conservative, who can tell the difference? They both privatise everything. I guess the same is true for Republican/Democrat parties in the states.
So, being able to make the decision making process finer grained is a seriously good idea. Of course people won't vote on everything, why should they, they'll vote on what interests them but then the same is true of MPs. I await the results of the experiment with interest.
Re:Great, and when they graduate with zero Windows
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Maine School & Linux
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· Score: 1
Sounds dumb, but one of the first things a friend asked me when he sat down in front of my linux box was "why doesn't control-alt-delete do anything".
I swear it's become a reflex action, like where the doctor taps the knee. "Uh oh, something's gone wrong - quick, the 3 fingered salute!". Oh well, they'll learn. He got the hang of virtual desktops pretty quickly, he even liked sloppy focus:) And this guy is 18, hardly a kid.
The only problem I see with using Linux in these situations is finding trained personell to staff the labs
I don't really get this. It's a school, right? Why can the teachers not do what this guy did and teach themselves? I'd bet 99% of all Linux users ever had to learn themselves as opposed to going on a training course. Obviously they may have been helped by others, but I learnt it all myself and via IRC. Maybe for businesses where time is short, but schools are in no hurry.
I get the feeling the "we need training" mentality is a bad one to have, if IT teachers can't learn new things themselves (or are scared to), why are they teaching IT?
But hackers will not make a user-friendly OS with a good GUI; they will make a hugely powerful OS with a ugly, horribly unintuitive interface, and complete user-hostility.
Nah, I don't believe that. I think it's one of these slashdot myths that somehow get started then the weight of people repeating it convinces everybody it's true, like "MacOS is open source" or "Windows crashes lots". Now mind you, it does have a kernel of truth, up until about a year or so ago nobody in the community really thought about usability, but the issues have been brought up time and time again, and now it's up there in peoples minds - alongside "how do we make this app secure" is "how do we make it easy to use?".
You only need to look at what people are doing in Gnome and peripheral projects like Gaim and XChat that are studying their usability closely, bringing themselves into conformance with the guidelines and so on. Over at my project, we think about usability because it's an issue, so we design it in from the start. It's just a case of getting the message across.
Anyway, considering that a lot of the hackers employed by companies like Mandrake, Redhat and SuSE were once volunteers, I don't see how getting paid magically transforms you into a usability guru.
But, of course, you are a person who does not percieve any problems with running as root.
There are loads of issues with NOT running as root don't forget. Linux security is a total pain in the ass, you've got to be root to basically do anything useful. To be honest, although I hate to say it I can't say I blame Lindows for making that the default. Why do you need to be root to set the date and time? Install software? WHY THE HELL DOES THE BEEP COMMAND HAVE TO BE SUID ROOT?
I think you get the idea. I know the answers to all the above questions, but a desktop machine is not a server where a malicious user could screw things up by playing with the system clock, or installing/uninstalling software. For desktop machines, the root/user distinction is too strong. See how MacOS has 3 levels, root, administrator, user? That makes a bit more sense.
It's easy to go around slagging off Lindows for making root the default, but perhaps us in the community should take a long hard look at why so much stuff needs to be done as root on what's often a single user box, and come up with a solution. Redhat gets close with consolehelper, but the default timeout is way too short. I have sudo set to not timeout on my box, it's insecure as hell but the added convenience of not having to type my password in over and over again is worth it. Really, the need-root-to-do-anything issue has been left lying way too long. MacOS doesn't do it. Windows doesn't do it. Why should we?
Will this really be viable? There are some serious man-hours spent on this port, is it reasonable to expect this project to be profitable?
Probably not. However, it appears Bioware are pressing ahead (and doing it inhouse) because they are a games company that wants to be around in the long run, and stay one step ahead of its competitors. Writing portable code isn't something that comes as second nature to most Windows coders, least of all games coders, but they clearly think (correctly) that Linux is going to be a force in the long run on the desktop.
By teaching themselves the ins and outs of porting games, they've learned (the hard way it seems) that portability has to be a concern from the beginning. Using SDL isn't hard, but it makes porting so much easier it's untrue. Make sure any 3rd party engines you use will run on other platforms or are easily made portable. And so on.
I think it's telling they outsourced the porting of the Mac client, but kept the Linux port in house. They could have easily hired LGP for instance to port it, or done what was done for Unreal Tournament and get a freelancer in, but they didn't. That makes me think they value the experience and want to keep it internal to the company. Assuming BioWare stick around, I'd expect to see more Linux ports in future.
That's why we're lucky Wine is now under the LGPL instead of the X11 license.
If that wasn't the case, Microsoft could come in, fill in the gaps in Wine (it's like 80% of the way there already) and presto: a version of Linux that can run Windows apps. No problemo. Fortunately they can't do that any longer, without giving it away to us all, which would of course break their monopoly.
Slashdot Mirror
I think they meant Linux the kernel, and i meant Linux the OS
The whois contact is IDG World Expo, so it sounds like the running of the expo has been contracted out (which makes sense). But yes, a bit of a boo boo isn't it?
And on a related note: if Linux on the desktop takes off, what's Plan B? Do you even know yet?
So keep a few office licenses around. Upgrade them even. On the rare occasions that OpenOffice or AbiWord/Gnumeric (which are also getting pretty good now) can't read Office files, fire up the real thing via CrossOver Server, or get Wine itself for free, sit down and beat it into submission yourself :)
Anyway, using OpenOffice isn't exactly obligatory. If you have already invested in MS Office and other pieces of Windows software, that's why we have Wine, so you don't "lose" that investment as such.
BTW, to the AC, are you based in the UK by any chance? I work at a scientific institution with about 6000 people and a month or so ago an email was sent around asking for anybody with good Linux desktp experience to step forward for evaluation......
Actually I'm kind of wondering if some of their top level execs aren't in denial about the whole thing. I once came across an interview (well, sort of interview, actually a monologue) by an ex-MS veep. He was talking about Microsoft vs Linux, and he said similar things to what Peter Houston is saying now "Linux will probably take the proprietary UNIX market but will never be a threat on the desktop".
One person pointed out "Is Microsoft really going to make the same mistake they made with serverside Linux and write it off so soon?". To which he replied that he thought the community development model couldn't produce a viable desktop, it'd never be usable or integrated enough.
That sounds a lot like what they were saying about the serverside a few years ago, it'd never be reliable or supported enough.
And now Peter Houston is saying Linux will never be a threat on the desktop because it'll never be easy enough to use. In particular I think the "integration" point needs addressing. I can't decide whether this is FUD or not. I think not, all competitors say things about each others products. But I don't believe it's true - when I look at the Linux desktop, I see standards efforts, I see integration efforts, I see usability efforts. I see so many people working their asses off to make it happen.
I think Microsoft is selling the "integration" line because they sell all the parts. In theory, because all the parts come from the same company, they'll be better integrated right? Well, that's true in traditional capitalism, but the traditional rules were bent and broken a long time ago in computing. Why can Microsoft integrate things so well?
Because they have the source code of course! How many competitors have tried to integrate their stuff with Windows and failed because Microsoft kept the last few hooks needed to themselves? So, when all the source code is available, anybody can produce well integrated solutions. Look at what Redhat did with Psyche. It's still got rough edges of course, but it points the way forward.
These guys are clearly smart. So why do they put forward relatively weak arguments again and again. Why do even ex-employees deny that Linux could ever be a threat on the desktop, despite the fact that it's racing towards being such a thing at top speed?
Well, I dunno, but I'd bet anything that they are all acutely aware that Microsoft gets its power from Windows. That's where it all comes from. Even Office is supported by Windows (and supports it in return).
The vast majority of machines are desktop machines. So, the one thing that could bring it all crashing down is if they lost that market, and they simply cannot conceive that Redmond campus in all its hugeness, the Microsoft empire that spans the globe and employs hundreds of thousands could be brought down by the faceless, nameless "barbarian hordes".
I saw a comment earlier about the US and Rome. Really that analogy is quite apt - the nicely integrated but at the core rotten Roman empire was brought to its knees by infighting, oppression of the people and rampaging barbarian hordes who they thought were no match for the Roman army, but turned out to be a lot more sophisticated than they thought. Are we going to see it acted out all over again?
That's an interesting perspective. Presumably if you make custom changes for companies then they wouldn't be redistributed so you wouldn't have to reveal the changes anyway. And what sort of things do you change or add that is so secret they can't be released back?
These things are interesting to read, and overall I thought the article was pretty accurate, but it makes it feel very dry doesn't it? All the graphs, figures, and relentlessly the focus on cost, the bottom line. Other benefits like increased flexibility and lack of lockin weren't mentioned. Neither was the fact that the vast majority of people who work on Linux the OS as a whole are not employed by big tech companies.
It's also rather depressing how much the involvement of IBM means to people. IBM has done a hell of a lot of good work, but the "we didn't pay any attention 'till IBM did" line indicates supreme daftness to me - Linux hasn't changed that much. I guess it's just a case of sheeple following whoever is biggest.
Considering that WinAmp has had Vorbis support built in for ages now, and WinAmp is extremely popular even amongst all my non-geek friends, I doubt it'd actually "force" as many users away as you might think.
Anyway, last time I checked RealPlayer didn't come included with Windows either?
Hrm. Are you sure? The Wine widget toolkit is still incomplete, suffers from visual glitches and is lacking (amongst other things) a RichEdit control.
In no way does the Wine/Windows toolkit compare to something like GTK. I think one good bet is actually GTK+ nowadays, especially as the windows port has come on so well lately. I've seen shots of AbiWord on Windows and it looks pretty native to me. Of course this is done via theming, so who knows how much it really matches up with what a Windows app should feel like, but GTK does have the advantage of being native on Linux and having plenty of language bindings available, as well as a free UI designer.
If you think moderation is censorship by the way, you need to go live in a country where it's actually practiced. If they really were despots they'd have just deleted the thread from the databases, but no, it's there, for us to read in all its glory. The amount of garbage the editors put up with is incredible, if people were posting homo-erotic fantasies about me on my site I'd sure as hell do a lot more than mod them down.
So, I'm pretty glad slashdot does this stuff. Occasionally I put the threshold at -1 because it's amusing to see just how much free time some people have, but I rarely, if ever, see anything of value.
I've read otherwise, but who knows? It'd make sense for WebCore to be a part of the OS, the name certainly suggests that - after all, the OS provides functionality to the apps and a renderign engine isn't to be sniffed at.
Sure I can run Mozilla beside IE, but IE is gonna get called, by all those insidious other hooks in 3rd party apps, and negate my browser choice, because they can. I want the option, dammit.
Well, the use of an embedded rendering engine is in fact academic, the app will function the same regardless of what engine is used. Replacing the WebBrowser control with Gecko (which is certainly doable) doesn't actually gain you any functionality. Switching web browsers does.
Good sig by the way :)
I don't think that stacks up. Apache Tomcat is actually very high performance, nearly as fast as Apache itself I've been told by people who would know.
I was having this argument with a friend last night. He couldn't understand how Java could be faster than C, so I showed him the HotSpot whitepaper.
But getting back to the topic, the bug here isn't a memory management bug. It's a flawed PROGRAM design that RESULTS IN a memory management bug. Global variables are bad in general, and should only be used with due diligence - and here's simply a case where that diligence didn't work.
No, it's a memory management bug. If the CVS server has a poor design that's a separate issue, but manual memory management is a pain in the ass and very easy to get wrong. Considering how many servers are in fact written in Java and their ilk, I think a possible slight loss in speed is certainly worth the increased security.
.... GnomeMines, KSirtet, XBill.....
You appear to have defeated your own argument. You clearly are a Windows user, as green as they come who expects everything to be identical and gets frustrated when it isn't - yet you still managed it.
I assume you were dragging from the filing system itself rather than the menus. Really the FS should be locked down by default - finding the actual executable is what you do on Windows yes, but not on Linux. The obvious way of doing it (dragging the menu item to the desktop) is not the Windows way.
Hate to break this to you, but I know a LOT of people that think IE is great. Mozilla has more features, but Chimera has more features than Safari. Outlook Express is a pretty good mail client, until the virus situation became untenable I used it all the time. Microsoft make some sucky apps, but many of them are quite good.
2. Apple apps are uninstallable.
So are Microsofts. Yes, you can uninstall IE. It's in Add/Remove Programs. No, that won't remove the WebBrowser control because apps need it to be there, just like Mac apps will when Apple start shipping WebCore as part of the OS. I fail to see the difference.
This is false logic anyway, you don't need to uninstall one product to use the competition. Mozilla and IE can sit side-by-side, so really how "uninstallable" an app is is basically academic.
3. Apple only extends itself where it feels it is needed. I could probably take some crap over that statement, but it seems to be true.
Yeah, you can. The quality of PowerPoint X was killing the Mac? I think not. Keynote is there because Jobs thought it was cool.
So Microsoft didn't have the power to kill off Netscape?
I don't know for sure, so flame me if I'm wrong, but I doubt in future MacOS will come with Safari and Chimera both installed by default, both given equal prominance. Only those that know about it will use it and Chimera will end up to Safari what Mozilla is to IE on Windows.
They probably won't, but that's expected. Maybe one day everybody will use Linux and most of our software will be open source, but I don't expect Joe and Jane User to start sending me patches. Right through the history of open source software, the answer has always been "if you want something, do it yourself". That worked because if you were using open source software, you were probably also a programmer.
In the future, that won't work, because they'll just be users who even if they wanted to help out could not, because they don't have the skills.
So the idea that if you use open source software you should contribute back is unsustainable really. I mean I use the road network, but I'm not expected to take part in filling holes, that's somebody elses job. Via taxes I pay them to do that for me.
I think in the future maybe when users outnumber developers in linuxland you'll start seeing people scanning bugzillas for high voted bugs and offering to fix them in return for cash - you want CYMK in the GIMP? How much is it worth to you (and others). So, although I expect the majority of the work would still be done by volunteers, some of the other things would be contributed to by pure users, perhaps business and govt amongst them.
I've often thought I'd try it after I leave university, in about 3/4 years. But I don't really know what the user:developer ratio will be then, and I wouldn't want to ask money for a feature when probably most of the people who'd contribute were themselves volunteer developers. That'd feel wrong. So, we'll have to see how it goes.
Anyway, my point was that in the future very few users will actually be able to contribute back patches or docs or whatever directly, so I should think economic models will arise that let them do it indirectly. Governments probably will contribute back in this way.
You're paranoid. I've been reading Slashdot for I think a couple of years now, and I read it quite a bit because, well, despite its flaws it's often one of the most entertaining and interesting reads around. I've had mod access once, which I blew because I didn't understand that thread == story. Never had them since, and I get modded up frequently.
You need to put your conspiracy theories away. Slashdot is mostly automated, do you really think Taco reads the comments and says, "Ah ha! User 233344 dares to go against the groupthink, I know, I'll make sure he NEVER has mod points". Er, no, he doesn't. Just running the site takes up all his time.
I just wish my relatively nonradical ideas didn't result is such obvious squelching of my voice here.
I've often posted unpopular viewpoints (usually posts pointing out Apple is not whatever hyperbolic adjectives have been applied today) but I still get modded up. If you aren't getting highly rated then either you need to post more interesting comments, or you need to change the way you write them. It has nothing to do with censorship or "squelching", just that there are hundreds of people posting but we all only have time to read a handful of the best ones.
So, being able to make the decision making process finer grained is a seriously good idea. Of course people won't vote on everything, why should they, they'll vote on what interests them but then the same is true of MPs. I await the results of the experiment with interest.
I swear it's become a reflex action, like where the doctor taps the knee. "Uh oh, something's gone wrong - quick, the 3 fingered salute!". Oh well, they'll learn. He got the hang of virtual desktops pretty quickly, he even liked sloppy focus :) And this guy is 18, hardly a kid.
I don't really get this. It's a school, right? Why can the teachers not do what this guy did and teach themselves? I'd bet 99% of all Linux users ever had to learn themselves as opposed to going on a training course. Obviously they may have been helped by others, but I learnt it all myself and via IRC. Maybe for businesses where time is short, but schools are in no hurry.
I get the feeling the "we need training" mentality is a bad one to have, if IT teachers can't learn new things themselves (or are scared to), why are they teaching IT?
Nah, I don't believe that. I think it's one of these slashdot myths that somehow get started then the weight of people repeating it convinces everybody it's true, like "MacOS is open source" or "Windows crashes lots". Now mind you, it does have a kernel of truth, up until about a year or so ago nobody in the community really thought about usability, but the issues have been brought up time and time again, and now it's up there in peoples minds - alongside "how do we make this app secure" is "how do we make it easy to use?".
You only need to look at what people are doing in Gnome and peripheral projects like Gaim and XChat that are studying their usability closely, bringing themselves into conformance with the guidelines and so on. Over at my project, we think about usability because it's an issue, so we design it in from the start. It's just a case of getting the message across.
Anyway, considering that a lot of the hackers employed by companies like Mandrake, Redhat and SuSE were once volunteers, I don't see how getting paid magically transforms you into a usability guru.
There are loads of issues with NOT running as root don't forget. Linux security is a total pain in the ass, you've got to be root to basically do anything useful. To be honest, although I hate to say it I can't say I blame Lindows for making that the default. Why do you need to be root to set the date and time? Install software? WHY THE HELL DOES THE BEEP COMMAND HAVE TO BE SUID ROOT?
I think you get the idea. I know the answers to all the above questions, but a desktop machine is not a server where a malicious user could screw things up by playing with the system clock, or installing/uninstalling software. For desktop machines, the root/user distinction is too strong. See how MacOS has 3 levels, root, administrator, user? That makes a bit more sense.
It's easy to go around slagging off Lindows for making root the default, but perhaps us in the community should take a long hard look at why so much stuff needs to be done as root on what's often a single user box, and come up with a solution. Redhat gets close with consolehelper, but the default timeout is way too short. I have sudo set to not timeout on my box, it's insecure as hell but the added convenience of not having to type my password in over and over again is worth it. Really, the need-root-to-do-anything issue has been left lying way too long. MacOS doesn't do it. Windows doesn't do it. Why should we?
Probably not. However, it appears Bioware are pressing ahead (and doing it inhouse) because they are a games company that wants to be around in the long run, and stay one step ahead of its competitors. Writing portable code isn't something that comes as second nature to most Windows coders, least of all games coders, but they clearly think (correctly) that Linux is going to be a force in the long run on the desktop.
By teaching themselves the ins and outs of porting games, they've learned (the hard way it seems) that portability has to be a concern from the beginning. Using SDL isn't hard, but it makes porting so much easier it's untrue. Make sure any 3rd party engines you use will run on other platforms or are easily made portable. And so on.
I think it's telling they outsourced the porting of the Mac client, but kept the Linux port in house. They could have easily hired LGP for instance to port it, or done what was done for Unreal Tournament and get a freelancer in, but they didn't. That makes me think they value the experience and want to keep it internal to the company. Assuming BioWare stick around, I'd expect to see more Linux ports in future.
If that wasn't the case, Microsoft could come in, fill in the gaps in Wine (it's like 80% of the way there already) and presto: a version of Linux that can run Windows apps. No problemo. Fortunately they can't do that any longer, without giving it away to us all, which would of course break their monopoly.