I am not new here, so I am not surprised. Or it always surprise me mildly how many people so much time dealing with complete non-issue, while related burning issues are ignored.
So, how we are doing with Unicode support genearlly:
PHP:
A new major version has been under development alongside PHP 5 for several years. This version was originally planned to be released as PHP 6 as a result of its significant changes, which included plans for full Unicode support. However, Unicode support took developers much longer to implement than originally thought, an the decision was made in March 2010[13] to move the project to a branch, with features still under development moved to a trunk.
PHP currently does not have native support for Unicode or multibyte strings; Unicode support is under development for a future version of PHP and will allow strings as well as class, method, and function names to contain non-ASCII characters.
Internally, Zarafa uses the windows-1252 charset just about everywhere. This means that we're storing the entire subject, to, from, etc in windows-1252. Only at the moment that the message is converted to an outgoing RTF822 message for SMTP, is the charset conversion done to follow various RFC822 standards.
I have my own bug for this on the Red Hat Bugzilla, which made it blocker for me, but I wonder how somebody could write in the 21st century a groupware server which is capable of working only with windows-1251 charset.
Novell gets (real) money for "intellectual property" (ip) in linux which Microsoft has placed a claim on. And yes, nothing has ever been identified and as far as we know, the claims are completely false. But so does redhat and so does Mandriva, Debian and so on. Sorry I am lost here -- when did Red Hat (learn your spelling, please), Mandriva, or Debian got any money from MSFT for alleged IP in Linux?
It's no mystery why the most successful OSS projects have strong central leadership. Vision can't be parallellized. You can maintain a piece of software in cooperative fashion, but if you try to apply direction to it you need one or a few people who have the authority on what that direction is, or your ship will just sail in circles.
Except, that central leadership scales poorly. You may be able to make one (albeit huge) project under the strong leadership (and even Linux kernel is poor example -- Linus begun to crumble under the weight of the requirements, sometimes around kernel 2.0 -- get your history straight; currently there are areas of kernel, where Linus has no idea what's going on -- see current discussion between uswsusp and suspend2), but to manage something SO huge as Debian is not possible to do by any one person. The closest to the Debian leader is the release manager, and even that has to be replaced frequently, because he gets totally worn out pretty fast.
> Errr, what would keep Ubuntu from continuing if Debian simply and abruptly came to an end?
Lack of maintainers and missing universe repository -- I don't remember exact numbers, but I have heard somewhere that Debian has approx. ten times active maintainers of what Ubuntu has. I believe that Ubuntu team is able to maintain well just what is the official repository (I am not sure what is the official name now). Surely, most of the former DDs would switch to Ubuntu, but then you would get the same problems Debian is struggling with now.
Matej
WinFS is no more, it's ex-project, it ceased to be
on
WinFS Gets the Axe
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· Score: 1
Being from Prague, Czechia, I had to think about general Vlasov and how this double treacher saved the city which is now so beloved for how much its architecture is preserved. Things are always more complicated.
Is it just me (or am I spoiled from Linux and KMail) but it seems to me that TB whenever I have to try it (getting into Windows wilderness) sucks roaylly. Especially working offline/online makes me cry every other time I try it (and I thought offline IMAP in KMail is experimental). Just today I removed all remnants of TB from my wife's Win computer and switched to putty with mutt, isync, leafnode, and slrn, because the instability of TB was just something I did not want to fight with.
Moreover, when trying to find a bug on bugzilla, I found bugs which seemed rather severe to me (potentially loosing mail) and there was not much development on them in last three years!! Wov! And I thought that there are too many bugs for KMail.
However, laptops are a different story. Of all the people I know who've tried to run Linux on a laptop, none have managed to get more than 90-95% of the whole system working. Modems don't work, or screen drivers don't work, or hibernating to disc doesn't work, or networking doesn't come up after hibernation, or... Sure, you can use a PC Card modem, but who wants to do that when you've already paid for a modem in your laptop???
That's strange. If I haven't been writing this on laptop (actually pretty old one -- Compaq Presario 1200), where modem (yes, WinModem) works, screen driver works, hibernating to disc works (here I am cheating a little bit, because I use patch on kernel -- got to swsusp.sf.net), my security updates are getting to me automatically (and no one threatens me that I will have to pay for them) courtesy of Debian Security Team, packages are consistent with each other, it happens in very pleasant and user-friendly Konqueror and KDE 3.2, if all this wasn't true for me, than I would believe. However, given all my experience I think that you (and all other who writing about something they have no clue at all) should think twice before writing things like this.
OK, and the third biggest punishment was against German BASF. Don't be _so_ paranoid.
Re:lets "debunk" those first screen shot aguments.
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
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· Score: 1
KDE is just turning onto XP clone. Yeah the gnome file picker is lite, but alot of us like that. What else do you need to do in a file picker? Look at fester adams? Click on "My Desktop"? "My Network Places" Some of us don't need it sugar coated.
Actually, one the most interesting things in the Linux development is
that Microsoft copies some GUI elements from KDE/Gnome (at least, they promised
in the next version of Windows to create mutliple virtual desktops,
which was feature of X win managers for years.
Slashdot Mirror
I have my own bug for this on the Red Hat Bugzilla, which made it blocker for me, but I wonder how somebody could write in the 21st century a groupware server which is capable of working only with windows-1251 charset.
> How many company's have entered into collaborations, with Microsoft, that did not end up with
> a rectal aperture far exceeding that of goatse?
I know at least about two -- Apple and Sun. And yes, there are many examples confirming your suspicion.
Matj
Except, that central leadership scales poorly. You may be able to make one (albeit huge) project under the strong leadership (and even Linux kernel is poor example -- Linus begun to crumble under the weight of the requirements, sometimes around kernel 2.0 -- get your history straight; currently there are areas of kernel, where Linus has no idea what's going on -- see current discussion between uswsusp and suspend2), but to manage something SO huge as Debian is not possible to do by any one person. The closest to the Debian leader is the release manager, and even that has to be replaced frequently, because he gets totally worn out pretty fast.
Matej
I am quite shocked that (especially commenting on the upstream article) nobody mentioned The Dead Parrot. "WinFS is not dead, it is just morphing" (comment for upstream). Wov! http://web.ukonline.co.uk/thursday.handleigh/humou r/monty-python/dead-parrot.htm
And this may be interesting as well -- Operation Keelhaul. This was always my one issue against Churchill.
Being from Prague, Czechia, I had to think about general Vlasov and how this double treacher saved the city which is now so beloved for how much its architecture is preserved. Things are always more complicated.
Matej
Is it just me (or am I spoiled from Linux and KMail) but it seems to me that TB whenever I have to try it (getting into Windows wilderness) sucks roaylly. Especially working offline/online makes me cry every other time I try it (and I thought offline IMAP in KMail is experimental). Just today I removed all remnants of TB from my wife's Win computer and switched to putty with mutt, isync, leafnode, and slrn, because the instability of TB was just something I did not want to fight with.
Moreover, when trying to find a bug on bugzilla, I found bugs which seemed rather severe to me (potentially loosing mail) and there was not much development on them in last three years!! Wov! And I thought that there are too many bugs for KMail.
No, thanks.
Matej
That's strange. If I haven't been writing this on laptop (actually pretty old one -- Compaq Presario 1200), where modem (yes, WinModem) works, screen driver works, hibernating to disc works (here I am cheating a little bit, because I use patch on kernel -- got to swsusp.sf.net), my security updates are getting to me automatically (and no one threatens me that I will have to pay for them) courtesy of Debian Security Team, packages are consistent with each other, it happens in very pleasant and user-friendly Konqueror and KDE 3.2, if all this wasn't true for me, than I would believe. However, given all my experience I think that you (and all other who writing about something they have no clue at all) should think twice before writing things like this.
Have a nice day,
Matej
OK, and the third biggest punishment was against German BASF. Don't be _so_ paranoid.
Actually, one the most interesting things in the Linux development is that Microsoft copies some GUI elements from KDE/Gnome (at least, they promised in the next version of Windows to create mutliple virtual desktops, which was feature of X win managers for years.