Excuse me? Wikipedia content is GFDL'd, which means its free as in freedom. So it will never die. No one can delete it.
Wikipedia is far more useful than your old Britannica. First its a lot bigger. Second its available in a lot of languages. Third, you can freely copy it (subject to the GFDL of course). Fourth its more current. News items are incorporated into the relevant articles within days.
And then your comment about unqualified opinion. This is a lot like the argument about the relative security of open source and closed source. Since there are hundreds of people looking at each article, the likelyhood of biased contribtions going uncorrected is extremely small. We have strict policies about "NPOV", or neutral point of view, which means that you can't write your opinion but can only attribute it. Like "A lot of people believe that there are no WMDs in Iraq". Look here for a start. These policies are fairly easy to enforce, especially in a distributed fashion.
Take a look at some wikipedians' user pages. You'll find that a surprising number of them are
actually experts in the fields they contribute to.
You don't have to take my word about anything. Participate and find out for yourself.
First, it isn't "this guy". We're a community, and decisions aren't made unilaterally.
Second, you probably have no idea how big wikipedia is. Others have posted about the traffic, so I won't go into that. Its not a single sever that's needed. We need a load balancer and several servers.
Third, a wiki is a lot harder to run than simple static pages (in terms of CPU and disk).
If you don't believe the $20000 amount, you're welcome to join the mailing lists and find out for yourself.
There wouldn't be any links pointing out of them, but there would be links pointing into them. Which is all that's required to calculate PageRank. What I understood is that, they plan to put up a sample chapter or something as html and look at the inbound links that it gets.
Spammers operate on the principle that even though 99% (or thereabouts) of recipients recognize and hate spam, the remaining 1% of fools are enough to make their business model viable. However, would this work for political spam? I mean, if more than 50% of recipients react negatively to it, its bad for the sender, isn't it? (IANAA, so correct me if I'm missing something:-)
The file was programmed to self destruct after being viewed and could not be copied.
I'm sure that's going to be really effective. Go to suprnova.org and you can download a Hindi movie every couple of days.
What these morons never seem to realize is that trivial restrictions may work with 99% of the population but it only takes one person to circumvent it and upload it for everyone else.
(I'm Indian) I read about this a couple of weeks back. Apparently the number of downloads was 200. Not surprising: internet availability among home users is ridiculously low in India, 0.4% dialup and 0.02% broadband. Its increasing, but slowly.
But on the other hand maybe movie distribution will become the killer app for broadband in India:)
The reason there weren't too many commercial apps was that until recently gtk lagged far behind Qt. (The gtk file selector was a joke, for example). But gtk2 was a vast improvement, and now the 2 are for practical purposes equal. (File selector is getting fixed in 2.6). So expect to see a lot more gtk apps soon.
And its not like there aren't any now. Mozilla uses gtk (though not exclusively) and netscape which is based on mozilla is closed source. This wouldn't have been possible if gtk were GPL. Similarly for openoffice and staroffice.
Thirdly, big companies like Adobe can pay for Qt. But userlinux is targeting much smaller enterprises as well, and its doubtful if they can.
Fourth, there's the issue of control. What insurance do you have against Qt jacking up the price of a developer license?
Offtopic: Slashdot editors, could you please avoid posting links to linuxworld. The ads are highly intrusive and there's javascript on the page that autoreloads it every minute or so, presumably to serve newer ads.
Back on topic. I have to say it is really sad to see KDE left out (and I say this as a long time gnome user). KDE is definitely the more mature and enterprise ready project. But then I can see Bruce's point of view. It doesn't make sense to support both, and Qt's licensing could easily put off commercial/proprietary developers.
Had the KDE and GNOME teams not thumbed their noses at each other for so long, and actually worked on interoperability issues (remember all the bitching when Redhat released bluecurve), all this could have been avoided. I mean, in that case it wouldn't have been difficult to support both.
Still, its very early in the game and there's miles to go, and both projects can compete if they work with a unified vision. Its encouraging to see that they're doing just that. The KDE proposal, for example, was big on integration (GTK, OO.o, mozilla).
Also, nobody is stopping a KDE/debian enterprise collaboration, which seems to be on the cards.
On the whole the commercial interest from the big vendors has helped greatly. So while the userlinux decision is definitely a sad thing, the future looks bright.
Uhh.., looks like this is my 500th post! Excuse me while I go out and get a breath of fresh air:)
Your complaint against people prefering cheaper things is riduculous. Its like complaining about gravity. Its just a law of nature, and there's not a thing in the world you can do about it, get used to it.
Traditionally, the global market is extremely unfree. There are artificial boundaries to movement of people and goods in the form of nations. Countries can make clever immigration laws and trade agreements (and an occasional imperialistic conquest, or liberation if you prefer) to perpetuate a steep difference in the quality of living. In economics its called purchasing power parity.
Enter the internet. Completely unregulated, uttlerly chaotic, ruthlessly efficient, the perfect anarchy and the ultimate free market. Suddenly all the carefully erected barriers collapse, and huge supressed pools of labor and talent compete untramelled for a slice of the pie. Its like making a hole in the dam. What you're seeing is the tip of an iceberg, the beginning of a revolution.
Regulation won't help, there are numerous ways around it and its already too late anyway. Nor will jingoism. In fact, there is no "problem". You're merely being forced to compete fairly.
I'm Indian, and I'm just graduating in CS so I keep on top of the trends in tech outsourcing. I think/.ers are actually underestimating the threat from India. For example, one of the most common arguments I see is that all the low level jobs will get outsourced but all the innovative jobs will stay within America. This article shows its not true. Fundamental research is starting to be outsourced as well. India produces huge numbers of Ph.Ds and other highly qualified people as well, but most of them migrate to the US. But recently the migration trend has gone down, and even reversed in some cases. This has opened the floodgates for high-level outsourcing.
Another mistaken argument is that there is only a finite pool of labor in India and so an equilibrium will be reached soon. This won't happen. Because the current level of penetration of computers and internet connections in India is extremely low (e.g: 0.4% dialup and 0.02% broadband). As this situation improves, it greatly decrease the barrier to entering the IT workforce in India and will continue to bring in an army of new workers for years to come.
As with the open source revolution, the internet changed everything.
ESR, never shy of controversy, writes in his blog:
Salaries are dropping. Time to celebrate! . He claims that the outsourcing trend will ultimately benefit Americans; that's just how the free market works. You may not agree with him but read it anyway for an alternate viewpoint.
Heard of the joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee? Well, Linux on the desktop is something like that. So far. You have disjoint teams of hackers working on different parts and there's no "unifying vision". Simple things like copy-paste wouldn't work because it requires developers to coordinate. KDE and gnome were a great step forward, but again the unity came from common underlying libraries rather than people working together.
In the light of this, the recent explosion of corporate interest in Linux on the desktop has been a huge boon. They have the resources and the need to integrate various components. There's no way freedesktop.org could have happened in the old scenario. The amount of integration work that has happened/is happening in the last couple of years is stunning. I lurk on both gnomedesktop.org and dot.kde.org, and the attitude of the developers towards integration has changed significantly.
I'll stick my neck out and predict that with the new audio infrastructure materializing by middle of next year, LotD is going to be so kick-ass by end of 2004 that the only MS can stop us is if they manage to make linux illegal.
Try some of these (funny yet scary at the same time):
Next time there's a hole in MSIE so big you can drive a cart through it, MS will release a patch in a week and say: "See! We told you we're more secure than open source. We have a patch out already and openwares.org hasn't yet!"
People will believe them when they say that
Openwares is going to get sued by MS claiming there's no way they could have released a patch unless they illegally obtained the source
I'm sure there's a joke or three out there about the name (wares->warez) but I can't find it:)
In related news, Redhat/Fedora has announced that the next Fedora release will ship with 2.6. They've called it a "stop-ship" feature:) Fedora Core 2 is tentatively scheduled to be released in April 04.
Parent was modded "interesting";^) Priceless. Absolutely priceless. In case that's no longer the case by the time your're reading this, I made a screenshot. Enjoy.
that linux is majorly used on all these media devices, in the movie industry, and in cell phones, and sound still doesn't work properly on linux desktops!
(No, I'm not trolling. I use linux exclusively but its foolish to pretend that it is perfect. And yes, I know about the recent projects like gstreamer, jack and efforts by freedesktop.org to improve the situation. But all that is a long way off from widespread adoption.)
Re:Nah, Education is the Future
on
Linux in 2004?
·
· Score: 1
Some tips:
If you have less memory try xfce. It has plenty of eye candy and is also memory and CPU efficient. But if you must stick with gnome/kde:
In redhat 9, go to preferences->more preferences->session->current programs. Remove all the memory hogs (particularly nautilus) except gnome-panel and metacity. You'll save a lot of memory.
In preferences->themes change the theme to "Simple". Again, big win in terms of both CPU and memory.
Remove lots of unnecessary servers/daemons that start while booting.
There are quite a few minor tweaks you can make to various applications to improve performance. eg: in gdm, avoid using the background picture.
Choose your apps wisely, like firebird instead of mozilla etc.
Cumulatively it should make a major difference.
OOo is certainly a huge resource hog. But it has improved a lot in 1.1 and they plan to decrease startup time greatly.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia is far more useful than your old Britannica. First its a lot bigger. Second its available in a lot of languages. Third, you can freely copy it (subject to the GFDL of course). Fourth its more current. News items are incorporated into the relevant articles within days.
And then your comment about unqualified opinion. This is a lot like the argument about the relative security of open source and closed source. Since there are hundreds of people looking at each article, the likelyhood of biased contribtions going uncorrected is extremely small. We have strict policies about "NPOV", or neutral point of view, which means that you can't write your opinion but can only attribute it. Like "A lot of people believe that there are no WMDs in Iraq". Look here for a start. These policies are fairly easy to enforce, especially in a distributed fashion.
Take a look at some wikipedians' user pages. You'll find that a surprising number of them are actually experts in the fields they contribute to.
You don't have to take my word about anything. Participate and find out for yourself.
Second, you probably have no idea how big wikipedia is. Others have posted about the traffic, so I won't go into that. Its not a single sever that's needed. We need a load balancer and several servers.
Third, a wiki is a lot harder to run than simple static pages (in terms of CPU and disk).
If you don't believe the $20000 amount, you're welcome to join the mailing lists and find out for yourself.
There wouldn't be any links pointing out of them, but there would be links pointing into them. Which is all that's required to calculate PageRank. What I understood is that, they plan to put up a sample chapter or something as html and look at the inbound links that it gets.
Spammers operate on the principle that even though 99% (or thereabouts) of recipients recognize and hate spam, the remaining 1% of fools are enough to make their business model viable. However, would this work for political spam? I mean, if more than 50% of recipients react negatively to it, its bad for the sender, isn't it? (IANAA, so correct me if I'm missing something :-)
The file was programmed to self destruct after being viewed and could not be copied.
I'm sure that's going to be really effective. Go to suprnova.org and you can download a Hindi movie every couple of days.
What these morons never seem to realize is that trivial restrictions may work with 99% of the population but it only takes one person to circumvent it and upload it for everyone else.
But on the other hand maybe movie distribution will become the killer app for broadband in India :)
Yup. Every time I try to play Tux Racer with the Nvidia driver the machine freezes.
And its not like there aren't any now. Mozilla uses gtk (though not exclusively) and netscape which is based on mozilla is closed source. This wouldn't have been possible if gtk were GPL. Similarly for openoffice and staroffice.
Thirdly, big companies like Adobe can pay for Qt. But userlinux is targeting much smaller enterprises as well, and its doubtful if they can.
Fourth, there's the issue of control. What insurance do you have against Qt jacking up the price of a developer license?
Back on topic. I have to say it is really sad to see KDE left out (and I say this as a long time gnome user). KDE is definitely the more mature and enterprise ready project. But then I can see Bruce's point of view. It doesn't make sense to support both, and Qt's licensing could easily put off commercial/proprietary developers.
Had the KDE and GNOME teams not thumbed their noses at each other for so long, and actually worked on interoperability issues (remember all the bitching when Redhat released bluecurve), all this could have been avoided. I mean, in that case it wouldn't have been difficult to support both.
Still, its very early in the game and there's miles to go, and both projects can compete if they work with a unified vision. Its encouraging to see that they're doing just that. The KDE proposal, for example, was big on integration (GTK, OO.o, mozilla).
Also, nobody is stopping a KDE/debian enterprise collaboration, which seems to be on the cards. On the whole the commercial interest from the big vendors has helped greatly. So while the userlinux decision is definitely a sad thing, the future looks bright.
Uhh.., looks like this is my 500th post! Excuse me while I go out and get a breath of fresh air :)
Your complaint against people prefering cheaper things is riduculous. Its like complaining about gravity. Its just a law of nature, and there's not a thing in the world you can do about it, get used to it.
Traditionally, the global market is extremely unfree. There are artificial boundaries to movement of people and goods in the form of nations. Countries can make clever immigration laws and trade agreements (and an occasional imperialistic conquest, or liberation if you prefer) to perpetuate a steep difference in the quality of living. In economics its called purchasing power parity.
Enter the internet. Completely unregulated, uttlerly chaotic, ruthlessly efficient, the perfect anarchy and the ultimate free market. Suddenly all the carefully erected barriers collapse, and huge supressed pools of labor and talent compete untramelled for a slice of the pie. Its like making a hole in the dam. What you're seeing is the tip of an iceberg, the beginning of a revolution.
Regulation won't help, there are numerous ways around it and its already too late anyway. Nor will jingoism. In fact, there is no "problem". You're merely being forced to compete fairly.
Hello from India.
Another mistaken argument is that there is only a finite pool of labor in India and so an equilibrium will be reached soon. This won't happen. Because the current level of penetration of computers and internet connections in India is extremely low (e.g: 0.4% dialup and 0.02% broadband). As this situation improves, it greatly decrease the barrier to entering the IT workforce in India and will continue to bring in an army of new workers for years to come.
As with the open source revolution, the internet changed everything.
ESR, never shy of controversy, writes in his blog: Salaries are dropping. Time to celebrate! . He claims that the outsourcing trend will ultimately benefit Americans; that's just how the free market works. You may not agree with him but read it anyway for an alternate viewpoint.
That sounds like a bad Soviet Russia joke ;^)
Audio won't "put linux over the top", but if it stops sucking so bad then one more barrier to widespread linux usage will be removed :)
In the light of this, the recent explosion of corporate interest in Linux on the desktop has been a huge boon. They have the resources and the need to integrate various components. There's no way freedesktop.org could have happened in the old scenario. The amount of integration work that has happened/is happening in the last couple of years is stunning. I lurk on both gnomedesktop.org and dot.kde.org, and the attitude of the developers towards integration has changed significantly.
I'll stick my neck out and predict that with the new audio infrastructure materializing by middle of next year, LotD is going to be so kick-ass by end of 2004 that the only MS can stop us is if they manage to make linux illegal.
Finished an endless series?
In related news, Redhat/Fedora has announced that the next Fedora release will ship with 2.6. They've called it a "stop-ship" feature :) Fedora Core 2 is tentatively scheduled to be released in April 04.
Sure we do!
BTW, Remember me? :)
Parent was modded "interesting" ;^) Priceless. Absolutely priceless. In case that's no longer the case by the time your're reading this, I made a screenshot. Enjoy.
Something doesn't add up. If linux costs $699, then how can they sell the whole thing for $499?!
(No, I'm not trolling. I use linux exclusively but its foolish to pretend that it is perfect. And yes, I know about the recent projects like gstreamer, jack and efforts by freedesktop.org to improve the situation. But all that is a long way off from widespread adoption.)
-
If you have less memory try xfce. It has plenty of eye candy and is also memory and CPU efficient. But if you must stick with gnome/kde:
-
In redhat 9, go to preferences->more preferences->session->current programs. Remove all the memory hogs (particularly nautilus) except gnome-panel and metacity. You'll save a lot of memory.
-
In preferences->themes change the theme to "Simple". Again, big win in terms of both CPU and memory.
-
Remove lots of unnecessary servers/daemons that start while booting.
-
There are quite a few minor tweaks you can make to various applications to improve performance. eg: in gdm, avoid using the background picture.
-
Choose your apps wisely, like firebird instead of mozilla etc.
Cumulatively it should make a major difference.OOo is certainly a huge resource hog. But it has improved a lot in 1.1 and they plan to decrease startup time greatly.
So this Kuhn guy is dyslexic?