Before I started using the ed2k network last April I had six gigabytes of music, mostly ripped from CDs I had bought as a teenager, of which I estimate that I listened to three gigabytes of it regularly. After using ed2k for ten months, I now have 84 gigabytes of music. I estimate that I listen to something like 20 to 30 gigabytes of it regularly, and I try to listen to at least one new artist, album, or work per week. (Since I work from home more often than not, I am fortunate to have plenty of time to familiarize myself with new music.)
The collection has gotten so large, in fact, that I've had to converted all ape and flac files to high-bitrate ogg-vorbis files using gstreamer to avoid running of disk space (recently I broke down and bought a larger drive and a DVD burner). If Debian ever packages the new mpc plugin (or if I find motivation to build the plugin myself), I'll save even more space. (The ogg files use a little less than half the space of the lossless codecs.)
The crux of the biscuit: yes, I've discovered all sorts of new musical interests by browsing the ed2k network.
Though I've had an off-handed interest in early and classical music for as long as I can remember, only thanks to ed2k have I been able to amass such a variety from which I can pick and choose, with which refine my taste. Neither streaming radio nor satellite radio can compare. Mix this rich digital library with Wikipedia and free web-based courses on introductory music theory and one has an interesting and educational way to spend one's evenings for a few months.
I've also acquired a taste for indigenous music from the so-called far reaches of the world. The gamelan music of Indonesia has been a particularly delightful discovery, as has the ancient music of China and Japan. I found a corpus of Islamic music from Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, and more. While I'm not interested so much in the subject matter, the music is fantastic.
It may sound silly, but a suite of nature soundtracks I found (consisting of waves crashing, thunderstorms and rain, insects chirping, etc.) turned out to be quite soothing while falling asleep.
I also found a few movie soundtracks that I now consider indispensable, such as those for Waking Life, Akira, and Donnie Darko.
There are also entire discographies of modern popular and semi-popular artists, some of which I'd never heard and ended up loving, such as Simon & Garfunkel, Nick Drake, Frank Zappa, Nine Inch Nails, Tom Waits, and Leonard Cohen.
1) Open-source. I like to know what my software is doing, and if it lacks some desired functionality, I want to be able to add it. Additionally, this is a matter of trust and privacy. Open-source software helps ensure software makers are competing fairly). Open-source software will rarely, if ever, report web browsing, word processing, or media viewing habits back to 'home base', at least without asking you first. And if they do, there's a great chance someone will notice and speak up (usually very loudly).
2) Security. I don't think I need to say much about this because the inadequacies of Windows, with regards to security and the sometimes unacceptably long invterval of finding a critical bug and patching it, are very well documented. Also, I'm a big fan of security by peer review of source code.
3) Stability. Windows was grossly unstable until Windows 2000 was released. Anyone that's been subjected to using Windows 95/98 should know exactly what I'm talking about, and systems administrators should know well enough the bizarre rituals and alchemies involved in convincing an NT 4.0 server to stay up for even months at a time.
I've been enjoying a stable computing environment since I switched to Linux in 1996. I reboot only after building a new kernel or on the (very) rare occasion that the nVidia module panics the kernel. I've also been using the same Debian installation for the last four years.
(Ironically, though persons who are pro-Microsoft compain that Windows XP still has major stability problems, I've been using it daily on my roommate's laptop for a few months now and the only noticable problem is that sometimes it doesn't like to shut down properly.)
4) Choice. For example, there are scores of open-source window managers that run on Linux and free BSDs, and some of these have eye candy and features still not available in Windows. There are hundreds of third-party extensions and applets for these window managers. There are numerous distributions of Linux and BSD that all have different benefits and shortcomings, sometimes aiming to solve different niche problems. And the best part is that they can all take advantage of each others' contributions - no lock-in. The list goes on and on.
5) Unix. Unix is a well-designed, modular system that is still heavily used thirty years after its inception. And it is thoroughly defined in open, public standards. I've come to be addicted to this system; I'd simply go mad if I were restricted to the DOS command line (though I hear Microsoft is attempting improvements in this area).
First, yes, I'm pretty sure I can call you childish and irrational with a straight face. Calling a person an asshole without provocation is reason enough. Way to be civil.
Second, I think I've made it clear that I'm not above being wrong, and I'll say now that I'm not above admitting that I've mis-spoke. I have mis-spoke by saying things like 'Qt applications' where I mean 'KDE applications', even though the scope of this discussion isn't GTK and Qt, but GNOME and KDE.
Third, I told you I've already responded to the things you said before you mentioned qt3-win32. You said 'free Qt port.' Pardon me for your lack of clarification, but I didn't know qt3-win32 existed, much less that they have plans for a native KDE4 port.
Fourth, yes, I'm blushing over my interpretation of the qt3-win32 site's "Important Note."
This knowlege pretty much puts me at ease. You see, whasn't that easy? Talk about lack of clarity - you could have just pointed out qt3-win32 and their plans from the start and saved us both from bad feelings and wasted time instead of calling me an asshole.
Now then, if I've sufficiently satisifed your ego, would you be so kind as to point out those (at least) three factual errors in my posts?
There are presently no usable and free solutions that allow average end-users to easily run modern KDE and KDE applications on Windows. As I contribute to the development of the desktop environment I choose to run, if I were running and contributing to KDE, I would be restricting the scope of end-users that can take take advantage of these contributions until someone decides to initiate and maintain a Qt/X11 port to Win32, and then makes sure KDE can build against it. That's the taint. I know you know this, I'm just clarifying what I mean.;-)
Yes, I would feel much better if Qt/X11 were ported to Win32, followed by KDE. I would probably go back to KDE, at least until GNOME matures. I would still hold Qt and KDE in lesser (idealistic, not technical) regard than Gtk and GNOME for reasons previously stated, reasons which, again, I invite those more in the know to clarify. I've only recently developed political interest in all of this, and I readily concede that my perception of the state of affairs could be (and are probably) misinformed, but I consider GNOME to be fairly ideal for reasons other than portability based on what I've read and what others have told me.
Its a tough problem, at least for me. GNOME is close to idealistic perfection, while KDE is close to perfect usability; but problems of choice are good problems to have.:-)
Interestingly, no one has pointed out that GNOME proper won't run on Win32 without Cygwin, just like KDE, though this seems to be a goal of the CyGNOME project.
I'd really be better of not replying to such a troll. But...
> For one thing, you seem to be under the > assumption that the port I referred to is not a > port to "win32 proper".
Since I don't see how you can possibly infer this from my response, you're the one assuming too much. Add to the facts that the qt3-win32 web site explains, in their opening text, why a port of Qt/X11 is still necessary.
> There are at least three other factually wrong > pieces in your post[...]
I still believe I've responded to everything you've said in previous posts, and I don't believe saying so makes me an 'asshole.' If you don't want to correct me, that's your choice, but you're not just 'punishing' me, but those who read what I've posted. If only for their sake, you should correct my mistakes.
Grow up? I'm not calling people assholes and trying to punish people for disagreeing with me.
Not good enough. You can't seriously expect my friends and family to install Cygwin and run an X server so they can use Konqueror.
> The only non-free aspect to QT is the > commercial licensed version of QT Windows.
That's the only aspect that matters to my argument.
> There is nothing to keep you, me, or anyone > else from porting one of the GPL'd QT toolkits > to Windows (as the KDE on Cygwin people have > done).
First, porting to Cygwin is porting to another UNIX architecture. Why do you think they ported to Cygwin and not Win32 proper? Talk to me when there's a native port. Second, ignoring the fact that I've never written a line of code that used MFC and I'm obviously not the right candidate for this (rather monumental) job, I don't use Windows enough to want to go through the time and pain of porting to that platform. However, I, my friends and family do use Windows enough that the freeness of Qt on Win32 is important. Talk to me when there's a native port.
> The existance of a non-free licenced version of > QT does not make the free-licenced versions any > less free.
Except that people can't run my Qt-based applications on a Windows platform without lots of pain (Cygwin) or forking over cash. There's no way I'd write a GUI using Qt these days, no way in hell. On the rare occasions that I've written GUI apps, I've specifically avoided Qt for this reason.
And there are other ideological matters to take into account:
It is my understanding that the heavy-hitting GNOME developers release their copyrights to the FSF. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) The SCO debacle shows us why this is important.
I don't know what kind of code quality standards the GNOME folks have, but in my experience GNOME's code is much cleaner than KDE's. Nothing irks me more than poorly designed interfaces and spaghetti code. While the question of interface quality is debatable as opinion, I think code cleanliness is pretty easy to see and stands on its own.
I use GNOME because I want to run software that isn't restricted from running on certain platforms without unacceptable caveats due to licensing restrictions. I think KDE is prettier and more featureful, but I'm not going to throw my principles out the window when GNOME and KDE are essentially functionally equivalent. And as a software engineer, I refuse to limit the scope of the audience that can use my software by using Qt. I'm also hopeful that community feedback will make the GNOME folks see the folly of their restrictive design tendencies and 'get with it.'
Amen brother! I see people pimping this response like its supposed to invalidate Nicholas's claims, when its equally as opinionated and emotional, and doesn't really address the problem at all: the drive and tendancy of GNOME user interface development to design for the most computer illiterate people while forgetting that those of us who have been at this for years and know what they're doing usually like and want choice and flexibility.
I wouldn't call this a 'review', but a rant about Nautilus 2.6 and one I happen to agree with, at that. I mean seriously, what were they thinking? "Let's take the most ANNOYING behavior of Windows and make it the UNCHANGABLE DEFAULT!"
Fortunately you can enable the 2.4 behavior using gconf, but that's a sorry response to these accusations of lameness; how hard would it be to include a checkbox in one of the menus or preference dialogs that says "End This Madness - Switch To Browser Mode"? Not hard at all.
I have a big problem with any desktop environment that throws away what has to be described as standard desktop practices and forces their users into a single, debatably inferior and unchangable UI paradigm, whether that environment be GNOME, Windows, OS X, etc. I'm very worried that we're going to see more of the same from GNOME. Their blasted UI guidelines call for a level of simplicity that, while making Grandma's computing experience more enjoyable, leaves those who know what we're doing working in a inflexible and unfriendly environment. Is that what we want? GNOME to be engineered for ONLY one type of user: my grandmother? What about those that have been using UNIX and Linux for decades? Did ANYONE stop and think what features WE might like in our desktop?
I want to be able to configure every aspect of my desktop. I know what works best for me, not the GNOME foundation. And judging from responses like that of Nicholas Petreley (and others in #gnome on GIMPnet), I'm not the only one. I hate to even bring up KDE, but damn man, if GNOME had even a quarter of the flexibility and configurability of KDE, I think you'd see a lot more GNOME users.
I recently switched to GNOME from KDE for ideological reasons (more Free than KDE - no Qt), but who's got the last laugh here? KDE has far, far more eye candy than GNOME and the same goes for features with regards to configurability. The only things GNOME has on KDE, in my mind, are:
- GTK is Free on all platforms - Third-party GNOME applications are generally of better quality than KDE applications. - GNOME code that I've seen is much, much cleaner than KDE code I've seen.
I'm sorry that this is the state of things, because I want to like GNOME. I still use it as my desktop environment, but more often I find myself asking, why? Well, I guess I'm still running on principles. I'm going to see how the next major release turns out, but if we're forced into more unfriendly changes, chances are I'll be coping with the moral taint and heading back to KDE.
Miguel's got a great point, one that evangelical F/OSS developers tend to miss: If you want the lay person to celebrate F/OSS software, make it available to them, meaning make it build and run on Windows. I've had great success migrating almost all of my Windows-using friends and family to Firefox and GAIM. Both of these packages are obviously superior to their proprietary, Windows-only counterparts, and my users understand this within the first five minutes of working with them.
But fundamentalist F/OSS developers often tell me that they don't want their software running on the Evil Empire's OS and that if users want to run them they need to use a supported OS. They seem to be angry at the user for running Windows in the first place. I think this is a counter-productive attitude: We want people to use F/OSS software, but we refuse to make it available on the OS that the majority of them run?
I don't mean to imply that all or even most developers feel this way, but it remains an attitude that must be dealt with if we are ever to 'dominate the world.'
I've not read the article since it won't freakin' load, but from the summary description I really fail to see how a new package manager will solve anything.
** Problems
- Package format compatability.
Generating software packages for rpm, deb, tgz, BSD ports, etc. is a major annoyance to software developers and package maintainers. The proposed system seems to solve this by supporting the 'big three' in one package manager. A single package system is the solution to this problem, not a new package mangler. I'm sure there are many proposed packaging systems out there that want to solve this exact problem, and the author's time might be better spent by adding support for the most promising system to apt or yum rather than taking what appears to me to be the wrong approach.
I don't know about other distributions, but Debian solves this problem rather nicely by allowing you to install rpm. There's also the alien utility, which will convert to or from deb, rpm, and tgz. Some would say that this is not ideal, but its far simpler than throwing volumes of standards and megabytes of scaffolding at the problem. "Keep it simple, but not simpler than it needs to be." Alien is as simple as elegance permits.
- Cross-distribution library compatability.
This problem will only be solved if distribution maintainers make a conscious effort to do so. I can assure you that this will never happen, and native-code binary packages will never, ever, ever fit the 'build once, run anywhere' model, even if 'anywhere' means a different distribution on the same platform. A new package manager will not make it any easier for me to install Mandrake's KDE 3.2 packages on my Debian or Fedora boxen.
- Cross-package-format dependency resolution.
About the only thing this idea would help with is satisfying package dependencies across package formats. E.g., libA, an rpm, depends on libB, which is only available as a deb. Assuming the the libraries in the rpm and the deb will install and link nicely, this idea would provide a package manager that would know how to do just that. But I can see no benefit to wanting to do this sort of thing in the first place, and I would suggest that it would only complicate systems management.
- Systems like FreeBSD port and Portage?
This manager works on the most popular systems. What about more esoteric package managers? Shouldn't it support them, too? Someone's bound to ask. In this regard, the system wouldn't be promoting standardization and would be duplicating the work of many distributions, probably poorly since attention (and design of the APIs used internally by the manager) has to be spread over many package formats instead of one. Again, a real solution is deciding on a single package system to use, not creating a tentacled, five-ton beast that will crush you to death when it tries to sit on your lap.
- The Simpsons did it! I mean, apt did it!
There are versions of apt for rpm and deb. They regrettably seem to be mutually exclusive, but the point is apt covers up many ugly parts of any packaging system via automation, and it supports two of the three package formats attributed to the author's idea. And since 99% of the time there is no reason to install packages of differing formats on the same system, it doesn't matter that apt for rpm and deb are mutually exclusive.
** Conclusion
Now that the site is back, I see that all this guy seems to want to do is write a silly GUI tool that lets you install packages of arbitrary formats by clicking a few times and that will run on the popular systems so that users will feel at home on different distributions thanks to a consistent GUI. Oh well, I wish you luck guy. I think this is a worthy endeavor insofar as end-users and the much-hyped "Linux Desktop" are concerned.
Why do we give a sh!t about KOffice 1.3 given what you've stated in this article? There are no summaries of important changes, bug fixes, or new features - in short, no reasons to entice people to try it. Anyone in a position to use KOffice has probably heard of it by now, yet the body of the article is a gentle 'hello' to KOffice. You are reaching an audience of millions by posting to this site. If you care about KOffice, the least you could do is hype it a bit. This article should be deferred to Freshmeat.
Nothing personal - the number of useless and duplicate posts running here is really starting to irk me, and I'm sure you only want to help KOffice.
I advocate Mozilla to everyone I know, and pop-up blocking is often the bread-winning feature. Generally people are already so sick of IE (and those that aren't are often persuaded by descriptions IE's many, many security problems) that it doesn't take much coaxing. Many realize the convenience of tabbed browsing and switch if only for that reason (not to mention the featureful extensions for tab power-users).
Surprise surprise, ignorance and fear in the American public school system? This happened to me monthly when I was in school and I never hacked a god dammed thing. If the typing teacher accidentally deleted a student's account without realizing, I would be accused of hacking and often given in-shool suspension or detention. No, I wasn't a trouble maker, nor did I ever, ever, ever hack anything in my school. I kept to myself and didn't talk to anyone unless I had to, but because I was the best student of anything with buttons, blame was constantly given to me for any discrepancy.
Parents need to start speaking up when those charged with our children's education act like fools. Egad, what am I thinking? Most parents send their children to the nearest public school without investigating its history or quality because its more convenient that way. They need to care before they're motivated to speak up, I suppose, and what good ever came from fools criticising fools?
"Okay, let's all sell our souls and work for Satan because its more convenient that way!"
> True, I haven't tried it, but I've read the spec. You should do the same before commenting further.
How about _trying it_ before YOU comment further? Geez. Freenet's bandwidth consumption is very reasonable given the small size of the network (networks - the development branches keep splitting the network up to test new ideas), and includes (albeit somewhat inaccurate) rate limiters. I've run it for months on a 256kbps upstream with 3.5mbps downstream with little interference with day-to-day Internet usage.
> e.g., FastTrack or gnutella.
Yeah, I really want the RIAA arresting my children for copyright infringement. I think I'll pass.
The average rate of bandwidth affordably available to the average Internet user may not be great enough to support mass acceptance and use of networks like Freenet right now, but that's _right now_. This isn't necessarily a product flaw of Freenet; by the time we've got the bandwidth to support such networks with huge numbers of users, the protocol implementations will have moved out of the research phase and hopefully native implementations will start appearing and making the damn thing a bit more painless to run. (More frustrating than bandwidth usage is system resource utilization - as long as Freenet's implemented in Java we're all going to be suffering. Has anyone tried JITting Freenet on Linux?)
Slashdot Mirror
Before I started using the ed2k network last April I had six gigabytes of music, mostly ripped from CDs I had bought as a teenager, of which I estimate that I listened to three gigabytes of it regularly. After using ed2k for ten months, I now have 84 gigabytes of music. I estimate that I listen to something like 20 to 30 gigabytes of it regularly, and I try to listen to at least one new artist, album, or work per week. (Since I work from home more often than not, I am fortunate to have plenty of time to familiarize myself with new music.)
The collection has gotten so large, in fact, that I've had to converted all ape and flac files to high-bitrate ogg-vorbis files using gstreamer to avoid running of disk space (recently I broke down and bought a larger drive and a DVD burner). If Debian ever packages the new mpc plugin (or if I find motivation to build the plugin myself), I'll save even more space. (The ogg files use a little less than half the space of the lossless codecs.)
The crux of the biscuit: yes, I've discovered all sorts of new musical interests by browsing the ed2k network.
Though I've had an off-handed interest in early and classical music for as long as I can remember, only thanks to ed2k have I been able to amass such a variety from which I can pick and choose, with which refine my taste. Neither streaming radio nor satellite radio can compare. Mix this rich digital library with Wikipedia and free web-based courses on introductory music theory and one has an interesting and educational way to spend one's evenings for a few months.
I've also acquired a taste for indigenous music from the so-called far reaches of the world. The gamelan music of Indonesia has been a particularly delightful discovery, as has the ancient music of China and Japan. I found a corpus of Islamic music from Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, and more. While I'm not interested so much in the subject matter, the music is fantastic.
It may sound silly, but a suite of nature soundtracks I found (consisting of waves crashing, thunderstorms and rain, insects chirping, etc.) turned out to be quite soothing while falling asleep.
I also found a few movie soundtracks that I now consider indispensable, such as those for Waking Life, Akira, and Donnie Darko.
There are also entire discographies of modern popular and semi-popular artists, some of which I'd never heard and ended up loving, such as Simon & Garfunkel, Nick Drake, Frank Zappa, Nine Inch Nails, Tom Waits, and Leonard Cohen.
I <3 eMule. Perhaps soon it will work on Wine....
-Nick
1) Open-source. I like to know what my software is doing, and if it lacks some desired functionality, I want to be able to add it. Additionally, this is a matter of trust and privacy. Open-source software helps ensure software makers are competing fairly). Open-source software will rarely, if ever, report web browsing, word processing, or media viewing habits back to 'home base', at least without asking you first. And if they do, there's a great chance someone will notice and speak up (usually very loudly).
2) Security. I don't think I need to say much about this because the inadequacies of Windows, with regards to security and the sometimes unacceptably long invterval of finding a critical bug and patching it, are very well documented. Also, I'm a big fan of security by peer review of source code.
3) Stability. Windows was grossly unstable until Windows 2000 was released. Anyone that's been subjected to using Windows 95/98 should know exactly what I'm talking about, and systems administrators should know well enough the bizarre rituals and alchemies involved in convincing an NT 4.0 server to stay up for even months at a time.
I've been enjoying a stable computing environment since I switched to Linux in 1996. I reboot only after building a new kernel or on the (very) rare occasion that the nVidia module panics the kernel. I've also been using the same Debian installation for the last four years.
(Ironically, though persons who are pro-Microsoft compain that Windows XP still has major stability problems, I've been using it daily on my roommate's laptop for a few months now and the only noticable problem is that sometimes it doesn't like to shut down properly.)
4) Choice. For example, there are scores of open-source window managers that run on Linux and free BSDs, and some of these have eye candy and features still not available in Windows. There are hundreds of third-party extensions and applets for these window managers. There are numerous distributions of Linux and BSD that all have different benefits and shortcomings, sometimes aiming to solve different niche problems. And the best part is that they can all take advantage of each others' contributions - no lock-in. The list goes on and on.
5) Unix. Unix is a well-designed, modular system that is still heavily used thirty years after its inception. And it is thoroughly defined in open, public standards. I've come to be addicted to this system; I'd simply go mad if I were restricted to the DOS command line (though I hear Microsoft is attempting improvements in this area).
Just to name a few...
- Nick
First, yes, I'm pretty sure I can call you childish and irrational with a straight face. Calling a person an asshole without provocation is reason enough. Way to be civil.
Second, I think I've made it clear that I'm not above being wrong, and I'll say now that I'm not above admitting that I've mis-spoke. I have mis-spoke by saying things like 'Qt applications' where I mean 'KDE applications', even though the scope of this discussion isn't GTK and Qt, but GNOME and KDE.
Third, I told you I've already responded to the things you said before you mentioned qt3-win32. You said 'free Qt port.' Pardon me for your lack of clarification, but I didn't know qt3-win32 existed, much less that they have plans for a native KDE4 port.
Fourth, yes, I'm blushing over my interpretation of the qt3-win32 site's "Important Note."
This knowlege pretty much puts me at ease. You see, whasn't that easy? Talk about lack of clarity - you could have just pointed out qt3-win32 and their plans from the start and saved us both from bad feelings and wasted time instead of calling me an asshole.
Now then, if I've sufficiently satisifed your ego, would you be so kind as to point out those (at least) three factual errors in my posts?
-Nick
> while I will not explain to you the other three factual errors in your previous post[...]
Then you're making the choice to continue being childish, thus end this dialog.
> Yes, this is a port of Qt/X11. It is not a port of Qt/X11 that requires a X server. That's the whole point.
I never said otherwise. I only said it wasn't enough, according to the qt3-win32 folks.
Call back when you're ready to have a rational discussion.
-Nick
Yes, you may notice that I noticed my mistake.
Ah, I see what you mean. Nevermind. ;-)
There are presently no usable and free solutions that allow average end-users to easily run modern KDE and KDE applications on Windows. As I contribute to the development of the desktop environment I choose to run, if I were running and contributing to KDE, I would be restricting the scope of end-users that can take take advantage of these contributions until someone decides to initiate and maintain a Qt/X11 port to Win32, and then makes sure KDE can build against it. That's the taint. I know you know this, I'm just clarifying what I mean. ;-)
Yes, I would feel much better if Qt/X11 were ported to Win32, followed by KDE. I would probably go back to KDE, at least until GNOME matures. I would still hold Qt and KDE in lesser (idealistic, not technical) regard than Gtk and GNOME for reasons previously stated, reasons which, again, I invite those more in the know to clarify. I've only recently developed political interest in all of this, and I readily concede that my perception of the state of affairs could be (and are probably) misinformed, but I consider GNOME to be fairly ideal for reasons other than portability based on what I've read and what others have told me.
Its a tough problem, at least for me. GNOME is close to idealistic perfection, while KDE is close to perfect usability; but problems of choice are good problems to have. :-)
Interestingly, no one has pointed out that GNOME proper won't run on Win32 without Cygwin, just like KDE, though this seems to be a goal of the CyGNOME project.
-Nick
The original comment has your account information attached to it. In any case, look here.
-Nick
I'd really be better of not replying to such a troll. But...
> For one thing, you seem to be under the
> assumption that the port I referred to is not a
> port to "win32 proper".
Since I don't see how you can possibly infer this from my response, you're the one assuming too much. Add to the facts that the qt3-win32 web site explains, in their opening text, why a port of Qt/X11 is still necessary.
> There are at least three other factually wrong
> pieces in your post[...]
I still believe I've responded to everything you've said in previous posts, and I don't believe saying so makes me an 'asshole.' If you don't want to correct me, that's your choice, but you're not just 'punishing' me, but those who read what I've posted. If only for their sake, you should correct my mistakes.
Grow up? I'm not calling people assholes and trying to punish people for disagreeing with me.
-Nick
I've responsed to everything you said in the message you're replying to. -Nick
> QT/KDE on Cygwin [sourceforge.net] is GPL'd,
Not good enough. You can't seriously expect my friends and family to install Cygwin and run an X server so they can use Konqueror.
> The only non-free aspect to QT is the
> commercial licensed version of QT Windows.
That's the only aspect that matters to my argument.
> There is nothing to keep you, me, or anyone
> else from porting one of the GPL'd QT toolkits
> to Windows (as the KDE on Cygwin people have
> done).
First, porting to Cygwin is porting to another UNIX architecture. Why do you think they ported to Cygwin and not Win32 proper? Talk to me when there's a native port. Second, ignoring the fact that I've never written a line of code that used MFC and I'm obviously not the right candidate for this (rather monumental) job, I don't use Windows enough to want to go through the time and pain of porting to that platform. However, I, my friends and family do use Windows enough that the freeness of Qt on Win32 is important. Talk to me when there's a native port.
> The existance of a non-free licenced version of
> QT does not make the free-licenced versions any
> less free.
Except that people can't run my Qt-based applications on a Windows platform without lots of pain (Cygwin) or forking over cash. There's no way I'd write a GUI using Qt these days, no way in hell. On the rare occasions that I've written GUI apps, I've specifically avoided Qt for this reason.
And there are other ideological matters to take into account:
It is my understanding that the heavy-hitting GNOME developers release their copyrights to the FSF. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) The SCO debacle shows us why this is important.
I don't know what kind of code quality standards the GNOME folks have, but in my experience GNOME's code is much cleaner than KDE's. Nothing irks me more than poorly designed interfaces and spaghetti code. While the question of interface quality is debatable as opinion, I think code cleanliness is pretty easy to see and stands on its own.
I use GNOME because I want to run software that isn't restricted from running on certain platforms without unacceptable caveats due to licensing restrictions. I think KDE is prettier and more featureful, but I'm not going to throw my principles out the window when GNOME and KDE are essentially functionally equivalent. And as a software engineer, I refuse to limit the scope of the audience that can use my software by using Qt. I'm also hopeful that community feedback will make the GNOME folks see the folly of their restrictive design tendencies and 'get with it.'
-Nick
Amen brother! I see people pimping this response like its supposed to invalidate Nicholas's claims, when its equally as opinionated and emotional, and doesn't really address the problem at all: the drive and tendancy of GNOME user interface development to design for the most computer illiterate people while forgetting that those of us who have been at this for years and know what they're doing usually like and want choice and flexibility.
-Nick
I wouldn't call this a 'review', but a rant about Nautilus 2.6 and one I happen to agree with, at that. I mean seriously, what were they thinking? "Let's take the most ANNOYING behavior of Windows and make it the UNCHANGABLE DEFAULT!"
Fortunately you can enable the 2.4 behavior using gconf, but that's a sorry response to these accusations of lameness; how hard would it be to include a checkbox in one of the menus or preference dialogs that says "End This Madness - Switch To Browser Mode"? Not hard at all.
I have a big problem with any desktop environment that throws away what has to be described as standard desktop practices and forces their users into a single, debatably inferior and unchangable UI paradigm, whether that environment be GNOME, Windows, OS X, etc. I'm very worried that we're going to see more of the same from GNOME. Their blasted UI guidelines call for a level of simplicity that, while making Grandma's computing experience more enjoyable, leaves those who know what we're doing working in a inflexible and unfriendly environment. Is that what we want? GNOME to be engineered for ONLY one type of user: my grandmother? What about those that have been using UNIX and Linux for decades? Did ANYONE stop and think what features WE might like in our desktop?
I want to be able to configure every aspect of my desktop. I know what works best for me, not the GNOME foundation. And judging from responses like that of Nicholas Petreley (and others in #gnome on GIMPnet), I'm not the only one. I hate to even bring up KDE, but damn man, if GNOME had even a quarter of the flexibility and configurability of KDE, I think you'd see a lot more GNOME users.
I recently switched to GNOME from KDE for ideological reasons (more Free than KDE - no Qt), but who's got the last laugh here? KDE has far, far more eye candy than GNOME and the same goes for features with regards to configurability. The only things GNOME has on KDE, in my mind, are:
- GTK is Free on all platforms
- Third-party GNOME applications are generally of better quality than KDE applications.
- GNOME code that I've seen is much, much cleaner than KDE code I've seen.
I'm sorry that this is the state of things, because I want to like GNOME. I still use it as my desktop environment, but more often I find myself asking, why? Well, I guess I'm still running on principles. I'm going to see how the next major release turns out, but if we're forced into more unfriendly changes, chances are I'll be coping with the moral taint and heading back to KDE.
-Nick
> And every young boy is mesmerized by the slow swish of a woman's hips.
You're assuming a lot here...
GNOME seems to maintain the "one tool one thing" paradigm wherever possible, an example I think everyone else would do well to follow.
Miguel's got a great point, one that evangelical F/OSS developers tend to miss: If you want the lay person to celebrate F/OSS software, make it available to them, meaning make it build and run on Windows. I've had great success migrating almost all of my Windows-using friends and family to Firefox and GAIM. Both of these packages are obviously superior to their proprietary, Windows-only counterparts, and my users understand this within the first five minutes of working with them.
But fundamentalist F/OSS developers often tell me that they don't want their software running on the Evil Empire's OS and that if users want to run them they need to use a supported OS. They seem to be angry at the user for running Windows in the first place. I think this is a counter-productive attitude: We want people to use F/OSS software, but we refuse to make it available on the OS that the majority of them run?
I don't mean to imply that all or even most developers feel this way, but it remains an attitude that must be dealt with if we are ever to 'dominate the world.'
-Nick
...describe what your software DOES when you announce releases on Slashdot! Why do so many people overlook this? -Nick
BF Skinner? ;-P
I've not read the article since it won't freakin' load, but from the summary description I really fail to see how a new package manager will solve anything.
** Problems
- Package format compatability.
Generating software packages for rpm, deb, tgz, BSD ports, etc. is a major annoyance to software developers and package maintainers. The proposed system seems to solve this by supporting the 'big three' in one package manager. A single package system is the solution to this problem, not a new package mangler. I'm sure there are many proposed packaging systems out there that want to solve this exact problem, and the author's time might be better spent by adding support for the most promising system to apt or yum rather than taking what appears to me to be the wrong approach.
I don't know about other distributions, but Debian solves this problem rather nicely by allowing you to install rpm. There's also the alien utility, which will convert to or from deb, rpm, and tgz. Some would say that this is not ideal, but its far simpler than throwing volumes of standards and megabytes of scaffolding at the problem. "Keep it simple, but not simpler than it needs to be." Alien is as simple as elegance permits.
- Cross-distribution library compatability.
This problem will only be solved if distribution maintainers make a conscious effort to do so. I can assure you that this will never happen, and native-code binary packages will never, ever, ever fit the 'build once, run anywhere' model, even if 'anywhere' means a different distribution on the same platform. A new package manager will not make it any easier for me to install Mandrake's KDE 3.2 packages on my Debian or Fedora boxen.
- Cross-package-format dependency resolution.
About the only thing this idea would help with is satisfying package dependencies across package formats. E.g., libA, an rpm, depends on libB, which is only available as a deb. Assuming the the libraries in the rpm and the deb will install and link nicely, this idea would provide a package manager that would know how to do just that. But I can see no benefit to wanting to do this sort of thing in the first place, and I would suggest that it would only complicate systems management.
- Systems like FreeBSD port and Portage?
This manager works on the most popular systems. What about more esoteric package managers? Shouldn't it support them, too? Someone's bound to ask. In this regard, the system wouldn't be promoting standardization and would be duplicating the work of many distributions, probably poorly since attention (and design of the APIs used internally by the manager) has to be spread over many package formats instead of one. Again, a real solution is deciding on a single package system to use, not creating a tentacled, five-ton beast that will crush you to death when it tries to sit on your lap.
- The Simpsons did it! I mean, apt did it!
There are versions of apt for rpm and deb. They regrettably seem to be mutually exclusive, but the point is apt covers up many ugly parts of any packaging system via automation, and it supports two of the three package formats attributed to the author's idea. And since 99% of the time there is no reason to install packages of differing formats on the same system, it doesn't matter that apt for rpm and deb are mutually exclusive.
** Conclusion
Now that the site is back, I see that all this guy seems to want to do is write a silly GUI tool that lets you install packages of arbitrary formats by clicking a few times and that will run on the popular systems so that users will feel at home on different distributions thanks to a consistent GUI. Oh well, I wish you luck guy. I think this is a worthy endeavor insofar as end-users and the much-hyped "Linux Desktop" are concerned.
-Nick
Hi perbert,
Why do we give a sh!t about KOffice 1.3 given what you've stated in this article? There are no summaries of important changes, bug fixes, or new features - in short, no reasons to entice people to try it. Anyone in a position to use KOffice has probably heard of it by now, yet the body of the article is a gentle 'hello' to KOffice. You are reaching an audience of millions by posting to this site. If you care about KOffice, the least you could do is hype it a bit. This article should be deferred to Freshmeat.
Nothing personal - the number of useless and duplicate posts running here is really starting to irk me, and I'm sure you only want to help KOffice.
-Nick
I advocate Mozilla to everyone I know, and pop-up blocking is often the bread-winning feature. Generally people are already so sick of IE (and those that aren't are often persuaded by descriptions IE's many, many security problems) that it doesn't take much coaxing. Many realize the convenience of tabbed browsing and switch if only for that reason (not to mention the featureful extensions for tab power-users).
-Nick
> remember when MP3s were traded through web pages?
Remember when MP3s were traded through DCC and FTP?
Surprise surprise, ignorance and fear in the American public school system? This happened to me monthly when I was in school and I never hacked a god dammed thing. If the typing teacher accidentally deleted a student's account without realizing, I would be accused of hacking and often given in-shool suspension or detention. No, I wasn't a trouble maker, nor did I ever, ever, ever hack anything in my school. I kept to myself and didn't talk to anyone unless I had to, but because I was the best student of anything with buttons, blame was constantly given to me for any discrepancy.
Parents need to start speaking up when those charged with our children's education act like fools. Egad, what am I thinking? Most parents send their children to the nearest public school without investigating its history or quality because its more convenient that way. They need to care before they're motivated to speak up, I suppose, and what good ever came from fools criticising fools?
"Okay, let's all sell our souls and work for Satan because its more convenient that way!"
Oh, Lester, you tickled me so.
-Nick
I hope the number of dupes goes down now that the holidays are over. Its really been out of control for the last few weeks.
-Nick
> True, I haven't tried it, but I've read the spec. You should do the same before commenting further.
How about _trying it_ before YOU comment further? Geez. Freenet's bandwidth consumption is very reasonable given the small size of the network (networks - the development branches keep splitting the network up to test new ideas), and includes (albeit somewhat inaccurate) rate limiters. I've run it for months on a 256kbps upstream with 3.5mbps downstream with little interference with day-to-day Internet usage.
> e.g., FastTrack or gnutella.
Yeah, I really want the RIAA arresting my children for copyright infringement. I think I'll pass.
The average rate of bandwidth affordably available to the average Internet user may not be great enough to support mass acceptance and use of networks like Freenet right now, but that's _right now_. This isn't necessarily a product flaw of Freenet; by the time we've got the bandwidth to support such networks with huge numbers of users, the protocol implementations will have moved out of the research phase and hopefully native implementations will start appearing and making the damn thing a bit more painless to run. (More frustrating than bandwidth usage is system resource utilization - as long as Freenet's implemented in Java we're all going to be suffering. Has anyone tried JITting Freenet on Linux?)
Hmph,
-Nick