if shipping a package with an unaccepted patch is considered "forking", then how the fuck is this news?
Novell forked OpenOffice.org years ago. Here is a press release from back in March that says:
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is the first fully supported enterprise desktop to deliver OpenOffice.org 2.0, the leading open source office suite. OpenOffice includes a powerful spreadsheet program, business presentations tool and word processor. The Novell® edition of OpenOffice.org will support many Visual Basic macros, closing one of the chief compatibility gaps between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office. OpenOffice.org 2.0 can save and open documents created in Microsoft Office formats including Excel pivot tables, and it is the only office suite available today that fully supports the OpenDocument file format, the new public standard for document files. Because OpenDocument is a public standard maintained by the open source community, it eliminates vendor lock-in by ensuring information saved in spreadsheets, documents and presentations is freely accessible to any OpenDocument-supporting application.
I would like to see SCO squirm in public court for a little longer.
They'll be in court for a while yet anyway. The sooner the SCO-vs-IBM case is over, the IBM-vs-SCO case can get underway. That's the one I want to watch.
Whereas Google Earth and the like, obviously, have more data they are still stored as separate images... (not sure why they needed to connect this one up into one image either, but it must be easier for them to analyse like that)
Maybe they couldn't get their hands on one of these.
but upgrading to Edgy is not a nightmare _in general._
I upgraded two machines from Dapper to Edgy, and after the first one I might have agreed with you. The second now looks like this though. So off to IRC I went. All I got was 10 or so people chastising me for using unstable. Felt just like when I used to run Debian. Oh well, maybe my Dad will enjoy Fedora.
If anyone can recognize the problem in that screenshot I'd love to hear from you.
I have no idea why Xterm and Firefox work, but Gnome Terminal, gnome-font-properties, and whatever the other window was, don't.
1991: MIPS Technologies produced the first 64-bit microprocessor, as the third revision of their MIPS RISC architecture, the R4000. The CPU was used in SGI graphics workstations starting with the IRIS Crimson. However, 64-bit support for the R4000 was not included in the IRIX operating system until IRIX 6.2, released in 1996.
Meanwhile, I have to keep wondering why mencoder's TV capture doesn't work. First, it started mysteriously messing up colourspaces, hogging tons of CPU while capturing, and now it can't record sound (doesn't think ALSA devices exist). I have no idea what's going on, and don't dare to contact anyone, as they probably (rightfully) say "I didn't change anything" isn't an excuse. *sigh*.
Yes, MPlayer devs insist that you use the latest version, preferrably CVS, otherwise they won't even talk to you.
They aren't obligated to talk to you. They write software that is very very good at what it does. They don't necessarily care about usability.
gcc 2.96 was never "broken"
Yes it was. That's why 2.96 wasn't released yet, and why gcc had to skip the 2.96 version release and just release 2.97 to avoid confusion among people thinking they had 2.96, when they really had 2.95.x.
Who's flamebaiting now?
Joe Barr. Try to keep track of these things. We're trying to have a discussion here.
As for Gentoo, others have already pointed out how ridiculous it is to keep on thinking Gentoo is easy and nice to use.
Says who? gentoo.org says:
What is Gentoo?
Gentoo is a free operating system based on either Linux or FreeBSD that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.
Thanks to a technology called Portage, Gentoo can become an ideal secure server, development workstation, professional desktop, gaming system, embedded solution or something else -- whatever you need it to be. Because of its near-unlimited adaptability, we call Gentoo a metadistribution.
Nothing in there about being easy to use. Powerful, but not easy.
Nowadays I like to get stuff done, not tweak a machine to death. Give me a distro that installs in 30 minutes max.
Really.. I run a Gentoo server and 4 diskless clients in my house. All 5 machines boot of a single OS. All 5 help compile each piece of software via distcc. Upgrades take minutes, and I only do them once.
What do you know, we like different things. Is one better than the other? I doubt it, but mine is much cooler.
I'm hopelessly confounded by mencoder command line options.
So use a GUI. Mencoder isn't supposed to be easy to use, and never claimed to be so. Writing reviews that have nothing good to say, and go one step further to be down right insulting isn't productive.
Joe Barr isn't the target audience for Mplayer or Gentoo. The people who write Mplayer do it because they like doing it. And it happens to be one of the best players and encoders out there. There are no competitors to Mplayer that are as versatile, and that is it's strength. Whether or not Joe Barr, or his dear old grannie are ever able to use it probably is of no concern to them. Or me for that matter.
"The MPlayer gang seems to relish nothing more than belittling their users and reminding them of just how little they know about Linux and computing in general" -- If the shoe fits. Don't email the developer list asking questions that belong on the Mplayer-users list. Mplayer-Dev is busy enough without all that.
"The journey began when I downloaded the latest CVS snapshot from the MPlayer Web site" -- A review of a CVS snapshot??
"The first thing to bite me was the configure script itself. It refused to run after detecting gcc 2.96, which is the default with Mandrake 8.1." -- Errrm, GCC 2.96?? A review of a CVS snapshot compiled with a broken compiler, greeeaaaat.
"It wants a file name on the command line." -- Duh.
"I needed video files. That called for gnutella." -- Because we all know the only thing worth watching is stolen from P2P networks.
"Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that." -- Funny, I don't remember being asked anything while installing Gentoo. There's no installer.
"For a proper Gentoo install, you'll need to read the fine manual. Read it a couple of times. Cover to cover. Pay particular attention to the sections on USE flags and Portage." -- Uhhh, not really. The Quick reference is more than sufficient.
"You will hear, see, and read "RTFM" dozens of times before you're done. But don't make the mistake of thinking that simply means having a copy handy as a reference during the installation, because by the time a question appears, it may already be too late. You need to RTFM before you begin." -- I don't even know what the fuck he's talking about there.
"Study GCC and the options that govern the behavior of GCC version 4.1.1." -- Forget studying GCC. If you don't understand what you're doing use the recommended $CFLAGS.
"After reading a few pages of the manual, I realized that the minimal live CD did not equal the Gentoo 2006.1 live CD. So I stopped and got the real thing." -- Dumb. You can bootstrap Gentoo from in Knoppix, that's what I always do. The CD you boot from makes very little difference. All you really need is bash, and something to download a stage tarball like wget.
And so on, and so on.. This isn't journalism, it's flamebait, and that's all it is. In the truest sense of the phrase.
they get a bad review from someone, so they personally attack the reviewer on their web page?
No, in his review he said they had no documentation available. They have fabulous documentation and now he's included in it. I thought it was very funny at the time. (5 years ago)
But seriously, Joe Barr:
1. Did not RTFM
2. Was impatient and gave up his first attempt while it was still running.
Joe Barr doesn't write serious reviews. He writes flamebait so that other sites will link to his articles. Anyone else remember the MPlayer uproar? The one that got him a mention in their documentation?
Because Schilling is a Sun fanboi. See his blog for details..
"OpenSolaris however _is_ a real threat for Linux. OpenSolaris gives more freedom than Linux, it gives new impressing features and there is marketing.
It seems that the reason for the FUD against OpenSolaris published by Linux people is caused by the fact that product of value and freedom found in Linux is smaller than the product of value and freedom available with OpenSolaris."
Why would a different licensing scheme make something incompatible?
Not incompatible as in prevents it from running. You cannot take snippits of code that do some function and port them to applications which have incompatible licensing. It's all about what you can do with the source code, and nothing to do with how you run the application.
if even 1 package (ie: the kernel) doesn't say that, then the whole distro can forget it.
Can forget what? Every distro that I know of contains software with many different licenses. The only thing it prevents is taking code from a GPL v2 (without the 'any later version' clause) and putting it in a GPL v3 package. It doesn't say anything about running GPL3 apps on a GPL2 kernel, or CDDL apps on a GPL2 kernel, or BSD apps on a GPL2 kernel.
This is just a standard IBM laptop. Nothing even remotely like a Panasonic Toughbook, or anything like that. Just a regular, black plastic Thinkpad.
Try that with your HP.
Slashdot Mirror
Says who? Show me something that says more than 50% of Slashdot visitors are in the U.S. please.
And how do you figure
Novell forked OpenOffice.org years ago. Here is a press release from back in March that says:
Miguel has a blog entry about this too.
They'll be in court for a while yet anyway. The sooner the SCO-vs-IBM case is over, the IBM-vs-SCO case can get underway. That's the one I want to watch.
Maybe they couldn't get their hands on one of these.
Very strange.
I upgraded two machines from Dapper to Edgy, and after the first one I might have agreed with you. The second now looks like this though. So off to IRC I went. All I got was 10 or so people chastising me for using unstable. Felt just like when I used to run Debian. Oh well, maybe my Dad will enjoy Fedora.
If anyone can recognize the problem in that screenshot I'd love to hear from you.
I have no idea why Xterm and Firefox work, but Gnome Terminal, gnome-font-properties, and whatever the other window was, don't.
2 years?
1991: MIPS Technologies produced the first 64-bit microprocessor, as the third revision of their MIPS RISC architecture, the R4000. The CPU was used in SGI graphics workstations starting with the IRIS Crimson. However, 64-bit support for the R4000 was not included in the IRIX operating system until IRIX 6.2, released in 1996.
>> Thats the root of the problem. I'd wager 90% of the functioanlity for browsers is only used by 5% of end users.
;)
> I don't think this is the case, because for the most part users don't choose which broswer features they use; web sites do that for them.
Speaking of which, Firefox2 has a really nice spell checker.
Yes it was. That's why 2.96 wasn't released yet, and why gcc had to skip the 2.96 version release and just release 2.97 to avoid confusion among people thinking they had 2.96, when they really had 2.95.x.
Joe Barr. Try to keep track of these things. We're trying to have a discussion here.
Says who? gentoo.org says: Nothing in there about being easy to use. Powerful, but not easy. Really.. I run a Gentoo server and 4 diskless clients in my house. All 5 machines boot of a single OS. All 5 help compile each piece of software via distcc. Upgrades take minutes, and I only do them once.
What do you know, we like different things. Is one better than the other? I doubt it, but mine is much cooler.
So use a GUI. Mencoder isn't supposed to be easy to use, and never claimed to be so. Writing reviews that have nothing good to say, and go one step further to be down right insulting isn't productive.
Joe Barr isn't the target audience for Mplayer or Gentoo. The people who write Mplayer do it because they like doing it. And it happens to be one of the best players and encoders out there. There are no competitors to Mplayer that are as versatile, and that is it's strength. Whether or not Joe Barr, or his dear old grannie are ever able to use it probably is of no concern to them. Or me for that matter.
Stick to Totem. It's made for simple people.
- "The MPlayer gang seems to relish nothing more than belittling their users and reminding them of just how little they know about Linux and computing in general" -- If the shoe fits. Don't email the developer list asking questions that belong on the Mplayer-users list. Mplayer-Dev is busy enough without all that.
- "The journey began when I downloaded the latest CVS snapshot from the MPlayer Web site" -- A review of a CVS snapshot??
- "The first thing to bite me was the configure script itself. It refused to run after detecting gcc 2.96, which is the default with Mandrake 8.1." -- Errrm, GCC 2.96?? A review of a CVS snapshot compiled with a broken compiler, greeeaaaat.
- "It wants a file name on the command line." -- Duh.
- "I needed video files. That called for gnutella." -- Because we all know the only thing worth watching is stolen from P2P networks.
Etc, etc...My Gentoo odyssey
- "Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that." -- Funny, I don't remember being asked anything while installing Gentoo. There's no installer.
- "For a proper Gentoo install, you'll need to read the fine manual. Read it a couple of times. Cover to cover. Pay particular attention to the sections on USE flags and Portage." -- Uhhh, not really. The Quick reference is more than sufficient.
- "You will hear, see, and read "RTFM" dozens of times before you're done. But don't make the mistake of thinking that simply means having a copy handy as a reference during the installation, because by the time a question appears, it may already be too late. You need to RTFM before you begin." -- I don't even know what the fuck he's talking about there.
- "Study GCC and the options that govern the behavior of GCC version 4.1.1." -- Forget studying GCC. If you don't understand what you're doing use the recommended $CFLAGS.
- "After reading a few pages of the manual, I realized that the minimal live CD did not equal the Gentoo 2006.1 live CD. So I stopped and got the real thing." -- Dumb. You can bootstrap Gentoo from in Knoppix, that's what I always do. The CD you boot from makes very little difference. All you really need is bash, and something to download a stage tarball like wget.
And so on, and so on.. This isn't journalism, it's flamebait, and that's all it is. In the truest sense of the phrase.Forever immortalized for being a jack-ass.
"OpenSolaris however _is_ a real threat for Linux. OpenSolaris gives more freedom than Linux, it gives new impressing features and there is marketing.
It seems that the reason for the FUD against OpenSolaris published by Linux people is caused by the fact that product of value and freedom found in Linux is smaller than the product of value and freedom available with OpenSolaris."
Among other humourous things.
No it won't. It only takes one person to strip the DRM and put up a torrent. Bingo, millions of pirated copies overnight.
That's why CSS didn't work for DVD even though most people haven't got a clue about the DeCSS court battle.
While sitting down for dinner at their favourite restaurant no less. Blowing up restaurants because they believed some terrorists may be inside doesn't seem very humane at all now that you mention it.