Suppose you are the manager for a project of this sort -- a demonstration that will sell hundreds, thousands, etc. of new processors and new software, the success of which will directly impact your marketing program. You are going to want to make sure EVERYTHING works as promised. So at this point there are two options:
1. Gateway and Micron were in on the FUD program with MS and just gave an appearance of Linux loyalty.
2. Gateway and Micron were pressured into folding by MS.
Option 1 falls apart for Gateway because of their past commitment to Linux. I don't know Micron's stance. But option 1 also gets Gateway into a lot of trouble with any demo attendees who were expecting Linux, if they deliberately lied all along.
* You find censorship nearly everywhere. The US, Sweden, Europe, the whole planet has some form of it. Sorry.
* Yes, America's culture is still influenced by its Puritan roots, but it's also influenced by a LARGE number of other cultures. Cultural conservativism is not a crime, it's just something that many people choose to disagree with.
Nietzsche can blow me. Everybody lives by some moral or ethical code, even Crowleyesque "do what thou wilt" paraphrases that amount to "nothing is immoral".
I dunno. I doubt a Pentium/90 sitting on a 128K ISDN line could serve millions of hits a day. But slap Apache in round-robin proxy mode in front of a cluster of Linux machines and you probably could.
Right tool for the right job -- don't expect a smallass Pentium to go up against big iron, whatever the operating system. But provided you're willing to throw the right hardware at it, Linux can compete against the "big boys" just fine.
Get the hell over it. How about we call the merging BANAIP (Bitch About Naming AFTER Integration, Please).
I don't have problem giving the GNU project credit where credit is due. The acronym was just something I made up off the top of my head:P
I've put my money where my mouth is - forked out cash for books on QT, CORBA, and all kinds of other interesting topics. I'll be working towards integration. I hope those who quibble about a silly issue like name will be willing to do the same.
I'm all in favor of this. It's good for Red Hat -- they get a mature, functional desktop now (KDE) and later (GNOME). They don't pick sides, they just produce a good distribution.
Anyway, I'd really love to see GNOME and KDE come together over a few solid issues. One of these is CORBA. Hot damn that stuff gives me wood.
Universal drag-n-drop plus universal theme support will virtually ensure a seamless blending of the two desktop systems.
The challenge, as I recall, was specifically directed at SQL Server v7. The fact that IBM's DB2 system sticks it to Oracle is nice, but inconsequential:)
And as far as the pricetag for the server hardware... it's price/performance, not the actual pricetag, that will probably influence a lot of big corporate buyers. If you REALLY NEED a DBMS that can do a query over a terabyte of data in 1 second or less, you will have a budget to get whatever ballsy hardware you need:)
Instead of worrying about embedding a scripting language, how about just exposing some of E's internals via CORBA? That lets people like me: * Actually integrate E with the rest of GNOME, which seems like a good idea seeing as the GNOME team gets wood every time E is mentioned and may or may not be aware that other window managers actually exist:) * Let me use whatever scripting language I want -- Perl, guile/scheme/lisp/fill-in-variant-here, hell, even C or Java. Writing an E configuration applet would be fun. I sure as hell don't want to be tied into someone else's idea of the One True Language, and I thought flexibility was what E was all about. * Keep the overhead in the E binary down (assuming the scripting language was statically linked), not to mention keeping the library requirements down (who wants to install Foo Bar Guile Lib or whatever when they already have ORBit installed as part of gnome?)
You all can feel it. It's just The Right Thing To Do. If this isn't being done already, it really needs to be done. If this is being done, it needs to be published:) I dunno what IPC mechanism you're talking about but I pray it's CORBA:)
I do a daily CVS checkout of wine, and a periodic (1-2 day intervals) test for MS Office 97 functionality. A week or two ago I was able to type in Word;)
Recent builds of Wine segfault on almost everything I run though. Might be an unresolved wine problem, might just be my box.. hmm.
Anyway, Office has run BETTER than MSIE in all my tests. I figure Corel+WINE will have Office running at a "2" rating in a few weeks.
Can be found on that amazing site, www.ars-technica.com -- the Damage Labs has been working with SMP and overclocked boards for awhile and they did some benchmarking about the value of SMP vs. faster clock speeds.
The hilarious part to me is that just YESTERDAY somebody was pasting me an excerpt from a news item saying something to the effect that "Other operating systems such as Novell or Linux will probably not disable the ID system..." suggesting that only Win95/98 would be able to.
I seem to remember someone here posting that his Linux machine's uptime exceeded the Windows NT 4 release date.. ie, at the time of the posting, his Linux machine had been running since before NT4 hit the market..
If that aint customer satisfaction, I dunno what is.
And more to the point, they got people to pay attention to the Linux phenomemon. CS majors who've never heard of it will learn about the new distributions. Prophets and mystics will discover the gurus RMS and ESR. Businesspeople will hear "big names support Linux" and glaze over. Not every single facet of the Linux experience can be explained in 10 minutes -- the fact that it got CNN coverage will cause people to investigate for themselves, and they WILL uncover the set of facts they're interested in.
"Do it yourself" is the lesson when working with free software. Maybe it's a lesson that applies to media research as well.
First, I have to disagree. I don't know what the going definition of "fluff" is but I saw three major points: 1. Bob Young talks about how his company is making money off Linux, and how it keeps on selling over their expectations, filmed in front of hundreds and hundreds of Linux shrinkwraps. 2. The "Gates hometown switches to Linux" mention. I think this is an invaluable sell. I had this story bookmarked from a long time back, but it's nice to see it get some fresh attention. 3. The fact that Linux has commercial support from the Big Names (including IBM). If nothing else convinces people that yes, there is commercial support, this should be it.
For people who think RMS, GNU, etc. etc. were snubbed: GET A FUCKING CLUE. This is CNN Fortune. This is not for computer people. This is not "a history of Linux and the GNU project". This is a TV program for BUSINESS PEOPLE, you know. The PHBs. They don't CARE about RMS or the GNU or the bazaar or any of that. They want to find out what it can do for their business, and that it's not just some hacker toy.
To that end, I think the CNN piece served its purpose more than adequately.
Before I started work at ASID, the Website was maintained via FTP -- everyone used a different account (which worked only because our Webserver is on a remote box that runs NT -- soon to change -- and the permissions were looser than a two-dollar hooker). Now people in the office connect to one share per domain name, that contains a mirrored copy of our website. When someone disconnects their session, postexec takes care of FTPing the changes using the wonderful tool sitecopy. Using Unix permissions, I can control who has accesss to overwrite what, and I can keep a log of everything that was changed.
Have you taken a look at ILU? It offers bindings for a load of languages (C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, and Scheme among them), has a free-ish license (no licensing fees that I can detect), can interoperate with CORBA via IIOP (still missing DII support, but that's coming RSN), and supports a number of transport types (TCP, UDP, RPC, and even HTTP). You can translate IDL specifications into ISL (the ILU specification language) and it supports asynchronous method calls (ie, for message passing).
I've been using it to develop a distributed application and I've never used anything simpler.
A couple points spring to mind... * Did they pay Troll Tech for the right to distribute Qt (which is required for KDE)? If not this could turn ugly very quickly. * What's wrong with an easy installation? Do not come down on people if they have a "windows-like" installation -- you have Slackware if you want to do it non-graphically and have a lot of choice. Remember, variety doesn't just apply to installation procedures, it applies to Linux distributions and (gasp) people too.
Nonsense -- this sort of project is valuable for several reasons; the important one to me is inspiration for more useful projects. It would be extremely useful for me to know which roommate uses how much water, electric, etc., which one eats my food, and who's at the door before I go answer it (some people can just wait). There are practical applications here waiting to be extracted and OSSed
It's ironic that Gnome displays more maturity than some of its proponents, and that KDE displays more stability than some of its supporters;) Having said that, I run both systems (parts of both at the same time) and am happy with the comfortable balance I've found. For those of you who want to switch back and forth, either Blackbox or WindowMaker are ideal light-weight window managers. For the toolkit purists, themes are definitely getting there so look-n-feel issues become less important.
One sour note came with the new glib (1.1.13) -- missing symbols trying to run my shiny new GNOME apps. This was fixed by rebuilding from the source RPM. Now I just need to rebuild gnotepad+ to make it work. C'est la vie.
Or you could bring up eth0 on a known fake address (pick something highly random in 10.0.0.0) and start up tcpdump -i eth0 -p -n -e, use perl to hunt for a matching MAC address (available from ifconfig), then ifconfig your card back up using the "real" IP. Ugly, but hey. Isn't this functionality what reverse-ARP is for?
I think it's a riot that the same company who was busted trying to orchestrate grass-roots support for themselves, not to mention (allegedly) arranging for positive survey results in a study then used by their DOJ-trial witness, should use the phrase "PR stunt" ANYWHERE.
One more corporate hypocrisy to file in the "why-slashdotters-flame-microsoft" cabinet.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose you are the manager for a project of this sort -- a demonstration that will sell hundreds, thousands, etc. of new processors and new software, the success of which will directly impact your marketing program. You are going to want to make sure EVERYTHING works as promised. So at this point there are two options:
1. Gateway and Micron were in on the FUD program with MS and just gave an appearance of Linux loyalty.
2. Gateway and Micron were pressured into folding by MS.
Option 1 falls apart for Gateway because of their past commitment to Linux. I don't know Micron's stance. But option 1 also gets Gateway into a lot of trouble with any demo attendees who were expecting Linux, if they deliberately lied all along.
I think Network Solutions is doing the world a favor by demonstrating just why fair competition is desperately needed in the TLD world.
Some facts.
* You find censorship nearly everywhere. The US, Sweden, Europe, the whole planet has some form of it. Sorry.
* Yes, America's culture is still influenced by its Puritan roots, but it's also influenced by a LARGE number of other cultures. Cultural conservativism is not a crime, it's just something that many people choose to disagree with.
Nietzsche can blow me. Everybody lives by some moral or ethical code, even Crowleyesque "do what thou wilt" paraphrases that amount to "nothing is immoral".
I dunno. I doubt a Pentium/90 sitting on a 128K ISDN line could serve millions of hits a day. But slap Apache in round-robin proxy mode in front of a cluster of Linux machines and you probably could.
Right tool for the right job -- don't expect a smallass Pentium to go up against big iron, whatever the operating system. But provided you're willing to throw the right hardware at it, Linux can compete against the "big boys" just fine.
Get the hell over it. How about we call the merging BANAIP (Bitch About Naming AFTER Integration, Please).
:P
I don't have problem giving the GNU project credit where credit is due. The acronym was just something I made up off the top of my head
I've put my money where my mouth is - forked out cash for books on QT, CORBA, and all kinds of other interesting topics. I'll be working towards integration. I hope those who quibble about a silly issue like name will be willing to do the same.
I'm all in favor of this. It's good for Red Hat -- they get a mature, functional desktop now (KDE) and later (GNOME). They don't pick sides, they just produce a good distribution.
Anyway, I'd really love to see GNOME and KDE come together over a few solid issues. One of these is CORBA. Hot damn that stuff gives me wood.
Universal drag-n-drop plus universal theme support will virtually ensure a seamless blending of the two desktop systems.
The challenge, as I recall, was specifically directed at SQL Server v7. The fact that IBM's DB2 system sticks it to Oracle is nice, but inconsequential :)
:)
And as far as the pricetag for the server hardware... it's price/performance, not the actual pricetag, that will probably influence a lot of big corporate buyers. If you REALLY NEED a DBMS that can do a query over a terabyte of data in 1 second or less, you will have a budget to get whatever ballsy hardware you need
Long live big iron.
The dancing dwarf at the end of the Black Lodge episode in Twin Peaks is my personal favorite.
:)
But seriously: Lookin good, as always Rob, keep up the good work
Instead of worrying about embedding a scripting language, how about just exposing some of E's internals via CORBA? That lets people like me: :)
:) I dunno what IPC mechanism you're talking about but I pray it's CORBA :)
* Actually integrate E with the rest of GNOME, which seems like a good idea seeing as the GNOME team gets wood every time E is mentioned and may or may not be aware that other window managers actually exist
* Let me use whatever scripting language I want -- Perl, guile/scheme/lisp/fill-in-variant-here, hell, even C or Java. Writing an E configuration applet would be fun. I sure as hell don't want to be tied into someone else's idea of the One True Language, and I thought flexibility was what E was all about.
* Keep the overhead in the E binary down (assuming the scripting language was statically linked), not to mention keeping the library requirements down (who wants to install Foo Bar Guile Lib or whatever when they already have ORBit installed as part of gnome?)
You all can feel it. It's just The Right Thing To Do. If this isn't being done already, it really needs to be done. If this is being done, it needs to be published
I do a daily CVS checkout of wine, and a periodic (1-2 day intervals) test for MS Office 97 functionality. A week or two ago I was able to type in Word ;)
Recent builds of Wine segfault on almost everything I run though. Might be an unresolved wine problem, might just be my box.. hmm.
Anyway, Office has run BETTER than MSIE in all my tests. I figure Corel+WINE will have Office running at a "2" rating in a few weeks.
Can be found on that amazing site, www.ars-technica.com -- the Damage Labs has been working with SMP and overclocked boards for awhile and they did some benchmarking about the value of SMP vs. faster clock speeds.
The hilarious part to me is that just YESTERDAY somebody was pasting me an excerpt from a news item saying something to the effect that "Other operating systems such as Novell or Linux will probably not disable the ID system..." suggesting that only Win95/98 would be able to.
Install Linux.
Install tilt sensor.
Connect to Lego Mindstorm.
Connect to wireless modem or radio unit.
Whee self-navigating robots.
I seem to remember someone here posting that his Linux machine's uptime exceeded the Windows NT 4 release date.. ie, at the time of the posting, his Linux machine had been running since before NT4 hit the market..
If that aint customer satisfaction, I dunno what is.
And more to the point, they got people to pay attention to the Linux phenomemon. CS majors who've never heard of it will learn about the new distributions. Prophets and mystics will discover the gurus RMS and ESR. Businesspeople will hear "big names support Linux" and glaze over. Not every single facet of the Linux experience can be explained in 10 minutes -- the fact that it got CNN coverage will cause people to investigate for themselves, and they WILL uncover the set of facts they're interested in.
"Do it yourself" is the lesson when working with free software. Maybe it's a lesson that applies to media research as well.
First, I have to disagree. I don't know what the going definition of "fluff" is but I saw three major points:
1. Bob Young talks about how his company is making money off Linux, and how it keeps on selling over their expectations, filmed in front of hundreds and hundreds of Linux shrinkwraps.
2. The "Gates hometown switches to Linux" mention. I think this is an invaluable sell. I had this story bookmarked from a long time back, but it's nice to see it get some fresh attention.
3. The fact that Linux has commercial support from the Big Names (including IBM). If nothing else convinces people that yes, there is commercial support, this should be it.
For people who think RMS, GNU, etc. etc. were snubbed: GET A FUCKING CLUE. This is CNN Fortune. This is not for computer people. This is not "a history of Linux and the GNU project". This is a TV program for BUSINESS PEOPLE, you know. The PHBs. They don't CARE about RMS or the GNU or the bazaar or any of that. They want to find out what it can do for their business, and that it's not just some hacker toy.
To that end, I think the CNN piece served its purpose more than adequately.
Flame on.
Before I started work at ASID, the Website was maintained via FTP -- everyone used a different account (which worked only because our Webserver is on a remote box that runs NT -- soon to change -- and the permissions were looser than a two-dollar hooker). Now people in the office connect to one share per domain name, that contains a mirrored copy of our website. When someone disconnects their session, postexec takes care of FTPing the changes using the wonderful tool sitecopy. Using Unix permissions, I can control who has accesss to overwrite what, and I can keep a log of everything that was changed.
Go samba!
Have you taken a look at ILU? It offers bindings for a load of languages (C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, and Scheme among them), has a free-ish license (no licensing fees that I can detect), can interoperate with CORBA via IIOP (still missing DII support, but that's coming RSN), and supports a number of transport types (TCP, UDP, RPC, and even HTTP). You can translate IDL specifications into ISL (the ILU specification language) and it supports asynchronous method calls (ie, for message passing).
I've been using it to develop a distributed application and I've never used anything simpler.
ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html
As someone who's been using gnome on and off since 0.nothing, I'd like to say the following.
I have yet to see the required, significant, very important Changelog entry that says:
made gmc STOP SUCKING.
The Gnome motto seems to be "Real Men use CVS".
Death to all Gnome-vs-KDE flamewars.
Thank you.
A couple points spring to mind...
* Did they pay Troll Tech for the right to distribute Qt (which is required for KDE)? If not this could turn ugly very quickly.
* What's wrong with an easy installation? Do not come down on people if they have a "windows-like" installation -- you have Slackware if you want to do it non-graphically and have a lot of choice. Remember, variety doesn't just apply to installation procedures, it applies to Linux distributions and (gasp) people too.
Give these guys a fuckin break.
Nonsense -- this sort of project is valuable for several reasons; the important one to me is inspiration for more useful projects. It would be
extremely useful for me to know which roommate uses how much water, electric, etc., which one eats my food, and who's at the door before I go answer it (some people can just wait). There are practical applications here waiting to be extracted and OSSed
It's ironic that Gnome displays more maturity than some of its proponents, and that KDE displays more stability than some of its supporters ;) Having said that, I run both systems (parts of both at the same time) and am happy with the comfortable balance I've found. For those of you who want to switch back and forth, either Blackbox or WindowMaker are ideal light-weight window managers. For the toolkit purists, themes are definitely getting there so look-n-feel issues become less important.
One sour note came with the new glib (1.1.13) -- missing symbols trying to run my shiny new GNOME apps. This was fixed by rebuilding from the source RPM. Now I just need to rebuild gnotepad+ to make it work. C'est la vie.
I gotta say I liked it. Whatever you think of Scott Adams -- get over it. Separate the man from his art.
Or you could bring up eth0 on a known fake address (pick something highly random in 10.0.0.0) and start up tcpdump -i eth0 -p -n -e, use perl to hunt for a matching MAC address (available from ifconfig), then ifconfig your card back up using the "real" IP. Ugly, but hey. Isn't this functionality what reverse-ARP is for?
I think it's a riot that the same company who was busted trying to orchestrate grass-roots support for themselves, not to mention (allegedly) arranging for positive survey results in a study then used by their DOJ-trial witness, should use the phrase "PR stunt" ANYWHERE.
One more corporate hypocrisy to file in the "why-slashdotters-flame-microsoft" cabinet.