Yes, the virtues of IEEE1394 and USB are very potent. But don't forget that there are two parts to every piece of hardware - the hardware itself, and the software to talk to it. Apple might have chosen the less-technically-elegant approach (let's include every driver we can with the OS) but it's much more impressive to the end-user. For example, I've got an iBook with iTunes. (From iApple, apparently. And who says the 'k' prefix on everything from the KDE project is annoying?:)
Someone at work brought in a FireWire CD burner (a Sony, a sweet 16x8x32x model - probably cost a pretty penny) and all I had to do to get it to work with the OS was plug it in. No clicking 'next' on the driver install, no prompts. iTunes suddenly stopped reporting "CD burner or software not found..." and ejected the disc tray, stating "Please insert a blank disc to continue..."
That's the kind of experience that people want from a computer. And so far, nothing - Windows XP, 2000, ME, 98, Linux, or anything else on the x86 platform - has been able to deliver it. Apple, quite simply, has.
If I had a fundamental misunderstanding of how _simple_ things like USB and FireWire worked, I seriously doubt that I'd be running Slackware on my X86 boxen. I can tell you that (without a doubt) if it's on the Apple supported hardware list, for something simple like (say) a CD-Burner via FireWire and OS X, all that you have to do is plug it in.
And it really does Just Work. Suddenly, iTunes stops reporting that there is no CD-Burner attached. As soon as you insert a blank CD, it asks you what you intend to do with it - should it prepare it for life as an ISO9660 CD or a real audio CD, to be used in your car and home stereo systems?
Without even a reboot.
I'm quite used to Slackware, and I wouldn't give it up for anything. But it's really REALLY nice to be able to sit down and plug things in, and watch them work properly. Which is exactly what my iBook is for.
Not only that, but it runs UNIX. (And since I prefer tcsh anyway, it's fine with me that it doesn't include bash.:)
The line "That doesn't even work with Win2K" should tell you something - OS X is a far different beast, and I'm quite glad of it. That doesn't work with Win2K because Win2K, while quite possibly the best Windows available, still sucks as far as operating systems go. (And yes, I know what I'm talking about here, too. I've had to use Win2K on my workstation before, and I'll probably have to again. Shit, I run it on my desktop at home for when I want to play CS and Unreal.)
The flipside of that is that with such a small peripheral/hardware pool, Thing Just Work (TM) on Macs. It's a beautiful thing, my friend.
For example: The X86 platform might be more flexible as to the sheer amount of things that you _can_ do with it, but for most families, it's not flexible enough because it's too technically daunting for them to do the things that they _want_ to do with it.
Macs make it easy. Want to plug in a CD burner? Don't worry, you don't have to open up your case! Just plug in the firewire cord and the power, and off you go. New hard drive? Digital video camera? USB camera? Don't worry about drivers. OS X is nice stuff, and it's a crying shame that non-Mac owners will never get to make it their/home.
Hmmm. I guess that the KDE developers don't want anyone to use their software either, eh? Or maybe Linus is sick and tired of people using his kernel, which is why both of these pretty high-profile projects use bzip2'd tarballs.
Please.
Not to mention that any recent (>7.0, iirc) RedHat, Mandrake, or Slackware copy of GNU's 'tar' program can decompress bz2 with a flag (-y on slackware, -J on redhat, and I forget for Mandrake). BZ2 might not be your personal favorite, but it's quite far from non-standard. Not to mention the fact that it's also BSD-licensed. It doesn't really get more free than that.
Other users have mentioned _why_ the MPlayer developers refuse to allow others to distribute binary distributions, but basically, it boils down to this.
1. Code that is compiled on the local machine will generally run faster than lowest-common-denominator compiled packages.
2. Some of the codecs that MPlayer uses are linked in during compile time, and are not Open Source/Free Software, so it's questionable to redistribute them (at best; in some cases, it's outright illegal).
3. The codec architecture in MPlayer is not dynamic, it's static. So the 'mplayer' binary that you end up with has all of those codecs loaded in, and it can't pick up new ones without a recompile. Chalk it up to over-optimization or bad design, but that's the fact.
I'm not saying that this is a textbook case of how to write, package, and distribute software, but it's definitely not a textbook case on how not to do it.
The funny thing is that you really don't appreciate the design because it's very subtle. I was _never_ a huge Apple fan - as a matter of fact, I was one of the more vocal anti-Mac people at my high school - until I heard whispers of OS X and the BSD system underneath it. Now that I actually own an iBook, let me tell you straight out - there are so many design issues that Apple has gotten right that it's not even funny.
Let's take (for example) the screen. The iBook, which is most definitely affordable (more so than most of the PC laptops I've seen, or at least comparable ones) has a gorgeous LCD. It's active matrix, it has beautiful true color support, and Apple's proprietary Quartz layer with its own fonts and their OpenType rendering literally beats the living sh*t out of ANYTHING from Microsoft (ClearType included) or the FreeType project.
Ah well. To use it is to love it. I won't bother explaining every single detail, mostly because there are so many that I can't recall every one off-hand. But there are reasons why Mac users rave about the design - there are things to appreciate.
Heh. I know you were kidding, but I'm the author of the dotNET style used in two of the new screenshots (possibly more, if there are more than 4 now). In any case, I'm now working on a style with animated text and pushbuttons. If you've got a copy of Qt3, grab http://clee.azsites.org/kde/se7en.tar.bz2 and follow the README. It's like dotNET on crack!
-clee
PS : Oh, one other thing. I'm considering renaming the dotNET style to dotORG, due to 1) possible legal ramifications wrt MS and 2) the fact that it could be pronounced 'dotorgy'. heh.
If you wanted to run a different Win32 GUI, but still run software written for Microsoft's GUI, you'd still have to have all the dlls installed for that one too. Of course, there isn't an alternative GUI/desktop shell and set of libraries, so that situation doesn't happen under Windows.
wrong. and yes, it's just as ugly to do this as it is to run KDE programs in GNOME or vice-versa.
Re:An ETHICAL way to Anti-Virus
on
Code Red III
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, if you add a line in your httpd.conf that looks like this:
AddHandler cgi-script.ida
then you can use Perl to write a quick script which will do the reverse lookup and then send that email. Or, if you want to use PHP instead, alter your AddType line for PHP to this:
AddType application/x-httpd-php.php.php3.ida
Then restart apache, and throw a script named default.ida up to your DocumentRoot directory.
(but does your workstation have a ssh client? do all of the servers you remotely access run sshd? Um probably not)
You mean... yours don't? Um I'm sorry.
(I also administer pretty much every server that I remotely access, and the first thing I do after I install the OS is to install sshd. second thing is disable telnetd. then I go nuts on software configuration.:)
Actually, Iwill offers several mainboards with the ALi north/south bridges. I plan on buying one for my next motherboard (damned Via incompatibility...)
If you don't want to spend the $120 for a KA266 (average price offered on pricewatch) then you can try looking for an ECS K7AMA, which also uses the ALi MaGiK chipsets (and also has support for PC133 SDRAM). The ECS K7AMA is about $70 on pricewatch.
Have you taken a serious look at the W3C standard for CSS2?
It does contain several references for things such as page breaks (page-break-before, page-break-after, etc) and also for elements which should be printed on every page, e.g. headers and footers.
I used to think that these features were lacking and valid reasons to not use XHTML1+CSS2 for word processing, but they aren't. I have, as before stated, yet to find a valid reason why XHTML is not a decent word processor format.
If we can all agree on ONE flavor of XML, then then stuff like Microsoft Office will become a commodity...
That's the problem. XML is not the proper answer, because XML happens to be a "language definition language". Your post makes as much sense as saying "Let's use SGML as the standard web page language!" Which sounds almost feasible until you realize that SGML is a tool used to *define* standards like HTML, which can then be used as standard languages.
My vote for a standard word processing language actually would be XHTML1+CSS2. I can't name any features off-hand that I would ever use in a word processor that can't be done in XHTML with CSS... but I'm hoping someone out there can prove me wrong and show me why I'm an idiot. : )
Sorry to be so blunt here, but I'm going to be anway...
<flame on>
This isn't a war over desktop market share, dumbass. This is all about the servers. Microsoft develops.NET services to be deployed from Windows2000 or XP servers, and it doesn't matter if you can use them on MacOS X or Linux or *BSD or your Commodore64, because the server is still MS based and they still have control.
The simple fact of the matter is that BSD has much more of the server market than people think, and most people with any sense refuse to put Linux in mission-critical server positions. Linux is getting better, yes, but the BSDs are at the moment better suited to serious server work.
That said, it's highly likely that any software Ximian writes will be easily ported to BSD anyway, as long as they have competent coders working on it, because UNIX environments are relatively similar from an application standpoint anyway. However, don't underestimate the importance of BSD here because it has close to zero percent desktop market share; that's like saying that nobody will use Internet Explorer because there are much better FTP clients available.
<flame off>
Re:... Use the nForce, Luke?
on
nVidia nForce
·
· Score: 2
Except that they linked to an earlier article that they had written on it on the first page, and if you didn't understand what they were talking about, you could have easily clicked on the link to brush up on it beforehand.
contents of/etc/exports:
# This is the NFS server at home
/usr/local/export (ro)
/home (rw)
#end contents
killall -HUP rpc.nfsd rpc.mountd
From another Linux machine:
mount server:/usr/local/export/mnt
works fine. How is that broken beyond hope?
(No, I wouldn't expect to use it in a data center. I'm perfectly happy using it at home to share files and serve up my home directories. But it's not "broken beyond hope" IMHO.)
Aside from all that Stormix, Easel, Slackware, Indera (linux based) all gone... Bye bye...
Aside from the fact that I think you meant Indrema, not Indera (because I've never heard of Indera, but I could just be stupid), you're horribly horribly wrong about Slackware. It's still doing quite fine and the 7.2 release should be coming along soon. Just because Wind River didn't decide to hire the Slack team does NOT mean that it's a dead distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if you're trying to find someone to get rid of it to - I'm willing! Contact me and I'll be glad to pay the shipping to take it off your hands...
webmaster@konqueror.org
-clee
What???
The cheapest DVD burners I've seen are ~$500. That Superdrive != Combodrive.
-clee
The display is too small - it's an iBook display.
Uh, the iBook display is a solid 12.1 inches. This thing is 15. I won't go into the rest of your post, since you're just wrong right here anyway.
Yes, the virtues of IEEE1394 and USB are very potent. But don't forget that there are two parts to every piece of hardware - the hardware itself, and the software to talk to it. Apple might have chosen the less-technically-elegant approach (let's include every driver we can with the OS) but it's much more impressive to the end-user. For example, I've got an iBook with iTunes. (From iApple, apparently. And who says the 'k' prefix on everything from the KDE project is annoying? :)
Someone at work brought in a FireWire CD burner (a Sony, a sweet 16x8x32x model - probably cost a pretty penny) and all I had to do to get it to work with the OS was plug it in. No clicking 'next' on the driver install, no prompts. iTunes suddenly stopped reporting "CD burner or software not found..." and ejected the disc tray, stating "Please insert a blank disc to continue..."
That's the kind of experience that people want from a computer. And so far, nothing - Windows XP, 2000, ME, 98, Linux, or anything else on the x86 platform - has been able to deliver it. Apple, quite simply, has.
-clee
Bullshit.
:)
If I had a fundamental misunderstanding of how _simple_ things like USB and FireWire worked, I seriously doubt that I'd be running Slackware on my X86 boxen. I can tell you that (without a doubt) if it's on the Apple supported hardware list, for something simple like (say) a CD-Burner via FireWire and OS X, all that you have to do is plug it in.
And it really does Just Work. Suddenly, iTunes stops reporting that there is no CD-Burner attached. As soon as you insert a blank CD, it asks you what you intend to do with it - should it prepare it for life as an ISO9660 CD or a real audio CD, to be used in your car and home stereo systems?
Without even a reboot.
I'm quite used to Slackware, and I wouldn't give it up for anything. But it's really REALLY nice to be able to sit down and plug things in, and watch them work properly. Which is exactly what my iBook is for.
Not only that, but it runs UNIX. (And since I prefer tcsh anyway, it's fine with me that it doesn't include bash.
The line "That doesn't even work with Win2K" should tell you something - OS X is a far different beast, and I'm quite glad of it. That doesn't work with Win2K because Win2K, while quite possibly the best Windows available, still sucks as far as operating systems go. (And yes, I know what I'm talking about here, too. I've had to use Win2K on my workstation before, and I'll probably have to again. Shit, I run it on my desktop at home for when I want to play CS and Unreal.)
-clee
The flipside of that is that with such a small peripheral/hardware pool, Thing Just Work (TM) on Macs. It's a beautiful thing, my friend.
/home.
For example: The X86 platform might be more flexible as to the sheer amount of things that you _can_ do with it, but for most families, it's not flexible enough because it's too technically daunting for them to do the things that they _want_ to do with it.
Macs make it easy. Want to plug in a CD burner? Don't worry, you don't have to open up your case! Just plug in the firewire cord and the power, and off you go. New hard drive? Digital video camera? USB camera? Don't worry about drivers. OS X is nice stuff, and it's a crying shame that non-Mac owners will never get to make it their
-clee
Hmmm. I guess that the KDE developers don't want anyone to use their software either, eh? Or maybe Linus is sick and tired of people using his kernel, which is why both of these pretty high-profile projects use bzip2'd tarballs.
Please.
Not to mention that any recent (>7.0, iirc) RedHat, Mandrake, or Slackware copy of GNU's 'tar' program can decompress bz2 with a flag (-y on slackware, -J on redhat, and I forget for Mandrake). BZ2 might not be your personal favorite, but it's quite far from non-standard. Not to mention the fact that it's also BSD-licensed. It doesn't really get more free than that.
Other users have mentioned _why_ the MPlayer developers refuse to allow others to distribute binary distributions, but basically, it boils down to this.
1. Code that is compiled on the local machine will generally run faster than lowest-common-denominator compiled packages.
2. Some of the codecs that MPlayer uses are linked in during compile time, and are not Open Source/Free Software, so it's questionable to redistribute them (at best; in some cases, it's outright illegal).
3. The codec architecture in MPlayer is not dynamic, it's static. So the 'mplayer' binary that you end up with has all of those codecs loaded in, and it can't pick up new ones without a recompile. Chalk it up to over-optimization or bad design, but that's the fact.
I'm not saying that this is a textbook case of how to write, package, and distribute software, but it's definitely not a textbook case on how not to do it.
Dammit, I fed a troll again. : /
The funny thing is that you really don't appreciate the design because it's very subtle. I was _never_ a huge Apple fan - as a matter of fact, I was one of the more vocal anti-Mac people at my high school - until I heard whispers of OS X and the BSD system underneath it. Now that I actually own an iBook, let me tell you straight out - there are so many design issues that Apple has gotten right that it's not even funny.
Let's take (for example) the screen. The iBook, which is most definitely affordable (more so than most of the PC laptops I've seen, or at least comparable ones) has a gorgeous LCD. It's active matrix, it has beautiful true color support, and Apple's proprietary Quartz layer with its own fonts and their OpenType rendering literally beats the living sh*t out of ANYTHING from Microsoft (ClearType included) or the FreeType project.
Ah well. To use it is to love it. I won't bother explaining every single detail, mostly because there are so many that I can't recall every one off-hand. But there are reasons why Mac users rave about the design - there are things to appreciate.
Heh. I know you were kidding, but I'm the author of the dotNET style used in two of the new screenshots (possibly more, if there are more than 4 now). In any case, I'm now working on a style with animated text and pushbuttons. If you've got a copy of Qt3, grab http://clee.azsites.org/kde/se7en.tar.bz2 and follow the README. It's like dotNET on crack!
-clee
PS : Oh, one other thing. I'm considering renaming the dotNET style to dotORG, due to 1) possible legal ramifications wrt MS and 2) the fact that it could be pronounced 'dotorgy'. heh.
Try to use 'mouseconfig' to set your mouse-type to Microsoft Intellimouse (USB).
-chris
If you wanted to run a different Win32 GUI, but still run software written for Microsoft's GUI, you'd still have to have all the dlls installed for that one too. Of course, there isn't an alternative GUI/desktop shell and set of libraries, so that situation doesn't happen under Windows.
wrong. and yes, it's just as ugly to do this as it is to run KDE programs in GNOME or vice-versa.
Actually, if you add a line in your httpd.conf that looks like this:
.ida
.php .php3 .ida
AddHandler cgi-script
then you can use Perl to write a quick script which will do the reverse lookup and then send that email. Or, if you want to use PHP instead, alter your AddType line for PHP to this:
AddType application/x-httpd-php
Then restart apache, and throw a script named default.ida up to your DocumentRoot directory.
-Chris
(but does your workstation have a ssh client? do all of the servers you remotely access run sshd? Um probably not)
:)
You mean... yours don't? Um I'm sorry.
(I also administer pretty much every server that I remotely access, and the first thing I do after I install the OS is to install sshd. second thing is disable telnetd. then I go nuts on software configuration.
one word:
:)
autoslack.
(see freshmeat.net for details.
Actually, Iwill offers several mainboards with the ALi north/south bridges. I plan on buying one for my next motherboard (damned Via incompatibility...)
If you don't want to spend the $120 for a KA266 (average price offered on pricewatch) then you can try looking for an ECS K7AMA, which also uses the ALi MaGiK chipsets (and also has support for PC133 SDRAM). The ECS K7AMA is about $70 on pricewatch.
Ummm...
Have you taken a serious look at the W3C standard for CSS2?
It does contain several references for things such as page breaks (page-break-before, page-break-after, etc) and also for elements which should be printed on every page, e.g. headers and footers.
I used to think that these features were lacking and valid reasons to not use XHTML1+CSS2 for word processing, but they aren't. I have, as before stated, yet to find a valid reason why XHTML is not a decent word processor format.
and I just ordered my first-ever NetBSD CD from Cheapbytes. version: 1.5.
bastards : )
is this something that every BSD team does to me on purpose? as soon as I bought FreeBSD4.2, the very next day 4.3 came out. unbelievable.
-chris
If we can all agree on ONE flavor of XML, then then stuff like Microsoft Office will become a commodity...
That's the problem. XML is not the proper answer, because XML happens to be a "language definition language". Your post makes as much sense as saying "Let's use SGML as the standard web page language!" Which sounds almost feasible until you realize that SGML is a tool used to *define* standards like HTML, which can then be used as standard languages.
My vote for a standard word processing language actually would be XHTML1+CSS2. I can't name any features off-hand that I would ever use in a word processor that can't be done in XHTML with CSS... but I'm hoping someone out there can prove me wrong and show me why I'm an idiot. : )
-chris
Sorry to be so blunt here, but I'm going to be anway...
.NET services to be deployed from Windows2000 or XP servers, and it doesn't matter if you can use them on MacOS X or Linux or *BSD or your Commodore64, because the server is still MS based and they still have control.
<flame on>
This isn't a war over desktop market share, dumbass. This is all about the servers. Microsoft develops
The simple fact of the matter is that BSD has much more of the server market than people think, and most people with any sense refuse to put Linux in mission-critical server positions. Linux is getting better, yes, but the BSDs are at the moment better suited to serious server work.
That said, it's highly likely that any software Ximian writes will be easily ported to BSD anyway, as long as they have competent coders working on it, because UNIX environments are relatively similar from an application standpoint anyway. However, don't underestimate the importance of BSD here because it has close to zero percent desktop market share; that's like saying that nobody will use Internet Explorer because there are much better FTP clients available.
<flame off>
Windows has API support but no actual player.
Uhhh...
C:\WINNT\system32\dvdplay.exe
works for me at work. YMMV.
Except that they linked to an earlier article that they had written on it on the first page, and if you didn't understand what they were talking about, you could have easily clicked on the link to brush up on it beforehand.
Slack.
You do know that you can configure the width of your panel in the little "Preferences..." dialog, right?
Hmmm...
/etc/exports:
/mnt
contents of
# This is the NFS server at home
/usr/local/export (ro)
/home (rw)
#end contents
killall -HUP rpc.nfsd rpc.mountd
From another Linux machine:
mount server:/usr/local/export
works fine. How is that broken beyond hope?
(No, I wouldn't expect to use it in a data center. I'm perfectly happy using it at home to share files and serve up my home directories. But it's not "broken beyond hope" IMHO.)
Aside from all that Stormix, Easel, Slackware, Indera (linux based) all gone... Bye bye...
Aside from the fact that I think you meant Indrema, not Indera (because I've never heard of Indera, but I could just be stupid), you're horribly horribly wrong about Slackware. It's still doing quite fine and the 7.2 release should be coming along soon. Just because Wind River didn't decide to hire the Slack team does NOT mean that it's a dead distribution.