all of our other marketing short comings in the OSS community. Your right, there are those who care about adoption and those who don't. I thought Red Hat did.
as shovel or paperweight. Red Hat as a name was interesting. Fedora is more like a developer name and signifies about as much. Kind of like saying "nothing to see here".
Fedora is a horrible name. Why waste time and money protecting it? It isn't catchy, it doesn't sound sexy enough to sell to a desktop user and it doesn't sound serious enough for business.
Its a joke and not a very clever one. They had there laugh, now is a good time to move on to more important things.
The advantage of using a network like Kazaa instead of a Bittorrent client is in the volume of files your able to share. Leaving a torrent up for multiple files can become cumbersome quickly and if your looking at sharing thousands of files, impossible. P2P clients like Kazaa are useful and just because it has been used primarily to redistribute copyrighted material does not mean that there is no legitimate use.
I redistribute freely published music and iso's, I keep my copyrighted/consumer music and software in separate folders.
I do believe sharing copyrighted property is a problem, but its important that we fight to keep the RIAA/MPAA et all from demonizing P2P and criminalizing our right to redistribute free information. P2P has a potential usefulness we haven't even begun to touch on and it would be a shame to lose it to rampant industry paranoia and money grubbing.
As the GPL (and OSS in general) are just beginning to penetrate the public consciousness it is possible over time we will be looking at a renaissance in the public commons, and I can think of no better way to help that happen then to help to build a large distributed and publicly searchable network of useful information. Enter P2P.
The Linux desktop (as it exists today) is at best OK. It is riddled with inconsistencies and the kde/gnome toolsets are just one simple example.
What I'd like to see would be a site dedicated to collecting feedback on what Linux users (old and new alike) would like to see created or improved. We really are full of comments, but its a little disappointing that as a user group (slashdot-computer nuts) we have no useful outlets. Its pretty funny really considering in a lot of ways we probably represent a large segment of network service providers (and scripters and programers and webdesigners and..). Is that ironic?
Jeez, all these post mentioning black lists make you almost want to believe its a good idea. White listing in combination is the way (eg Tagged Message Delivery Agent):
The technical countermeasures used by TMDA to thwart spam include:
whitelists: accept mail from known, trusted senders.
blacklists: refuse mail from undesired senders.
challenge/response: allows unknown senders which aren't on the whitelist or blacklist the chance to confirm that their message is legitimate (non-spam).
tagged addresses: special-purpose e-mail addresses such as time-dependent addresses, or addresses which only accept certain kinds of communication. These increase the transparency of TMDA for unknown senders by allowing them to safely circumvent the challenge/response system.
This combination was chosen based on the following assumptions about the current state of spam on the Internet:
1. You cannot keep your email address secret from spammers.
2. Content-based filters can't distinguish spam from legitimate mail with sufficient accuracy.
3. To maintain economies of scale, bulk-mailing is generally:
* An impersonal process where the recipient is not distinguished.
* A one-way communication channel (from spammer to victim).
4. spam will not cease until it becomes prohibitively expensive for spammers to operate.
I used bluebottle.com's webmail service for quite a while with no more spam trouble, ever (until they got DDOSed into dropping the service).
Spam holes are not the answer, but with friend list they sure look a lot saner (c'mon, everyone in.tw isn't going to spam you).
Maybe they aren't considering Linux a serious threat yet, but rather maneuvering to gain the appearance of a competitive marketplace. I will bet in another year or so they'll really start to bemoan Linux and how its tearing the market away from them, all the while working carefully to make sure that it is never taken seriously enough to gain dominance. Seems like a fine strategy. Let [submit 3rd world market here] convert to Linux, their poor, rich governments will continue to use what they believe to be the worlds most productive (and aggressively none compatible) OS.
Even as I write this in Mozilla I spell check it with Word.
Microsoft more then just about anyone needs to get the word out about Linux right now. Will it bite them in the ass? We sure as hell are working on it.;-)
I mean get over it. If they can't find it online they'll find it else where. We kept stacks of pilfered magazines in a hollowed out tree in the woods, under the house, we stole them from our parents, the convienence store or found them at the dump, whatever. Even if there wasn't porn there was always the Sears catalog (bra and panty section!) or worst case, National Geographic. Its like we all like to pretend that hormones don't make you a complete raging lunatic.
Set a good example, do your best and let the little people grow up.
"When I called Apple, they stated that they simply don't support the use of the older Mac iPods on PC's and are not responsible, even though they admit that it was their own software that caused this."
Or there's:
"but when we installed iTunes for the PC the iPod stopped working"
Now we don't even bother reading the article posted directly above our replies? He's saying second-party software worked perfectly (Xplay) but when he installed Apples own iTunes software the players stopped working. Bad Apple.
Don't get me wrong. Most of what I know about GNU/Linux I learned on Mandrake. Implying that it's the last of the free software distros is comical though.
The downloadable version is free, as in unencombered. Thats important. I think its also important that as much as we complain here about everything we try to give credit where credit is due. Heres a simple quote from the Mandrake website:
"All improvements and add-ons introduced by MandrakeSoft are published under the General Public License (GPL)."
So I think calling their software free isn't very missleading at all. Including packages with none OSI certified lisences is nothing to crow about when they've made both their distribution and contributed code free.
This is the only company I know of that actually puts its money (and its business model) where its mouth is (and it might even work).
Major commercial distribution. Gentoo, Debian and Fedora are great, but for a commercial player Mandrake has been a surprisingly upstanding member of the OSS community. Not only in keeping Mandrake free (as in beer and freedom) but actively using alternative funding methods in an attempt to reasonably sustain that freedom (in a commercail marketplace).
First off the availability is slowly but steadily increasing. With projects like Ardour nearing major releases even professional recording studios are starting to take note. Even the home user is finding more useful tools available. And with preemptive kernels there's lots of possibilities.
The future for Linux holds many things. Hackers composing music? You bet.
The first Matrix was revolutionary, not because of the psuedo philosophical story line, but because of the analog effects. Something we had been missing for far too long. Its a real disappointment that just when you think that a director finally *gets it*, you realize it was just their dumb luck and everything goes back to the way it was.
That said, I bought my tickets a few weeks ago. See you there..
Maybe they decided the market was already full. Turning it over the the community makes pretty good sense. Enterprise has always been their primary market.
And I'll be trying out JuK, too, I've never heard of it before today.
Same with Rythmbox for me. I've been using Xmms for so long, Zinf/Freeamp was OK because of the playlist manager, but its so unstable I can't use it regularly without losing patience.
I'll trade your recommendatoin with a recommendation for Legends its a new freeware FPS game for Linux and Windows that is way beyond anything I've seen released for free before. Give it a shot. Juk??! Pffft!
Came across it in Linux Journal years ago and haven't come across a more satifying player yet. For player integration wouldn't something like Gstreamer be good? I don't use the larger desktop managers so I don't have much experience (go Blackbox!), but it seems that would (could?) be more tightly integrated (file playback on mouse over, etc).
By the plugins available. Like the Audioscrobbler for relational rating, or oddcast/blackice for streaming, or the sound enhancing plugins for 4Front Technologies and of course the great visual plugins like Goom or Jess.
I'm sure there are plently of additional features people would like and plugins aren't the answer to everything, but as a music/media player it is just what I need and its a real pleasure to use. The bigger players seem like bloatware to me and what they add in gawdy buttons doesn't actually seem to enhance my experience.
I guess the Xmms dev team could be faulted for not satisfying everyone all of the time, but that would be going a little too far. If you really hate the GUI's for so many appliactions (I'd agree with you on some and disagree on others) maybe try the command line app splay. Its got no GUI to compain of, but it sounds better then any other app I've used on a computer. Does shuffle or non shuffle, ^C to exit. Its a surprisingly nice little player.
Here's a page about it. Looks like he's packaged 0.11 which is one release behind, but worked fine and included the Mythmusic module. There's probably someone out there who's put together a 0.12 (or a latest CVS) binary package, there tends to be debs for just about everything somewhere (Mandrake is probably #2 for availability now).
Good luck. Its a sweet PVR package too and 0.12 includes a news feeds module so you can get your slash/fix in the lazyboy.
And IMHO its the fastest, easiest to use hands down. With Goom and Jess visualizing on my TV its just about perfect. Default skin beats W/A and is sleek and easy on the eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
all of our other marketing short comings in the OSS community. Your right, there are those who care about adoption and those who don't. I thought Red Hat did.
as shovel or paperweight. Red Hat as a name was interesting. Fedora is more like a developer name and signifies about as much. Kind of like saying "nothing to see here".
Thanks, I didn't know that. *tears* :-)
Fedora is a horrible name. Why waste time and money protecting it? It isn't catchy, it doesn't sound sexy enough to sell to a desktop user and it doesn't sound serious enough for business.
Its a joke and not a very clever one. They had there laugh, now is a good time to move on to more important things.
The advantage of using a network like Kazaa instead of a Bittorrent client is in the volume of files your able to share. Leaving a torrent up for multiple files can become cumbersome quickly and if your looking at sharing thousands of files, impossible. P2P clients like Kazaa are useful and just because it has been used primarily to redistribute copyrighted material does not mean that there is no legitimate use.
I redistribute freely published music and iso's, I keep my copyrighted/consumer music and software in separate folders.
I do believe sharing copyrighted property is a problem, but its important that we fight to keep the RIAA/MPAA et all from demonizing P2P and criminalizing our right to redistribute free information. P2P has a potential usefulness we haven't even begun to touch on and it would be a shame to lose it to rampant industry paranoia and money grubbing.
As the GPL (and OSS in general) are just beginning to penetrate the public consciousness it is possible over time we will be looking at a renaissance in the public commons, and I can think of no better way to help that happen then to help to build a large distributed and publicly searchable network of useful information. Enter P2P.
The Linux desktop (as it exists today) is at best OK. It is riddled with inconsistencies and the kde/gnome toolsets are just one simple example.
What I'd like to see would be a site dedicated to collecting feedback on what Linux users (old and new alike) would like to see created or improved. We really are full of comments, but its a little disappointing that as a user group (slashdot-computer nuts) we have no useful outlets. Its pretty funny really considering in a lot of ways we probably represent a large segment of network service providers (and scripters and programers and webdesigners and..). Is that ironic?
Spam holes are not the answer, but with friend list they sure look a lot saner (c'mon, everyone in
Maybe they aren't considering Linux a serious threat yet, but rather maneuvering to gain the appearance of a competitive marketplace. I will bet in another year or so they'll really start to bemoan Linux and how its tearing the market away from them, all the while working carefully to make sure that it is never taken seriously enough to gain dominance. Seems like a fine strategy. Let [submit 3rd world market here] convert to Linux, their poor, rich governments will continue to use what they believe to be the worlds most productive (and aggressively none compatible) OS.
;-)
Even as I write this in Mozilla I spell check it with Word.
Microsoft more then just about anyone needs to get the word out about Linux right now. Will it bite them in the ass? We sure as hell are working on it.
I mean get over it. If they can't find it online they'll find it else where. We kept stacks of pilfered magazines in a hollowed out tree in the woods, under the house, we stole them from our parents, the convienence store or found them at the dump, whatever. Even if there wasn't porn there was always the Sears catalog (bra and panty section!) or worst case, National Geographic. Its like we all like to pretend that hormones don't make you a complete raging lunatic.
Set a good example, do your best and let the little people grow up.
"When I called Apple, they stated that they simply don't support the use of the older Mac iPods on PC's and are not responsible, even though they admit that it was their own software that caused this."
Or there's:
"but when we installed iTunes for the PC the iPod stopped working"
Now we don't even bother reading the article posted directly above our replies? He's saying second-party software worked perfectly (Xplay) but when he installed Apples own iTunes software the players stopped working. Bad Apple.
Don't get me wrong. Most of what I know about GNU/Linux I learned on Mandrake. Implying that it's the last of the free software distros is comical though.
The downloadable version is free, as in unencombered. Thats important. I think its also important that as much as we complain here about everything we try to give credit where credit is due. Heres a simple quote from the Mandrake website:
"All improvements and add-ons introduced by MandrakeSoft are published under the General Public License (GPL)."
So I think calling their software free isn't very missleading at all. Including packages with none OSI certified lisences is nothing to crow about when they've made both their distribution and contributed code free.
This is the only company I know of that actually puts its money (and its business model) where its mouth is (and it might even work).
Major commercial distribution. Gentoo, Debian and Fedora are great, but for a commercial player Mandrake has been a surprisingly upstanding member of the OSS community. Not only in keeping Mandrake free (as in beer and freedom) but actively using alternative funding methods in an attempt to reasonably sustain that freedom (in a commercail marketplace).
I've got a lot of respect for that.
and let god sort them out. The FUD is getting so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Looks like its welcome to the prime-time Linux.
First off the availability is slowly but steadily increasing. With projects like Ardour nearing major releases even professional recording studios are starting to take note. Even the home user is finding more useful tools available. And with preemptive kernels there's lots of possibilities.
The future for Linux holds many things. Hackers composing music? You bet.
The first Matrix was revolutionary, not because of the psuedo philosophical story line, but because of the analog effects. Something we had been missing for far too long. Its a real disappointment that just when you think that a director finally *gets it*, you realize it was just their dumb luck and everything goes back to the way it was.
That said, I bought my tickets a few weeks ago. See you there..
There is lots of competition on the desktop right now, with:
Mandrake
Lindows
Xandros
Lycoris
Gentoo Games
Debian
And of course Slackware and Suse
Maybe they decided the market was already full. Turning it over the the community makes pretty good sense. Enterprise has always been their primary market.
And I'll be trying out JuK, too, I've never heard of it before today.
Same with Rythmbox for me. I've been using Xmms for so long, Zinf/Freeamp was OK because of the playlist manager, but its so unstable I can't use it regularly without losing patience.
I'll trade your recommendatoin with a recommendation for Legends its a new freeware FPS game for Linux and Windows that is way beyond anything I've seen released for free before. Give it a shot. Juk??! Pffft!
Xmms takes the cake. Fast, sleek, extensable and easy to use. All the benifits of Winamp without the bad code.
Came across it in Linux Journal years ago and haven't come across a more satifying player yet. For player integration wouldn't something like Gstreamer be good? I don't use the larger desktop managers so I don't have much experience (go Blackbox!), but it seems that would (could?) be more tightly integrated (file playback on mouse over, etc).
By the plugins available. Like the Audioscrobbler for relational rating, or oddcast/blackice for streaming, or the sound enhancing plugins for 4Front Technologies and of course the great visual plugins like Goom or Jess.
I'm sure there are plently of additional features people would like and plugins aren't the answer to everything, but as a music/media player it is just what I need and its a real pleasure to use. The bigger players seem like bloatware to me and what they add in gawdy buttons doesn't actually seem to enhance my experience.
I guess the Xmms dev team could be faulted for not satisfying everyone all of the time, but that would be going a little too far. If you really hate the GUI's for so many appliactions (I'd agree with you on some and disagree on others) maybe try the command line app splay. Its got no GUI to compain of, but it sounds better then any other app I've used on a computer. Does shuffle or non shuffle, ^C to exit. Its a surprisingly nice little player.
I'd hate to see them busy up the default design too, thats why I like it so much (aside from the slick GUI design).
Here's a page about it. Looks like he's packaged 0.11 which is one release behind, but worked fine and included the Mythmusic module. There's probably someone out there who's put together a 0.12 (or a latest CVS) binary package, there tends to be debs for just about everything somewhere (Mandrake is probably #2 for availability now).
Good luck. Its a sweet PVR package too and 0.12 includes a news feeds module so you can get your slash/fix in the lazyboy.
And IMHO its the fastest, easiest to use hands down. With Goom and Jess visualizing on my TV its just about perfect. Default skin beats W/A and is sleek and easy on the eyes.
What makes Xmms simple is its plug-in arcitecture, not its features. I'm too lazy to count, but Xmms is complicated, its just well designed.