People didn't invent all those different protocols because they like to make your life miserable, they invented them because they are optimized for different things. Firewire, for example, can be used for high speed networking as well, but people don't use it for that much because it is electrically not as nice. IR, Bluetooth, RS-232C, USB, Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, etc., they are all there for a reason.
You can make things fast, cheap, simple, easy to configure, secure, etc., but not all at the same time. That is the first lesson of engineering, and it applies to peripheral connections as much as it does to other engineering problems.
After a hard crash and an unclean reboot with ext3, I would consistently lose data on open files,
As you should--that's the way it's supposed to work by default. If you want it to work differently, you need to configure it differently. You get three choices for what is recoverable. That's two more than most other journalling file systems give you.
and at times, my journal was, at times,(seemingly) corrupt, and I would have to boot into single user mode and manually fsck the disk, which took forever.
It can happen, I suppose, but I haven't noticed it, and I crash machines with ext3 a lot.
Ext3 is the default on several installations and it's tremendously easy to install. You can convert ext2 partitions to ext3 on the fly by just creating a journal. If you want to turn off journalling for some reason, you can do that, too, since an ext3 partition remains backwards compatible with ext2. And you actually get a choice between three different kinds of consistency.
ReiserFS would be my second choice: it isn't compatible with anything, but it brings some nice, new functionality to the table.
XFS is unlikely to be as well tested or tuned as either of these others on Linux.
The point is that I don't want Perl6 regexps. I'm happy with Perl5 regexps. For the things that are hard to do with Perl5 regexps, I don't want an even more complicated regexp package, I want a simpler parser generator.
I can do a lot of things. But for non-technical users, looking around on VersionTracker, installing a "plug-in", and "uploading" are just way too complicated.
So, my point remains: by dropping iTools, iPhoto is affected: it doesn't work anymore out of the box for web page publishing. And that was one of the main features it had going for it.
You can get it here. It's small, it's very simple, and it works well. It inserts itself between a VNC server and a VNC client. You can use it to record sessions from Windows, MacOSX, and Linux, and play them back on all those platforms. It can even be played back from a Java applet through a web browser. It probably requires less bandwidth than MPEG.
One of iPhoto's strengths was the ease with which non-computer people could put up their photos on their home page. Without iTools, that goes away. The integration with iTools was a big part of making the iMac usable and interesting for home users, and Apple made a big deal out of that and out of the fact that it was free.
Beyond a certain degree of complexity, it really doesn't make much sense anymore to use regular expressions--a simple built-in parser generator with executable annotations is both clearer and more powerful. Parser generator syntax allows comments, whitespace, with a simple, fairly standard syntax.
Perl and other languages should leave "good enough" alone when it comes to regular expressions and instead just make it easy to put chunks of grammars into programs.
I am really, really annoyed. Free iTools was a major reason for recommending the Mac: it made getting on-line much easier. This was a major part of Apple's advertising. iTools wasn't announced as a "1 year free trial", it was announced as an free service for Macintosh, something that made the system easier to use.
It is just not acceptable to change conditions like that after people have given out their supposedly free email addresses. It makes people feel that they can't trust Apple to stand by their promises.
The issue is not charging for value added services, the issue is charging for email addreses that used to be free. At $100/year, most people would not have started using iTools; many people will now have to pay because changing their email address is more painful, not because they like iTools so much that they are willing to pay that kind of money.
Why don't you give some specific examples rather than useless blah blah bullshit?
That's very simple: there is no open source implementation of the Java platform (Kaffe, gjc, etc. are not implementations of the Java platform, and they have lots of problems even as they are). It makes no sense for people to develop, say, a Linux desktop in Java and depend on a proprietary runtime.
It seems Sourceforge is filled with Open Source Java apps.
Sure, and there are also open source VisualBasic, open source Windows, and open source Delphi applications: people share source for all sorts of reasons under all sorts of licenses. But most open source software is developed on open source platforms with open source tools, and for good reason.
Linux needs an application development platform that is more robust and simpler than C or C++. Cross platform or Microsoft-compatibility is irrelevant for that purpose. Mono may or may not end up delivering, but it is clear that Java does not fit the bill--Sun's policies and the way Java has evolved make it unsuitable for much open source applications development.
Not only are these libraries not standardized, they are likely to be protected by patents.
That's FUD. You can't protect "libraries" by patents, only inventions. And there are unlikely to be many patentable inventions in the APIs of common GUI and OS libraries.
ultimately Sun just owns the Java name, not all the implementations.
There is effectively only one Java implementation: Sun's and its derivatives. And since there is no standard for even the core language and libraries, there aren't going to be any others, only some tinkering with things vaguely like Java.
I do hope that people will use either Java or.NET, or both, more on Linux. It really fixes a lot of problems with Linux applications development, just like it does on Windows.
But calling this a "true innovation" is ridiculous. Both.NET and Java are decades old technology. Neither Microsoft nor Sun "innovated" there. Except for the snazzier graphics, people were building the same kind of VM systems and object-oriented languages in the 1970s and early 1980s.
I also think wxWindows is by far the best cross platform C/C++ toolkit around right now: it's free for both non-commercial and commercial use, runs on lots of platforms, can use native widgets, is mature, and has tons of functionality. Many more open source projects should use it.
It was the fact that they could write code faster and worry less about the crap that tipped the scales.
I have yet to see a Microsoft tool (or any other tool) that lets me write code faster. Tools require time and effort to use. It's much better to just to get it right the first time.
Apple already confusingly calls its operating system "X"; nobody can be certain anymore when someone talks about an "X" application whether that's an "X11" or an "OSX" application. Now the use the name of a major UNIX calendaring applications, ical. What's going to be next? Apple Emacs? Oh, wait, they have that, too.
I think this is a really bad move. Mac home users will be forced to pay $100/year or be forced to both change their e-mail addresses and figure out how to reconfigure their systems to use one of the other accounts they get from their ISP. People will feel let down and betrayed by Apple--iTools was part of the package and played a role in the decision of many home users to buy a Mac. The Mac will be less usable because things like mail and web publishing don't just work out of the box anymore. And Apple loses a lot of good will and advertising from people using addresses at "mac.com".
I think what Apple loses from this is far more valuable than the money they are going to be making. I hope they'll reverse this decision.
Funny, those four distinct advantages are exactly the advantages I see Linux has over NT. Microsoft has the arguments right, they just confused the two operating systems.
Proven, comprehensive operating system platforms delivering seamless integration, industry-leading scalability and performance, broad application support, and solid reliability.
Yes, given Linux's extremely widespread use, including at some of the biggest Internet sites in the world, Linux certainly has this advantage.
Faster time-to-market via powerful tools and an extensible framework.
Linux's Posix-based environment is proven, extensible, mature, and very widely used. Its Internet, services, management, and GUI frameworks are also highly extensible and industry leading. An additional time-to-market advantage is the immediate availability of updates and bug fixes throughout the community. This is in contrast with Microsoft's centralized development style, in which I am completely dependent on their efforts to deliver bug fixes.
Ease of deployment, interoperability, and manageability in a heterogeneous environment.
Indeed: score another one for Linux. Its POSIX foundations, widest support for network protocols and services, and multitude of options for management (including command line, GUI-based and network based), make it the clear winner.
Better business alignment with straightforward licensing and clarity of intellectual property ownership.
Yes, I very much prefer the straightforward licensing and clarity of the GPL over the muddy and complex legal agreements with a company like Microsoft. Furthermore, licensing costs for Linux are predictable in perpetuity. And, as an added bonus, I do not need to hire expensive lawyers to analyze the GPL--it is a known, standard, predictable agreement.
"Linux"? People can satisfy their creative and constructive urges using a huge multitude of programming and graphic tools. Of course, there area also an endless number of game editors for many games, games that now have free runtimes (Quake, etc.).
Why would intelligent life want to talk to earth? Indeed, why would it want to talk to anyone? If there is other intelligent life out there that managed to survive more than a few thousand years, maybe they just figured out that staying home taking care of their own planet is a lot more pleasant than traveling around the universe in tin cans or holding conversations with hundreds of years of lag.
If you read Nature and Science, you'll see that there has been an uproar in solid state physics about a researcher who kept publishing the most amazing results ("superconducting buckyballs", "organic transistors", etc.) and seems to have been reusing the same graph over and over again for completely different results. He, too, had collaborators.
What it tells us is that no scientific result is credible until it has been independently replicated by others.
What is so depressing about these cases of fraud is that they discourage the replication of interesting but implausible results: if fraud is common, people aren't going to spend time and money on things that may be fraudulent. That is why this kind of thing really hurts science.
Mandrake is a great distribution and it doesn't make any promises ("runs Windows software") that it can't keep.
For most home users, Mandrake provides everything they will ever need (if it's a full install). The only issue I see potentially is that they may not know all the software they have. Let's hope people aren't afraid to explore the menus.
Ideally, consumer Linux PCs would ship with a simple welcoming application that shows people all the software they have and makes it easy for them to find stuff ("I want to write a letter.").
While I think the Linux software is ready for the desktop, there still remains an uphill struggle in terms of consumer behavior and "ad hoc" support. For example, right now, consumers think that to get software, they go to the store; if they don't see anything for Linux on the shelves, they assume (incorrectly) that there is no software. And when they want hardware, people at the local CompUSA will sell them something for Windows or Mac, only. Still, someone has to start selling these boxes to consumers, and WalMart is a good place to do it. Let's hope the printer they sell along with it just plugs in...
In the worst case, this is simply a veiled attempt at selling a PC effectively without an OS, assuming that people will get Windows themselves somehow. But just like they say in showbiz: just spell the name right. If it's usable at all, some people will keep it. That's a good start.
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You can make things fast, cheap, simple, easy to configure, secure, etc., but not all at the same time. That is the first lesson of engineering, and it applies to peripheral connections as much as it does to other engineering problems.
What have men got to do with anything?
As you should--that's the way it's supposed to work by default. If you want it to work differently, you need to configure it differently. You get three choices for what is recoverable. That's two more than most other journalling file systems give you.
and at times, my journal was, at times,(seemingly) corrupt, and I would have to boot into single user mode and manually fsck the disk, which took forever.
It can happen, I suppose, but I haven't noticed it, and I crash machines with ext3 a lot.
ReiserFS would be my second choice: it isn't compatible with anything, but it brings some nice, new functionality to the table.
XFS is unlikely to be as well tested or tuned as either of these others on Linux.
The point is that I don't want Perl6 regexps. I'm happy with Perl5 regexps. For the things that are hard to do with Perl5 regexps, I don't want an even more complicated regexp package, I want a simpler parser generator.
So, my point remains: by dropping iTools, iPhoto is affected: it doesn't work anymore out of the box for web page publishing. And that was one of the main features it had going for it.
You can get it here. It's small, it's very simple, and it works well. It inserts itself between a VNC server and a VNC client. You can use it to record sessions from Windows, MacOSX, and Linux, and play them back on all those platforms. It can even be played back from a Java applet through a web browser. It probably requires less bandwidth than MPEG.
One of iPhoto's strengths was the ease with which non-computer people could put up their photos on their home page. Without iTools, that goes away. The integration with iTools was a big part of making the iMac usable and interesting for home users, and Apple made a big deal out of that and out of the fact that it was free.
You are right: the fact that a car company would put something as unreliable and user-unfriendly as Windows 98 into a car isn't funny, it's sad.
I didn't make that claim.
But wait, you say real Open Source application development can only occur on an open platform using open tools
I didn't say that.
Excuse me for saying but you're full of shit.
Excuse me, but you are responding to things I didn't say.
Perl and other languages should leave "good enough" alone when it comes to regular expressions and instead just make it easy to put chunks of grammars into programs.
It is just not acceptable to change conditions like that after people have given out their supposedly free email addresses. It makes people feel that they can't trust Apple to stand by their promises.
The issue is not charging for value added services, the issue is charging for email addreses that used to be free. At $100/year, most people would not have started using iTools; many people will now have to pay because changing their email address is more painful, not because they like iTools so much that they are willing to pay that kind of money.
That's very simple: there is no open source implementation of the Java platform (Kaffe, gjc, etc. are not implementations of the Java platform, and they have lots of problems even as they are). It makes no sense for people to develop, say, a Linux desktop in Java and depend on a proprietary runtime.
It seems Sourceforge is filled with Open Source Java apps.
Sure, and there are also open source VisualBasic, open source Windows, and open source Delphi applications: people share source for all sorts of reasons under all sorts of licenses. But most open source software is developed on open source platforms with open source tools, and for good reason.
Not only are these libraries not standardized, they are likely to be protected by patents.
That's FUD. You can't protect "libraries" by patents, only inventions. And there are unlikely to be many patentable inventions in the APIs of common GUI and OS libraries.
ultimately Sun just owns the Java name, not all the implementations.
There is effectively only one Java implementation: Sun's and its derivatives. And since there is no standard for even the core language and libraries, there aren't going to be any others, only some tinkering with things vaguely like Java.
But calling this a "true innovation" is ridiculous. Both .NET and Java are decades old technology. Neither Microsoft nor Sun "innovated" there. Except for the snazzier graphics, people were building the same kind of VM systems and object-oriented languages in the 1970s and early 1980s.
I also think wxWindows is by far the best cross platform C/C++ toolkit around right now: it's free for both non-commercial and commercial use, runs on lots of platforms, can use native widgets, is mature, and has tons of functionality. Many more open source projects should use it.
I have yet to see a Microsoft tool (or any other tool) that lets me write code faster. Tools require time and effort to use. It's much better to just to get it right the first time.
Yes, and that's just what people are doing: either paying or telling Apple "to stick it". Or did you see anybody proposing a third course of action?
Apple already confusingly calls its operating system "X"; nobody can be certain anymore when someone talks about an "X" application whether that's an "X11" or an "OSX" application. Now the use the name of a major UNIX calendaring applications, ical. What's going to be next? Apple Emacs? Oh, wait, they have that, too.
I think what Apple loses from this is far more valuable than the money they are going to be making. I hope they'll reverse this decision.
Proven, comprehensive operating system platforms delivering seamless integration, industry-leading scalability and performance, broad application support, and solid reliability.
Yes, given Linux's extremely widespread use, including at some of the biggest Internet sites in the world, Linux certainly has this advantage.
Faster time-to-market via powerful tools and an extensible framework.
Linux's Posix-based environment is proven, extensible, mature, and very widely used. Its Internet, services, management, and GUI frameworks are also highly extensible and industry leading. An additional time-to-market advantage is the immediate availability of updates and bug fixes throughout the community. This is in contrast with Microsoft's centralized development style, in which I am completely dependent on their efforts to deliver bug fixes.
Ease of deployment, interoperability, and manageability in a heterogeneous environment.
Indeed: score another one for Linux. Its POSIX foundations, widest support for network protocols and services, and multitude of options for management (including command line, GUI-based and network based), make it the clear winner.
Better business alignment with straightforward licensing and clarity of intellectual property ownership.
Yes, I very much prefer the straightforward licensing and clarity of the GPL over the muddy and complex legal agreements with a company like Microsoft. Furthermore, licensing costs for Linux are predictable in perpetuity. And, as an added bonus, I do not need to hire expensive lawyers to analyze the GPL--it is a known, standard, predictable agreement.
"Linux"? People can satisfy their creative and constructive urges using a huge multitude of programming and graphic tools. Of course, there area also an endless number of game editors for many games, games that now have free runtimes (Quake, etc.).
Why would intelligent life want to talk to earth? Indeed, why would it want to talk to anyone? If there is other intelligent life out there that managed to survive more than a few thousand years, maybe they just figured out that staying home taking care of their own planet is a lot more pleasant than traveling around the universe in tin cans or holding conversations with hundreds of years of lag.
What it tells us is that no scientific result is credible until it has been independently replicated by others.
What is so depressing about these cases of fraud is that they discourage the replication of interesting but implausible results: if fraud is common, people aren't going to spend time and money on things that may be fraudulent. That is why this kind of thing really hurts science.
For most home users, Mandrake provides everything they will ever need (if it's a full install). The only issue I see potentially is that they may not know all the software they have. Let's hope people aren't afraid to explore the menus. Ideally, consumer Linux PCs would ship with a simple welcoming application that shows people all the software they have and makes it easy for them to find stuff ("I want to write a letter.").
While I think the Linux software is ready for the desktop, there still remains an uphill struggle in terms of consumer behavior and "ad hoc" support. For example, right now, consumers think that to get software, they go to the store; if they don't see anything for Linux on the shelves, they assume (incorrectly) that there is no software. And when they want hardware, people at the local CompUSA will sell them something for Windows or Mac, only. Still, someone has to start selling these boxes to consumers, and WalMart is a good place to do it. Let's hope the printer they sell along with it just plugs in...
In the worst case, this is simply a veiled attempt at selling a PC effectively without an OS, assuming that people will get Windows themselves somehow. But just like they say in showbiz: just spell the name right. If it's usable at all, some people will keep it. That's a good start.