While a comparison between Whistler and KDE/Gnome is interesting and useful, we should not forget that there may be better ways to do user interfaces than whatever MS dreams up. Reading the article, you might thing that MS invented the task bar and start menu. They just moved the MacOS menu bar from the top to the bottom of the screen, and put "Start" in the place of the apple logo.
Granted, MS does have a huge development staff, and is likely to have put considerable effort and research into their designs, but then, their marketing department probably has a lot to say about their design also, and they are certainly not above changing the interface in a way that says "I'm new, buy me or be old fashioned" regardless of how useable it really is.
The unspoken subtext of this article is "What are the chances of (KDE/Gnome) finally kicking MS butt in the marketplace? Can we catch them on the next release cycle?". Free software should not be about trying to beat commercial software in the marketplace. It should be about finding new and better ways of meeting practical computing needs..
I voted in Alachua County, Florida. Here they used bubble sheets, where you had to fill in bubles, and the voter placed his or her own ballot in the scanner. If the ballot was invalid, the voter had the ability to correct it on the spot. If this system had been used in Palm Beach County, Al Gore would be the President-elect. This is very serious, and needs to be challenged in court.
Unfortunately, the reviewer did not say which winmodem his low-cost box includes.
I have a low-cost box that includes a PC-Chips HSP modem. PC-Chips has gone a long way to support Linux for their modem chipsets. There is a driver with source code available (pctel). I got mine working on Mandrake 7.1, and Corel has worked with PC-Chips to include user-friendly support for these modems in CLOS-1.2.
A word about performance: for several years, Linux hackers have said they don't really care about winmodem support because they use cpu cycles that "real" modems don't need. In my experience with the PC-Tel HSP modem chipset, this is really not a concern. The performance impact is minimal. On my box, which is by no means high-end (K6-2-500) The modem would use only 3%-5% of the cpu. And, the data throughput is faster that using the same modem under Windows.
I think we should put our support behind companies that support us, and don't just say that winmodems are no good because some of the drivers are binary-only.
One of the main reasons for Sun keeping a tight grip on Java is so that MS couldn't embrace, extend, extinguish. (Other than, perhaps Sun making sure that everythig gets optimized for Sparc/Solaris as much as for Intel/Windows, or perhaps more).
Anyway, Sun now has no reason to worry about that, because MS will be ignoring Java from now on. There is a chance that.NET will improve faster and offer more than Java. On the other hand, if Java gets adopted by the open source community, it could more quickly evolve and offer whatever features programmers and end users need from it.
I "downgraded" from Mandrake 7.1, and am basically happy I did. XFree86 4.0 has improved my graphics, installation was no major problem, and nothing has crashed so far, so where are all these bugs? Possibly in KDE2, Mozilla and the Linux 2.4.x kernel, but those are provided in a separate "preview" section, not installed by default. Of course, this was a clean install, so there might be horrors from upgrading a Red Hat installation.
I have a feeling that some disgruntled person had install problems and then decided to make RedHat take notice by posting on Linuxnewbie and Slashdot. (The "bug" that was cross posted was in Anaconda, the installation wizard).
Actually the only gripe I have is that I got a nasty surprise when my fresh install wouldn't boot, because of the 1024th cylinder problem. Mandrake 7.1 uses GRUB instead of LILO, so it boots beyond the 1024th cylinder. So, I added a small boot partition and it was smooth sailing from there.
My take is that this is potenially very good, and also potentially bad, but most likely good.
Why does MS want to invest in Corel?
1. To prop up its.NET initiative (as stated).
2. To keep a competitor in business, to blunt the monopoly charges.
3. To make money, since Corel shares are likely to go up.
I am suspcious about.NET, because it looks like another way to make proprietary MS technologies
defacto standards, with which they can leverage Win2000 deployment, and shut out competitors in the server space. (In order to use.NET you have to run Win2K servers). On the other hand, there just may be a possibity that MS will actually play fair and open up.NET (not too likely). Probably the best we can hope for is that MS will be only partially successfull, and.NET will be one of several choices for application servers.
I wonder what else Corel is getting out of this. Could it be that MS will be more forthcomming in
providing information about Windows APIs so Corel apps will be able to run better on Windows?
Perhaps even, they will allow Corel to migrate some technologies to Linux (I'm a dreamer!). One of the reasons why WPO2000 is not feature-complete on Linux (in my limited understanding) is because
MS will not allow certain DLLs to be shipped with programs that run on Wine.
I recently tried out reiserfs on a large partition, and ran some benchmarks (Mandrake 7.1, 2.2.16). It was consistently slower than the ext2 partition on the same hard drive running Bonnie. They were about equal running Dbench. What I found disappointing, though, is that reiserfs still has a maximum file size of 2GB. So I guess the only selling points for reiserfs at present are the better used of disk space and journalling. They clain that small files can read and write faster, but I have not seen that yet.
For files > 2GB on IA32, we have to wait for XFS or JFS. Too bad!
Perhaps a big advantage of using Gecko is that it will likely be a target for commercial plugins that make multimedia web browsing so much fun. Flash and RealPlayer to start, and perhaps eventually, Shockwave, Quicktime, and who knows, maybe even WiMP. Since Moz is cross-platform, it may not be too much to ask for the commercial companies to support all the platforms it runs on.
One big problem with having a game machine + VCR. It won't do both at the same time, and the parents will get really pissed when the kids unset the VCR in order to play games while they're away. Duh!
The idea that most people only use a few programs only emphasizes MS monopoly power. MS has used its OS dominance to foist a pathetic office suite on unsuspecting victims.
I tend to agree with those who say that the Justice Dept.'s focus on bundling Explorer is misplaced. There have been many complaints that MS has hidden APIs and done other things to try to prevent competing software producers from utilizing new Windows features. That is the real abuse of monopoly power. They wait someone to come up with a good program and develop a market for it, then write their own version and coerce people into using theirs instead.
What I need from a desktop...(OLE!)
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
As some people have commented, unless GNU/Linux/OpenSource/FSF/whatever starts providing something that you can't get from M$ (besides stability) what's the point?
I really need to be able to create a graph in a spreadsheet and embed it in a document, and be able to edit the graph afterwards, like you can do in Windows. Copy and paste objects of various sorts. I don't see either KDE or Gnome providing this as yet. I know that this is what Bonobo is supposed to do. I don't know if this is something that KDE will provide or not.
I'm not a big fan of StarOffice, but one benefit of having a monolithic office program is that object linking and embedding is possible on any platform, because they don't rely on the OS to provide those things. I use WordPerfect office on Windows and Linux, and the lack of true OLE is glaring on Linux.
As it is, I have no problem with using both KDE and Gnome, and hope that either one or both will develop the type of code reuse that allows the sharing of complex data objects between programs as soon as possible.
Seems as though these new palms are just buying time. They mimic the style of the new WinCE devices to an extent, bad choice in my opinion, but it seems that Palm is reacting to WinCE without matching them in cpu power and screen quality.
What Palm needs to do: 1) don't discontinue the old styles (remember "new Coke") 2) carefully engineer a new line that includes a faster cpu, more memory and color screen, but retains the form factor, long battery life and efficent OS that made Palm so popular in the first place. Also, stick with a standard peripheral connector so people don't lose their investment in addons if they upgrade.
We know WinCE sucks, but on a 200MHz cpu and 32MB of ram, it has room to suck and still deliver performance.
Seems to me that IBM's ViaVoice source code had been released, but apparently not as Free software. They now sell ViaVoice for Linux for $59, and offer a free SDK to integrate it in Linux Apps. http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/linux/dictati on.html
Corel has developed and sold off product lines several times in the past (Netwinder, GraphOn, etc.), so we can at least hope that this is not out of desperation. You may notice that Corel has retained a permanent license to use the photo collection in their products, and gained an equity stake in Hemera. If Hemera is better at making a profit than Corel is at present, this could add to their bottom line.
Would the commercial and non-commercial distributions consider forming a united front to target hardware vendors to supply Linux drivers for their new hardware?
Now that ATI and 3COM have decided to become Linux-friendly, how about targeting input device vendors, monitor vendors, printer vendors, etc?
Or, in fact, why not try it! That is one way to really get the sense of how people learn to interact with computers. Try showing someone who is a Windows or Mac user how to accomplish various tasks using a Linux system. It can be as frustrating for you as it is for them!
I agree that there is a need for a simple, consistent Linux environment, an I presume that this is what Corel is attempting with their distribution. That is why they chose KDE over Gnome, because KDE is less configurable than Gnome, although more so than Windows, as well as being well-integrated and simple to use.
There is no reason to reduce choices or number of distributions, though. Right now, all the distributers and developers are innovating like crazy, coming up with improvements and features, which are being tested in the marketplace, so features that work best in particular situations will be available to integrate into new configurations. When a truly simple, consistent, intuitive system is available, then it will be ready for the masses.
There is one point that I disagree with, though. Burgess said: "The Windows interface was designed to be used by everyday people doing every day things. Yes, the internals are not very good but that is of no concern to the user nor should users be asked to care."
The fact that the internals of Windows are not very good has a big effect on the end user, because it crashes a lot. Users should and do care about that!
Slashdot Mirror
While a comparison between Whistler and KDE/Gnome is interesting and useful, we should not forget that there may be better ways to do user interfaces than whatever MS dreams up. Reading the article, you might thing that MS invented the task bar and start menu. They just moved the MacOS menu bar from the top to the bottom of the screen, and put "Start" in the place of the apple logo.
Granted, MS does have a huge development staff, and is likely to have put considerable effort and research into their designs, but then, their marketing department probably has a lot to say about their design also, and they are certainly not above changing the interface in a way that says "I'm new, buy me or be old fashioned" regardless of how useable it really is.
The unspoken subtext of this article is "What are the chances of (KDE/Gnome) finally kicking MS butt in the marketplace? Can we catch them on the next release cycle?". Free software should not be about trying to beat commercial software in the marketplace. It should be about finding new and better ways of meeting practical computing needs..
I voted in Alachua County, Florida. Here they used bubble sheets, where you had to fill in bubles, and the voter placed his or her own ballot in the scanner. If the ballot was invalid, the voter had the ability to correct it on the spot. If this system had been used in Palm Beach County, Al Gore would be the President-elect. This is very serious, and needs to be challenged in court.
PCTel doesn't distribute drivers, they let their OEMs do that. You can find it from:E L.ZIP
ftp://www.pcchips.com.tw/driver/Linux/MODEM/PCT
Netscape 4.x isn't open source either, so why don't you exclude that from the distribution?
Unfortunately, the reviewer did not say which winmodem his low-cost box includes.
I have a low-cost box that includes a PC-Chips HSP modem. PC-Chips has gone a long way to support Linux for their modem chipsets. There is a driver with source code available (pctel). I got mine working on Mandrake 7.1, and Corel has worked with PC-Chips to include user-friendly support for these modems in CLOS-1.2.
A word about performance: for several years, Linux hackers have said they don't really care about winmodem support because they use cpu cycles that "real" modems don't need. In my experience with the PC-Tel HSP modem chipset, this is really not a concern. The performance impact is minimal. On my box, which is by no means high-end (K6-2-500) The modem would use only 3%-5% of the cpu. And, the data throughput is faster that using the same modem under Windows.
I think we should put our support behind companies that support us, and don't just say that winmodems are no good because some of the drivers are binary-only.
Ya know, you have a point there!
.NET will improve faster and offer more than Java. On the other hand, if Java gets adopted by the open source community, it could more quickly evolve and offer whatever features programmers and end users need from it.
One of the main reasons for Sun keeping a tight grip on Java is so that MS couldn't embrace, extend, extinguish. (Other than, perhaps Sun making sure that everythig gets optimized for Sparc/Solaris as much as for Intel/Windows, or perhaps more).
Anyway, Sun now has no reason to worry about that, because MS will be ignoring Java from now on. There is a chance that
I "downgraded" from Mandrake 7.1, and am basically happy I did. XFree86 4.0 has improved my graphics, installation was no major problem, and nothing has crashed so far, so where are all these bugs? Possibly in KDE2, Mozilla and the Linux 2.4.x kernel, but those are provided in a separate "preview" section, not installed by default. Of course, this was a clean install, so there might be horrors from upgrading a Red Hat installation.
I have a feeling that some disgruntled person had install problems and then decided to make RedHat take notice by posting on Linuxnewbie and Slashdot. (The "bug" that was cross posted was in Anaconda, the installation wizard).
Actually the only gripe I have is that I got a nasty surprise when my fresh install wouldn't boot, because of the 1024th cylinder problem. Mandrake 7.1 uses GRUB instead of LILO, so it boots beyond the 1024th cylinder. So, I added a small boot partition and it was smooth sailing from there.
-- "Linux helps those who help themselves"
My take is that this is potenially very good, and also potentially bad, but most likely good.
.NET initiative (as stated).
.NET, because it looks like another way to make proprietary MS technologies
.NET you have to run Win2K servers). On the other hand, there just may be a possibity that MS will actually play fair and open up .NET (not too likely). Probably the best we can hope for is that MS will be only partially successfull, and .NET will be one of several choices for application servers.
Why does MS want to invest in Corel?
1. To prop up its
2. To keep a competitor in business, to blunt the monopoly charges.
3. To make money, since Corel shares are likely to go up.
I am suspcious about
defacto standards, with which they can leverage Win2000 deployment, and shut out competitors in the server space. (In order to use
I wonder what else Corel is getting out of this. Could it be that MS will be more forthcomming in
providing information about Windows APIs so Corel apps will be able to run better on Windows?
Perhaps even, they will allow Corel to migrate some technologies to Linux (I'm a dreamer!). One of the reasons why WPO2000 is not feature-complete on Linux (in my limited understanding) is because
MS will not allow certain DLLs to be shipped with programs that run on Wine.
Only time will tell. This is interesting though!
John Craig
I recently tried out reiserfs on a large partition, and ran some benchmarks (Mandrake 7.1, 2.2.16). It was consistently slower than the ext2 partition on the same hard drive running Bonnie. They were about equal running Dbench. What I found disappointing, though, is that reiserfs still has a maximum file size of 2GB. So I guess the only selling points for reiserfs at present are the better used of disk space and journalling. They clain that small files can read and write faster, but I have not seen that yet.
For files > 2GB on IA32, we have to wait for XFS or JFS. Too bad!
Perhaps a big advantage of using Gecko is that it will likely be a target for commercial plugins that make multimedia web browsing so much fun. Flash and RealPlayer to start, and perhaps eventually, Shockwave, Quicktime, and who knows, maybe even WiMP. Since Moz is cross-platform, it may not be too much to ask for the commercial companies to support all the platforms it runs on.
At least, one can hope.
One big problem with having a game machine + VCR. It won't do both at the same time, and the parents will get really pissed when the kids unset the VCR in order to play games while they're away. Duh!
The idea that most people only use a few programs only emphasizes MS monopoly power. MS has used its OS dominance to foist a pathetic office suite on unsuspecting victims.
I tend to agree with those who say that the Justice Dept.'s focus on bundling Explorer is misplaced. There have been many complaints that MS has hidden APIs and done other things to try to prevent competing software producers from utilizing new Windows features. That is the real abuse of monopoly power. They wait someone to come up with a good program and develop a market for it, then write their own version and coerce people into using theirs instead.
As some people have commented, unless GNU/Linux/OpenSource/FSF/whatever starts providing something that you can't get from M$ (besides stability) what's the point?
I really need to be able to create a graph in a spreadsheet and embed it in a document, and be able to edit the graph afterwards, like you can do in Windows. Copy and paste objects of various sorts. I don't see either KDE or Gnome providing this as yet. I know that this is what Bonobo is supposed to do. I don't know if this is something that KDE will provide or not.
I'm not a big fan of StarOffice, but one benefit of having a monolithic office program is that object linking and embedding is possible on any platform, because they don't rely on the OS to provide those things. I use WordPerfect office on Windows and Linux, and the lack of true OLE is glaring on Linux.
As it is, I have no problem with using both KDE and Gnome, and hope that either one or both will develop the type of code reuse that allows the sharing of complex data objects between programs as soon as possible.
Seems as though these new palms are just buying time. They mimic the style of the new WinCE devices to an extent, bad choice in my opinion, but it seems that Palm is reacting to WinCE without matching them in cpu power and screen quality.
What Palm needs to do:
1) don't discontinue the old styles (remember "new Coke")
2) carefully engineer a new line that includes a faster cpu, more memory and color screen, but retains the form factor, long battery life and efficent OS that made Palm so popular in the first place. Also, stick with a standard peripheral connector so people don't lose their investment in addons if they upgrade.
We know WinCE sucks, but on a 200MHz cpu and 32MB of ram, it has room to suck and still deliver performance.
jcc
Seems to me that IBM's ViaVoice source code had been released, but apparently not as Free software. They now sell ViaVoice for Linux for $59, and offer a free SDK to integrate it in Linux Apps. http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/linux/dictati on.html
Well, at least there is some choice!
jcc
Corel has developed and sold off product lines several times in the past (Netwinder, GraphOn, etc.), so we can at least hope that this is not out of desperation. You may notice that Corel has retained a permanent license to use the photo collection in their products, and gained an equity stake in Hemera. If Hemera is better at making a profit than Corel is at present, this could add to their bottom line.
Shouldn't we all know better than to use 10k or 30k when we really mean 10000 or 30000? C'mon, when is all this k nonsense going to stop?
Would the commercial and non-commercial distributions consider forming a united front to target hardware vendors to supply Linux drivers for their new hardware?
Now that ATI and 3COM have decided to become Linux-friendly, how about targeting input device vendors, monitor vendors, printer vendors, etc?
Or, in fact, why not try it! That is one way to really get the sense of how people learn to interact with computers. Try showing someone who is a Windows or Mac user how to accomplish various tasks using a Linux system. It can be as frustrating for you as it is for them!
I agree that there is a need for a simple, consistent Linux environment, an I presume that this is what Corel is attempting with their distribution. That is why they chose KDE over Gnome, because KDE is less configurable than Gnome, although more so than Windows, as well as being well-integrated and simple to use.
There is no reason to reduce choices or number of distributions, though. Right now, all the distributers and developers are innovating like crazy, coming up with improvements and features, which are being tested in the marketplace, so features that work best in particular situations will be available to integrate into new configurations. When a truly simple, consistent, intuitive system is available, then it will be ready for the masses.
There is one point that I disagree with, though. Burgess said: "The Windows interface was designed to be used by everyday people doing every day things. Yes, the internals are not very good but that is of no concern to the user nor should users be asked to care."
The fact that the internals of Windows are not very good has a big effect on the end user, because it crashes a lot. Users should and do care about that!