Of course everybody knows what the standard for corporate presentations is - MS PowerPoint. From the classroom to the boardroom, every single digital presentation I've ever seen has been made in PowerPoint. You know what?
A few months ago (I am finishing off high school now) my general studies teacher decided we should all do a presentation on a social issue. I chose Civil Liberties but that's irrevelevant. The thing that made by presentation different was that I chose Swish, basically a Flash creation tool. It's damn easy to use, and I got to play with all their neat text effects. The result? A presentation that absolutely blew the pants off of the standard "slide-in-the-bulletpoint" presentations made by my friends. Why don't more companies do this, when it clearly has such a lot of impact? Herd mentality I guess: people thing presentation, they think PowerPoint.
One thing should be noted though for people who are going to try this - I spent so long playing will all the fun effects my presentation was rather light on content:) I'll be more careful about that next time. Also, my presentation needed a graphics accelerator, tee hee.
If Linux really wanted to do something better than MS Office, it should start thinking differently. It wouldn't be hard to create an SVG based presentation app that looked amazing, esp now KDE and Gnome have SVG support built in. It's stuff like this that will ensure a Linux victory on the desktop is not a hollow one.
thanks -mike
Yeah, but at least we actually have digital TV. The US rollout of DVB has been horrendous as well - afaik the government is still deciding on what transmission system to use.
Don't complain too much, though you may not realise it the UK has the most advanced television system in the world:)
That problem has been largely resolved with Qt3 - within a few months once the kde community has upgraded (i can't wait:) the X clipboard will be largely reunified and you'll have a more powerful clipboard than on Win32 or the Mac.
1) Use Ctrl-C/V/X to do the standard Windows thing with the clipboard. 2) Selecting text copies it to the secondary clipboard. Then you can paste it using the middle mouse button (or the wheel). No need to touch the keyboard at all. That's a real speed boost I find.
Re:can it copy and paste between apps yet?
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GNOME 2.0 Beta
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· Score: 1
Yeah yeah, old news (thankfully:)
This problem is to do with a rather vague spec on how the clipboard in X works. Qt in particular interpreted it wrong, but the new version (3) does it right. GTK has always done it right afaik.
So - in approximately 5/6 months time once people have finished upgrading to KDE 3/GNOME 3 most apps (which these days tend to be written for one or the other) will be conformant and that'll be the end of it.
Yes you would be right in saying this is a stupid mistake to make and it's hurt the Linux desktop considerably. It has done, but that's the price you pay for not having 1 person in charge. When your working to commitee standards (especially very complex ones) with multiple implementations, misinterpretations will happen. That's life, especially Linux life. I'll live with it, because I prefer democracy to dictatorships even though sometimes dictatorships are more efficient.
Damn me - it's the Linux effect. I'm turning into more of a MS hating zealot every day!:(
Hehe, you know I sometimes find it funny that everyone here assumes that Linux's desktop is inferior to Mac OS Xs.
NOT TRUE! I have a friend who is a die hard Mac lover, who was using the pre-release betas of OS X etc. and he told me the other day that he thought it was a shame that there wasn't any KDE skin for OS X. I didn't believe him at first, but he's already tried skinning the Mac (and failed to properly unskin it again, lol) so perhaps he wasn't mad.
Yeah, everyone is instantly bowled over by Aqua. But to be honest, I reckon that KDE 2 with the standard theme and a few enhancements looks better than Windows, and some of the screenshots I've seen on Ximian Gnome look sweet - different to the Mac of course, but not inferior I think.
It's more about memory really. Bear in mind that if you don't have shared libs, then you're loading the same code into memory over and over and over and over again.
Perhaps one implementation that might work well on Linux would integrate a folder with a package manager, such as GNUpdate, so you could drag a package into a folder, which would then be installed in the background. Drag a package out, and it'd be uninstalled. You get the benefits of the distributed FHS system currently used with the end user ease-of-use that AppFolders provides
Okay, this would seem to have one massive disadvantage, which appears to be borne out from my experiences with OS X.
Of course, dragging and dropping apps to install is all very well for the user, but surely it completely removes the opportunity to use shared libraries? The reason Linux splashes files in different directories is to make them easy to share files with each other.
Of course, I don't know this - but I'd bet anything that the reason the OS X installer for Mozilla is 15mb compared to 9/10 for Windows/Linux is because OS X doesn't have the same concept of shared libs, so much more must be shipped with the product. Interestingly, once decompressed Moz on OS X is 35mb, compared to 15 on my windows/linux box.
You know what, I just discovered GConf - it sounds exactly like what I had in mind. Hopefully it'll be accepted by the community as a whole: it'd be a shame if this was restricted to just Gnome environments.
thanks -mike
Here's a way of fixing this problem (both installation and configuration) - if I was in charge of Linux, this is what I'd do. Of course, I'm not in charge, nobody is and that's great, but bear with me here:
Standardise on XML for configuration files. No, it's not perfect for everything, but it's well known, easily manipulatable with many different tools and is an open standard. It's good enough, and the benefits of standardisation here (in terms of ease of manipulation) outweigh the disadvantages I think.
Make a GNU Configuration Library that simply exports some DOM interfaces for documents that can be retrieved via URIs. So - an app passes a URI to the config library along with some other information (like is this system or user config data) and gets back an XML document. The idea is that each application can be identified by a URI (or perhaps guid if you're feeling windowsish), and that they don't worry about how their configuration data is stored, only that it is.
In the background what happens here is the config library is an abstraction layer over a datastore - of any kind. The default would probably adopt the dotfile standard that is defacto at present for personal data, and/etc,/usr/etc for system configuration. However, other plugins could implement an XML:DB backend, or store the data in a binary database, or do anything you like with it. The apps don't care.
Fantastic, so now we've got most programs reading and writing to a standardised configuration format, and that data will be managed by the system according to user/distro preferences. Storing stuff in personal dotfile(s)/dotfolders would be easiest and most common I'd imagine, after all this system is pretty easy to understand and work with for the user. Next up is how the sort of user who doesn't want to edit text files all day alters the system configuration.
Everyone will have different preferences for this too, and as Linux is as much about choice as anything else, this must be accomodated. Webmin is great for remote administration, but when I'm sitting in front of my box I'd rather use the KDE Control Centre. Other people would rather have their settings altered in each application. How do you manage this?
Well firstly, it seems pretty obvious that most of the time it's going to be easier to edit application configuration from within that app. Sometimes that won't be possible, for instance with server apps, but for desktop GUI apps like word processors it'd be easier to select the Configure menu option. In KDE/Gnome etc. apps already use standardised config dialogs, so it's pretty easy for the user. For servers, Control Center plugins (or whatever your favourite equivalent is) would seem the obvious way to go. This doesn't necessarily mean coding up a new control module each time: Broadway would let you embed a KDE/Gnome control center module into Webmin easily.
So now we've got configuration sorted, or at least a lot better than it was. Next up is software installation. This is a hell of a lot better than it used to be, but one popular misconception in the *nix community seems to be that non-technical end users are willing to compile apps. People who say "but it only takes 3 commands!" are glossing over the problem - often you need developer packages and reams of source code and header files for a program to compile. It can take a long time for even simple programs, and if there's an error during compilation/linking then non-programmers are screwed.
That's why we have binary packages. Unfortunately there are two competing package systems, and this isn't a great system. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for competition, but sometimes competition is good, and sometimes it's harmful. This is one area where it's harmful, and it means I can't always get programs working on my distro simply because nobody has packaged it for me. But - nobody can seem to decide between Debian and Red Hat package managers! LSB says RedHat, Debian people say Debian, and in the meantime end users are caught in the middle. What's needed is a technically advanced solution that is distribution neutral - like for instance, GNUpdate If I was designing the LSB, this is what I'd use. It's not finished yet, but when it is it will give us backwards compatability with a distro-independant packaging solution. For those who can and want to build from the source, it will even be able to pull programs direct from CVS!
So there you go. Simple things, not a giant leap coding wise, but simply agreeing on some things with a smart architecture would go a long way towards propelling Linux into the kind of ease-of-use that only MacOS and perhaps Windows enjoys.
This happens all the time, there are in fact several different MSN Messenger virii, not all of which use IE. Some of them just send files to you, such as the infamous;) Choke virus.
What pisses me off about this is that Microsoft is the one who makes all the money from this, yet I am the one who has to clean up my friends computers every third Tuesday for them, because MSN allows any program (or indeed website, it's used on the msn portal pages) to access it's internal objects via COM. Not that there is anything wrong with this idea, but due to their lax coding, it's people like me who get to pick up the pieces.
As I access MSN via Jabber I can't be infected with these viruses anyway, but the fact that MSN isn't even a particularly great chat program especially rankles.
There have been many new ideas in computing. Problem is, they have failed to take off in the same way that for instance UNIX or the GUI did. The only real example of a "modern" technology that took off massively I can think of is the web (1991), so over a decade old now.
The causes vary, often it's due to politics, or too much market control by one organisation (read, microsoft usually).
For instance, take OpenDoc. OpenDoc was cool stuff, really ahead of its time, true componenet programming and computing. The idea of the application was made almost obsolete, instead you made up the software you needed from reusable parts. Something called Stationary was the closest you got to application, Stationary was basically part templates.
OpenDoc was IMHO great stuff, and should have revolutionised computing. Problem is, it was invented by Apple before Jobs came and sorted them out. There was a Win32 version out there somewhere, but Apple did their best to keep it hidden, the "official" OpenDoc website didn't mention Windows at all. There were many other companies involved besides Apple, but they were in control, and through their arrogance in believing that OpenDoc could give a boost to the Mac platform they killed it's potential. I spent ages trying to learn how to write Parts, but without being able to find the elusive Windows version I was stufffed.
So there's one answer to your question. Very few good ideas ever reach the light of day, and fewer still get generally accepted in the way UNIX/the GUI/the web did.
This sounds really great doens't it? 10,000 USD cash prize, visiting their facilities (who wouldn't be curious to see the worlds biggest Beowulf cluster) and more.
Thing is, though that is a lot of money, what happens if you make them, say 20,000 USD with a great new compression/analysis algorithm.
What then? You have no claim to a part of their profits. I guess that's just a part of competing to give your ideas to a company.
Bet on it. It doesn't have to be through patents, or embrace-and-extend, or any of the techniques they've used in the past. It might be, but for all we know they could just come up with a new way of fiddling things.
Look - what is Microsoft? It is a big company, one which is in a serious crisis right now - it's main revenue streams are drying up in the form of slow Office/Windows XP sales (well, slow compared to what they need to be). Hence Hailstorm, which is a big part of.NET
So - consider that Linux is the first real competition MS has had on the desktop/server market for years (forget apple, they have survived by selling to a niche, mainly artists, not business/home). Now consider that they are desperate for cash, lots of it.
So, considering all that, how likely is it that MS will invest millions into a new platform for Windows, and then allow it's primary competitor to make it about a zillion times easier to port code from Win32 to Linux? Not very is the answer. Remember this - Microsoft HATE Linux: their corporate leaders see open source as "wrong" etc, and of course Linux is already good as a server and making headway on the desktop, so how do they respond to this threat?
Seems obvious - they need.NET, but what they don't need is to be giving their competitors a leg up by developing an expensive technology. They'll try and keep.NET Win32 only, and they won't have to try hard. Yes, yes, we all know about the ECMA submissions, but lets face it: There are standards, and there are standards. C#, CLI etc. will be de-facto standards soon, but that doesn't make them anymore acceptable, regardless of whether they've been rubber-stamped by ECMA or not.
Having said all that, you've got to give Miguel respect: he knows good technology when he sees it and isn't afraid of politics. I love some of Microsofts software, I just don't love the company. Problem is, in cases like.NET they are inextricably linked.
.NET is great - but I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. That's like walking right into the lions den because the lion is guarding a great new toy that you want, and saying the lions reformed and won't eat you.
Having said that, can't the open source movement do any better? I mean.NET is an excellent implementation of technologies we're familiar with and have used for years, but surely we can do better. I think we can, I think it's called Mozilla, and I think it's underrated as a development platform. But that's just IMHO, please don't let that distract you from my main argument here.
yeah. anyway, rant over. it's much longer than i thought it would be anyway.
On the contrary, I tipping is a very good idea, well, it's the best I can think of right now considering the circumstances.
In fact, I wrote an article and posted it to Kuro5hin.org a while ago now, you can look for it if you like. Also, I'm working on a technology (called Genio) that will provide true online electronic identity, one of the prerequisites I think for true large scale tipping online.
Yeah, I see this opinion all the time. Mozilla is too slow, Mozilla is too bloated, too many features.
Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms. Probably the reason they didn't use OpenSSL is due to limited support on other platforms, I don't know.
Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.
But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.
Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.
They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.
So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.
Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD
This is more about copyrights in a digital world
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The Napsterization of TV
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Sure, we can all laugh about the idea of people emailing half a gig of video to each other, or downloading them onto their PDA, or say "wow, how cool would having digital archives of my favourite tv programs be", but the real issue here is - how do media artists make a living when their product can be copied an infinite number of times for virtually zero cost?
I don't see much discussion of that, perhaps because nobody knows the answer? It hasn't been solved for music yet - no wonder the TV execs are wetting themselves.
Firstly, nobody I think will deny that Microsoft have some smart people at the helm, but that doesn't mean all your points are valid.
You seem to forget that most of the points you make against Linux also apply to Microsoft. Fighting over KDE and GNOME? Yeah, that sucks, but you could say with equal truth that for many years Windows Nt/2000 was "fighting" with the 9x line. Apps written for one wouldn't always work on another. They were the same, but different. With XP, Microsoft has finally solved this dilemma basically by dumping the 9x line. Linux will solve the KDE/GNOME dilemma too, in one of two ways:
1) One will defeat the other, and either KDE or GNOME will be retired by a significant majority.
2) They will become compatible to such an extent that it doesn't matter which one you use, as the experience you get is just as good on either of them, and it becomes a matter of personal taste, with competition driving them both onwards. This is the option I'd rather see, as it's been shown time and time again that innovation happens best and fastest when there is competition in place.
Will Microsoft "defeat" Linux by having a better product? I don't think so. I've used most types of Windows, ditto for MacOS and have recently discovered Linux, and yep, when you've used the competition you can see more clearly where Windows is good, and where it's not.
Windows has lots of very good points, and now that XP has brought reliability (and yes, security too if you ignore things like buffer overflows which can happen in any system) up to scratch, it's an excellent product.
But does that mean that the Linux crew are just going to pack up their bags and go home? Don't be daft, in some (many?) respects Linux smacks Windows totally. For some things I find KDE easier to use and more powerful than Windows.
I don't think the people who make Linux are arrogant, especially not compared to Microsoft, who are the most arrogant of the lot. I think we should be glad that there is finally some decent competition in the PC operating systems arena.
A year ago, I tried Linux and immediately went back to Windows. 98 was better, even considering reliability. This year, I tried it again, and now use it 50% of the time. Soon, I'll be using Linux 100% of the time, I have no doubt about that.
You're talking out of your ass here.
You say you don't have/need any excuse like "Microsoft is a bad company" to steal software: you just do it because you're selfish.
Great. Good for you. But you know what? You're just the same as they are, except instead of using the record companies as an excuse you say "society screwed me, so that means I can screw everyone else too". What sort of an argument is that?
It's not an argument, is it? You want something but don't want to pay for it, so you blame society and go out and steal some software.
Lacking morals isn't an excuse. Everyone needs them, because if nobody had morals society would collapse. People like you make me sick, because you seem to believe the world revolves around you, and that it's okay for you to treat other people as your doormat.
You know, even though this is after all slashdot, I'm surprised that I haven't really seen anyone stick up for the MPEG consortium yet.
After all, they have worked for years to bring together technology from all over the world and synthesise it into something that is truly useful.
The kind of mathematics, science and engineering behind something like the MPEG standards isn't something you dream up in a bedroom - it takes a lot of time and money, and as time is money, this means money squared.
If they don't get their money back, then there won't be any more MPEG standards. At the end of the day, this is going to let people make lots of cash off of streaming video to people (whether it be via the net/cable/sat/whatever) - the people who enabled that deserve a reward.
I think it's pretty good of them to allow not-for-profit use of MPEG-4, which will allow people who aren't making money from their use of the technology to make as many MPEG-4 encoded videos as they like.
Sure, maybe the time based charging is dumb and should be rethought, or maybe it's actually pretty sensible (given the markets in which it'll be used, ie digital tv/video etc). The MPEG group is made up of a lot of extremely smart people - don't write them off because they aren't giving away their work into the public domain.
I did try and write a plugin for Explorer once (not a fs driver, just a COM plugin a la ZipFolders), and after a frustrating few weeks managed to trash my copy of Explorer - I had to reinstall Windows. Eventually I got it working, but at what cost!
I'll tell you why nobody writes FS plugins (a feature that I maintain till this day was a good idea, innovative even, spoilt by bad implementation) - even getting the "minimal" hello world plugin requires creation of several different COM objects, with virtually zero documentation, and when it does exist it's often inaccurate.
I have nothing but respect for the ZipFolders guys, I tried to do something similar and failed miserably.
Actually, Passport used to be tied to Hotmail but when they realised this was hurting uptake of the system they changed it to allow other addresses as well.
The spam problem is purely related to hotmail by the way.
You know, what I find scary is that it's a well known truism that MS takes 3 versions to get anything right. At the moment, Passport isn't right. It's too hard to setup (for site admins i mean, not users), costs too much money and is way too centralised. It's much better than it used to be however, and it's curretnly on version 2.
Cool? I find the lack of a wheel constantly irritating. And the fact that I have to keep reaching for the keyboard to right click is also annoying. This is definately apples "style over substance" attitude coming through again. They look sweet, but give me my old wheel mouse any day.
Less than a week ago now I installed SuSE Linux 7.2, I was -totally- new to Linux and knew nothing about it, other than that it was supposed to be good for writing software and it was more reliable than Win98. Games?
SuSE comes with loads of them, they all worked right out of the box, no configuration needed. All my hardware both the standard and the exotic just worked, OpenGL was fine, and changing resolutions was a piece of cheese (I think YaST has some kind of auto-X-config program). Linux hard to use? Maybe if you have old or unusual hardware, but the idea that Windows is easier to configure for video is a joke!
Windows regularly seems to forget my monitor settings, meaning that I can't change resolutions without telling it what my monitor is again (means rebooting often). The slider can get "stuck" at 800x600 and won't go any higher, I happen to know how to fix this, but I've had to give tech support to my friends several times for this problem. Sure, Linux is far from perfect, but before you bash the technology, remember that it's the community that matters.
Is X a heap of junk? That's the impression I got from reading some posts, but in reality it seems alright to me. The differing widget themes/toolkits seemed wierd at first coming from a windows background, but I'm used to it now and really it doesn't bother me. And soon I read X will support true transparency and anti-aliasing. Great!
OpenGL is proceeding at a glacial pace huh? Well yeah, in the same way that the web is proceeding slowly compared to if Microsoft were running the show and every new release of IE had great new features, but I prefer standards. Also rememeber that OpenGL has lost a lot of its momentum since MS dropped support for it. I think Linux gaming is alright, I love tux racer for instance! But we need more like it.
I read their page yesterday, before it was slashdotted and I believe it says somewhere that they will be selling the software separately sometime in the future, but it didn't give an exact date.
I'd guess this would introduce a lot more complexity because of the myriad of different hardware types out there etc.
Slashdot Mirror
A few months ago (I am finishing off high school now) my general studies teacher decided we should all do a presentation on a social issue. I chose Civil Liberties but that's irrevelevant. The thing that made by presentation different was that I chose Swish, basically a Flash creation tool. It's damn easy to use, and I got to play with all their neat text effects. The result? A presentation that absolutely blew the pants off of the standard "slide-in-the-bulletpoint" presentations made by my friends. Why don't more companies do this, when it clearly has such a lot of impact? Herd mentality I guess: people thing presentation, they think PowerPoint.
One thing should be noted though for people who are going to try this - I spent so long playing will all the fun effects my presentation was rather light on content :) I'll be more careful about that next time. Also, my presentation needed a graphics accelerator, tee hee.
If Linux really wanted to do something better than MS Office, it should start thinking differently. It wouldn't be hard to create an SVG based presentation app that looked amazing, esp now KDE and Gnome have SVG support built in. It's stuff like this that will ensure a Linux victory on the desktop is not a hollow one.
thanks -mike
Yeah, but at least we actually have digital TV. The US rollout of DVB has been horrendous as well - afaik the government is still deciding on what transmission system to use.
:)
Don't complain too much, though you may not realise it the UK has the most advanced television system in the world
1) Use Ctrl-C/V/X to do the standard Windows thing with the clipboard.
2) Selecting text copies it to the secondary clipboard. Then you can paste it using the middle mouse button (or the wheel). No need to touch the keyboard at all. That's a real speed boost I find.
This problem is to do with a rather vague spec on how the clipboard in X works. Qt in particular interpreted it wrong, but the new version (3) does it right. GTK has always done it right afaik.
So - in approximately 5/6 months time once people have finished upgrading to KDE 3/GNOME 3 most apps (which these days tend to be written for one or the other) will be conformant and that'll be the end of it.
Yes you would be right in saying this is a stupid mistake to make and it's hurt the Linux desktop considerably. It has done, but that's the price you pay for not having 1 person in charge. When your working to commitee standards (especially very complex ones) with multiple implementations, misinterpretations will happen. That's life, especially Linux life. I'll live with it, because I prefer democracy to dictatorships even though sometimes dictatorships are more efficient.
Damn me - it's the Linux effect. I'm turning into more of a MS hating zealot every day! :(
NOT TRUE! I have a friend who is a die hard Mac lover, who was using the pre-release betas of OS X etc. and he told me the other day that he thought it was a shame that there wasn't any KDE skin for OS X. I didn't believe him at first, but he's already tried skinning the Mac (and failed to properly unskin it again, lol) so perhaps he wasn't mad.
Yeah, everyone is instantly bowled over by Aqua. But to be honest, I reckon that KDE 2 with the standard theme and a few enhancements looks better than Windows, and some of the screenshots I've seen on Ximian Gnome look sweet - different to the Mac of course, but not inferior I think.
Perhaps one implementation that might work well on Linux would integrate a folder with a package manager, such as GNUpdate, so you could drag a package into a folder, which would then be installed in the background. Drag a package out, and it'd be uninstalled. You get the benefits of the distributed FHS system currently used with the end user ease-of-use that AppFolders provides
Of course, dragging and dropping apps to install is all very well for the user, but surely it completely removes the opportunity to use shared libraries? The reason Linux splashes files in different directories is to make them easy to share files with each other.
Of course, I don't know this - but I'd bet anything that the reason the OS X installer for Mozilla is 15mb compared to 9/10 for Windows/Linux is because OS X doesn't have the same concept of shared libs, so much more must be shipped with the product. Interestingly, once decompressed Moz on OS X is 35mb, compared to 15 on my windows/linux box.
Just a thought.
You know what, I just discovered GConf - it sounds exactly like what I had in mind. Hopefully it'll be accepted by the community as a whole: it'd be a shame if this was restricted to just Gnome environments. thanks -mike
In the background what happens here is the config library is an abstraction layer over a datastore - of any kind. The default would probably adopt the dotfile standard that is defacto at present for personal data, and /etc, /usr/etc for system configuration. However, other plugins could implement an XML:DB backend, or store the data in a binary database, or do anything you like with it. The apps don't care.
Everyone will have different preferences for this too, and as Linux is as much about choice as anything else, this must be accomodated. Webmin is great for remote administration, but when I'm sitting in front of my box I'd rather use the KDE Control Centre. Other people would rather have their settings altered in each application. How do you manage this?
Well firstly, it seems pretty obvious that most of the time it's going to be easier to edit application configuration from within that app. Sometimes that won't be possible, for instance with server apps, but for desktop GUI apps like word processors it'd be easier to select the Configure menu option. In KDE/Gnome etc. apps already use standardised config dialogs, so it's pretty easy for the user. For servers, Control Center plugins (or whatever your favourite equivalent is) would seem the obvious way to go. This doesn't necessarily mean coding up a new control module each time: Broadway would let you embed a KDE/Gnome control center module into Webmin easily.
That's why we have binary packages. Unfortunately there are two competing package systems, and this isn't a great system. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for competition, but sometimes competition is good, and sometimes it's harmful. This is one area where it's harmful, and it means I can't always get programs working on my distro simply because nobody has packaged it for me. But - nobody can seem to decide between Debian and Red Hat package managers! LSB says RedHat, Debian people say Debian, and in the meantime end users are caught in the middle. What's needed is a technically advanced solution that is distribution neutral - like for instance, GNUpdate If I was designing the LSB, this is what I'd use. It's not finished yet, but when it is it will give us backwards compatability with a distro-independant packaging solution. For those who can and want to build from the source, it will even be able to pull programs direct from CVS!
So there you go. Simple things, not a giant leap coding wise, but simply agreeing on some things with a smart architecture would go a long way towards propelling Linux into the kind of ease-of-use that only MacOS and perhaps Windows enjoys.
thanks -mike
What pisses me off about this is that Microsoft is the one who makes all the money from this, yet I am the one who has to clean up my friends computers every third Tuesday for them, because MSN allows any program (or indeed website, it's used on the msn portal pages) to access it's internal objects via COM. Not that there is anything wrong with this idea, but due to their lax coding, it's people like me who get to pick up the pieces.
As I access MSN via Jabber I can't be infected with these viruses anyway, but the fact that MSN isn't even a particularly great chat program especially rankles.
The causes vary, often it's due to politics, or too much market control by one organisation (read, microsoft usually).
For instance, take OpenDoc. OpenDoc was cool stuff, really ahead of its time, true componenet programming and computing. The idea of the application was made almost obsolete, instead you made up the software you needed from reusable parts. Something called Stationary was the closest you got to application, Stationary was basically part templates.
OpenDoc was IMHO great stuff, and should have revolutionised computing. Problem is, it was invented by Apple before Jobs came and sorted them out. There was a Win32 version out there somewhere, but Apple did their best to keep it hidden, the "official" OpenDoc website didn't mention Windows at all. There were many other companies involved besides Apple, but they were in control, and through their arrogance in believing that OpenDoc could give a boost to the Mac platform they killed it's potential. I spent ages trying to learn how to write Parts, but without being able to find the elusive Windows version I was stufffed.
So there's one answer to your question. Very few good ideas ever reach the light of day, and fewer still get generally accepted in the way UNIX/the GUI/the web did.
thanks -mike
I dunno, she is damn fine and no beating about the bush, but isn't being immobile in front of a computer supposed to be our job?
Nah, I'm kidding, like I'd so no or something. Anyway, geek women are kinky, in a strange sort of way. So flame me!
This sounds really great doens't it? 10,000 USD cash prize, visiting their facilities (who wouldn't be curious to see the worlds biggest Beowulf cluster) and more.
Thing is, though that is a lot of money, what happens if you make them, say 20,000 USD with a great new compression/analysis algorithm.
What then? You have no claim to a part of their profits. I guess that's just a part of competing to give your ideas to a company.
-mike
Look - what is Microsoft? It is a big company, one which is in a serious crisis right now - it's main revenue streams are drying up in the form of slow Office/Windows XP sales (well, slow compared to what they need to be). Hence Hailstorm, which is a big part of .NET
So - consider that Linux is the first real competition MS has had on the desktop/server market for years (forget apple, they have survived by selling to a niche, mainly artists, not business/home). Now consider that they are desperate for cash, lots of it.
So, considering all that, how likely is it that MS will invest millions into a new platform for Windows, and then allow it's primary competitor to make it about a zillion times easier to port code from Win32 to Linux? Not very is the answer. Remember this - Microsoft HATE Linux: their corporate leaders see open source as "wrong" etc, and of course Linux is already good as a server and making headway on the desktop, so how do they respond to this threat?
Seems obvious - they need .NET, but what they don't need is to be giving their competitors a leg up by developing an expensive technology. They'll try and keep .NET Win32 only, and they won't have to try hard. Yes, yes, we all know about the ECMA submissions, but lets face it: There are standards, and there are standards. C#, CLI etc. will be de-facto standards soon, but that doesn't make them anymore acceptable, regardless of whether they've been rubber-stamped by ECMA or not.
Having said all that, you've got to give Miguel respect: he knows good technology when he sees it and isn't afraid of politics. I love some of Microsofts software, I just don't love the company. Problem is, in cases like .NET they are inextricably linked.
yeah. anyway, rant over. it's much longer than i thought it would be anyway.
thanks -mike
On the contrary, I tipping is a very good idea, well, it's the best I can think of right now considering the circumstances. In fact, I wrote an article and posted it to Kuro5hin.org a while ago now, you can look for it if you like. Also, I'm working on a technology (called Genio) that will provide true online electronic identity, one of the prerequisites I think for true large scale tipping online.
Yeah, I see this opinion all the time. Mozilla is too slow, Mozilla is too bloated, too many features.
Well, that's your opinion. I find that a lot of Linux users tend to have this opinion, perhaps because UNIX is more based around the idea of small reusable components than other platforms. Probably the reason they didn't use OpenSSL is due to limited support on other platforms, I don't know.
Usually posts like that one end up with something like "Yeah, but I love Konquerer or Galeon, it's so light!", which just shows that you prefer small and fast to not so small and not so fast (but with more features). Fine, I can understand that.
But you know what? I'd be willing to bet that I use about 80-90% of Mozillas features, both on Windows and Linux. I am glad everytime I see a new feature. So you like using Gecko, but not their front end. That's great, but please bear in mind this is purely a matter of personal taste - not everyone agrees, so constantly repeating your own opinion doesn't really add much to the debate.
Oh yeah, also I get sick of people talking out of their ASSES about how Mozilla is badly manged because OMG the latest nightly has a regression in it. This is caused by a fundamental misunderstanding about how the project works. You think - oh, until 1.0 is finished Mozilla won't be ready, it'll still be in beta. But nobody I've talked to who has used Netscape 6.2 thinks it's beta software.
They don't think it's perfect either, but the fact is that 1.0 is a number basically plucked out of the air. It's when the APIs will be guaranteed frozen, and other geeky targets like that. When you use Mozilla, you agreed that you were using TEST software, released for the purposes of TESTING. In the course of any large software engineering project, regressions will happen as the internals are rewritten to take advantage of the stuff the developers have learned. That's the same in any project.
So what I'm saying is, don't whine and bitch about how your favourite feature has been futured, or how the latest nightly has had a regression, or how it doesn't run perfectly on your ultra-obscure variant of UNIX or whatever, and BE GRATEFUL that you can even see the progress of this project! Be grateful that you can contribute, and that you CAN play with the latest features and influence whether they become a part of the project or not.
Show me the IE or Opera bug db and then I'll shut up. Until then, stop with the FUD
I don't see much discussion of that, perhaps because nobody knows the answer? It hasn't been solved for music yet - no wonder the TV execs are wetting themselves.
Hi there,
Firstly, nobody I think will deny that Microsoft have some smart people at the helm, but that doesn't mean all your points are valid.
You seem to forget that most of the points you make against Linux also apply to Microsoft. Fighting over KDE and GNOME? Yeah, that sucks, but you could say with equal truth that for many years Windows Nt/2000 was "fighting" with the 9x line. Apps written for one wouldn't always work on another. They were the same, but different. With XP, Microsoft has finally solved this dilemma basically by dumping the 9x line. Linux will solve the KDE/GNOME dilemma too, in one of two ways:
1) One will defeat the other, and either KDE or GNOME will be retired by a significant majority.
2) They will become compatible to such an extent that it doesn't matter which one you use, as the experience you get is just as good on either of them, and it becomes a matter of personal taste, with competition driving them both onwards. This is the option I'd rather see, as it's been shown time and time again that innovation happens best and fastest when there is competition in place.
Will Microsoft "defeat" Linux by having a better product? I don't think so. I've used most types of Windows, ditto for MacOS and have recently discovered Linux, and yep, when you've used the competition you can see more clearly where Windows is good, and where it's not.
Windows has lots of very good points, and now that XP has brought reliability (and yes, security too if you ignore things like buffer overflows which can happen in any system) up to scratch, it's an excellent product.
But does that mean that the Linux crew are just going to pack up their bags and go home? Don't be daft, in some (many?) respects Linux smacks Windows totally. For some things I find KDE easier to use and more powerful than Windows.
I don't think the people who make Linux are arrogant, especially not compared to Microsoft, who are the most arrogant of the lot. I think we should be glad that there is finally some decent competition in the PC operating systems arena.
A year ago, I tried Linux and immediately went back to Windows. 98 was better, even considering reliability. This year, I tried it again, and now use it 50% of the time. Soon, I'll be using Linux 100% of the time, I have no doubt about that.
Competition is good.
You're talking out of your ass here. You say you don't have/need any excuse like "Microsoft is a bad company" to steal software: you just do it because you're selfish. Great. Good for you. But you know what? You're just the same as they are, except instead of using the record companies as an excuse you say "society screwed me, so that means I can screw everyone else too". What sort of an argument is that? It's not an argument, is it? You want something but don't want to pay for it, so you blame society and go out and steal some software. Lacking morals isn't an excuse. Everyone needs them, because if nobody had morals society would collapse. People like you make me sick, because you seem to believe the world revolves around you, and that it's okay for you to treat other people as your doormat.
You know, even though this is after all slashdot, I'm surprised that I haven't really seen anyone stick up for the MPEG consortium yet.
After all, they have worked for years to bring together technology from all over the world and synthesise it into something that is truly useful.
The kind of mathematics, science and engineering behind something like the MPEG standards isn't something you dream up in a bedroom - it takes a lot of time and money, and as time is money, this means money squared.
If they don't get their money back, then there won't be any more MPEG standards. At the end of the day, this is going to let people make lots of cash off of streaming video to people (whether it be via the net/cable/sat/whatever) - the people who enabled that deserve a reward.
I think it's pretty good of them to allow not-for-profit use of MPEG-4, which will allow people who aren't making money from their use of the technology to make as many MPEG-4 encoded videos as they like.
Sure, maybe the time based charging is dumb and should be rethought, or maybe it's actually pretty sensible (given the markets in which it'll be used, ie digital tv/video etc). The MPEG group is made up of a lot of extremely smart people - don't write them off because they aren't giving away their work into the public domain.
thanks -mike
I did try and write a plugin for Explorer once (not a fs driver, just a COM plugin a la ZipFolders), and after a frustrating few weeks managed to trash my copy of Explorer - I had to reinstall Windows. Eventually I got it working, but at what cost!
I'll tell you why nobody writes FS plugins (a feature that I maintain till this day was a good idea, innovative even, spoilt by bad implementation) - even getting the "minimal" hello world plugin requires creation of several different COM objects, with virtually zero documentation, and when it does exist it's often inaccurate.
I have nothing but respect for the ZipFolders guys, I tried to do something similar and failed miserably.
thanks -mike
Actually, Passport used to be tied to Hotmail but when they realised this was hurting uptake of the system they changed it to allow other addresses as well.
The spam problem is purely related to hotmail by the way.
You know, what I find scary is that it's a well known truism that MS takes 3 versions to get anything right. At the moment, Passport isn't right. It's too hard to setup (for site admins i mean, not users), costs too much money and is way too centralised. It's much better than it used to be however, and it's curretnly on version 2.
So what happens when it reaches version 3?
Cool? I find the lack of a wheel constantly irritating. And the fact that I have to keep reaching for the keyboard to right click is also annoying. This is definately apples "style over substance" attitude coming through again. They look sweet, but give me my old wheel mouse any day.
Less than a week ago now I installed SuSE Linux 7.2, I was -totally- new to Linux and knew nothing about it, other than that it was supposed to be good for writing software and it was more reliable than Win98. Games?
SuSE comes with loads of them, they all worked right out of the box, no configuration needed. All my hardware both the standard and the exotic just worked, OpenGL was fine, and changing resolutions was a piece of cheese (I think YaST has some kind of auto-X-config program). Linux hard to use? Maybe if you have old or unusual hardware, but the idea that Windows is easier to configure for video is a joke!
Windows regularly seems to forget my monitor settings, meaning that I can't change resolutions without telling it what my monitor is again (means rebooting often). The slider can get "stuck" at 800x600 and won't go any higher, I happen to know how to fix this, but I've had to give tech support to my friends several times for this problem. Sure, Linux is far from perfect, but before you bash the technology, remember that it's the community that matters.
Is X a heap of junk? That's the impression I got from reading some posts, but in reality it seems alright to me. The differing widget themes/toolkits seemed wierd at first coming from a windows background, but I'm used to it now and really it doesn't bother me. And soon I read X will support true transparency and anti-aliasing. Great!
OpenGL is proceeding at a glacial pace huh? Well yeah, in the same way that the web is proceeding slowly compared to if Microsoft were running the show and every new release of IE had great new features, but I prefer standards. Also rememeber that OpenGL has lost a lot of its momentum since MS dropped support for it. I think Linux gaming is alright, I love tux racer for instance! But we need more like it.
thanks -mike
I read their page yesterday, before it was slashdotted and I believe it says somewhere that they will be selling the software separately sometime in the future, but it didn't give an exact date.
I'd guess this would introduce a lot more complexity because of the myriad of different hardware types out there etc.