I still have yet to understand what kind of problems people have with X! It seems to work fine from my perspective. And no... I'm not using twm and a few xterms. I am an eye-candy addict, so I've been bouncing around between the Enlightenment wm, KDE and GNOME. So far, I've seen NONE of the issues that people seem to complain about. X is snappy, and as of RedHat 8, looks just as good as Windows with the exception of a few apps that don't take advantage of the nicely rendered fonts in X. I haven't seen any kind of performance problems and I tend to run more than one X server on the same machine, at one time. the people who say X "looks ancient" either don't know how to use X, or are thinking about what it looked like in 1997. The support for video cards is very nice, and ever since X went modular in it's 4.0 series, it's been incredibly flexible. About the only other issue I can see has nothing to do with X's performance, but has everything to do with the development of X. I echoed Alan Cox's statment in the last discussion. Yes... something "wild" does need to be done to get development on X going. I think a lot of the problems are probably caused by the fact that the CODE is incredibly dense and is not written in a way that people used to writing GNU software are accustomed to. ON that front... yes X does have problems.
Actually, I am reminded of the state of fonts when I was using Windows 3.1 with regard to having more than one format. When I got my first PC, it had Windows 3.1 on it. Since I planned to be a professional desktop publisher at the time, I new that TrueType fonts were inferior for professional publications. So, I purchased some Adobe fonts and installed the Adoby Type Manager. This worked great for my printing, but made things kind of weird with regard to the rest of the system.
In XFree86, I think it WOULD be a good idea of a set of defacto TrueType fonts were packaged with X. I think I remembered hearing that there were copyright problems or something... which is why we don't have a native TrueType font pack or software for easily creating TrueType fonts in Linux. But, the point is that SOMETHING needs to be done about the basic set of fonts that X comes with.
As far as the potential conflict between the two projects, I say "let the best man win". Sometimes, you are never going to get past the arguing about which approach is better and you just wind up talking and never doing. If either project winds up with something inferior, it will be dropped in a second by most users and distros. So let's have at it and get some work done!
I have to agree. Until the End of the World is very close, in terms of being a favorite, to Wings of Desire. It has a completely different feel than Wings. A lot more accessible. I will be looking forward to a DVD release if that happens.:) In fact, this movie is what inspired my wife and I to take a trip to Australia. (We didn't make it to Coober Pedy, but we were in the outback.) Just a fantastic movie! I have to agree. Anyone who appreciates that movie makes it onto my friends list even if we never agree on anything else.:)
Hmmm. Where do I start with this one? I didn't post any of the above for one thing. I don't think I'd participate in such a challenge since it sounds like you are pretty unscrupulous in the first place. My Linux servers are running just fine for a few years now thank you very much. They are doing just what I need with stability, security and robustness. It sounds to me like you just like picking fights with people.
Wrong. Well, true for Linux, but who the hell cares about that? Nobody uses Linux anyway. PDF is most definitely in Windows at the OS level: it's in a printer driver.
You are completely mistaken. Windows does NOT have PDF functionality built into it ANYWHERE. Yes, you can use *Postscript* drivers for some printer in Windows, but that is NOT PDF. Why don't you go and do something about your ignorance with regard to computers? If you want PDF capabilities in Windows, you need to buy the Adobe product. So, you are completely wrong (as usual), it's NOT built into the OS.
Hehehehe. I like the asswipe post from the other AC. It's VERY appropriate.
My god you are ill informed!!! You subscribe to the security through obscurity approach? Ha! Lame!
Full disclosre is the best security model. Expose everything so that something can be done about it. By displaying the mechanisms of the security hole, you also light a fire under the ass of anyone responsible for it. Open source is the best at tackling this since the coders are on the problem as soon as it's revealed. The fix is usually availble within a day if not hours after the announcement. On the other hand, companies like Microsoft and Sun sit on their asses babbling about "unknown issues" when someone DOES find a problem and brings it to their attnetion. It's not a wonder that their products are hacked so frequently.
Could wind up passing, given the decidedly conservative nature of the Supreme Court and the current administration now. After all, it's almost a "thoughtcrime" to be opposed to the war right now.
Here's a Paul Verhoven film only a small few are probably familiar with. It starred Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It was called "Flesh and Blood". I saw it back in high school (1987) when a friend of mine brough it over. It couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a comedy, a drama, and action film or a period piece. It excelled at none of those roles, but was still somewhat charming. Poor acting (with the exception of Rutger Hauer), terrible direction, but... there are some great lines from it:
While the band of merry merecnaries are setting up camp in the rain and find a statue of St. Martin:
Friar (said maniacaly): "Look! It's a hand. This is a sign from god!!!" Henchman: "Bah!! It looks like a lump of shit!"
or
As the mercenaries loot, rape and pillage a small kingdom:
Female merc 1 (While picking threw jewelery): "Oh... they're all so beautiful. I don't know which one to take." Female merc 2: "Take them both you silly bitch!!"
Now we will know who to boycott in protest of braindead copy protection schemes. Probably won't matter much to me anyway, since all the music I buy isn't popular enough to be profitable and hence doesn't employ copy protection...
Someone needs to mod the parent up. Here's a repost of someone "telling it like it is":
While it might make some folks happy that E17 is jumping the alpha-blending anti-aliasing bandwagon behind Apple's OS X, what annoys me it that they do not copy the intelligent concept behind Aqua: display PDF.
What Apple has done is define an abstraction for graphical applications. What others are copying are some of the nice uses of those abstractions: anti-aliasing and alpha-blending.
It's really a shame the only thing they understand is the surface details, and don't get the underlying beauty.
Re:stick to e16 for a wm, but e17 has nice stuff
on
State of the E-nion
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have to agree with you, I miss the abundance of window managers that used to be out there. All the different approaches, the interesting ideas, etc... Now the innovation that was taking place is kind of dying. GNOME and KDE are nice, but they don't try much that is edgy. Enlightenment is about the last stop these days if you want to see some innovative ideas in GUI design.
I think a lot of this has to do with lowest common denominator thinking. MOST people are satisfied to be able to just maximize, minimize and close windows. In fact a friend of mine still questions the need for multiple desktops and windowshading. I think the point is that we need multiple approaches to be able to satisfy varying work environments. It's kind of like writing your own.bash_profile. No two are (or should be) alike, if you are talking about an advanced user. The GUI should be the same way. That's what projects like GNOME and KDE seem to forget. They are too focused on beating Windows by being the same.
Hello. Would you please check out my journal? I think we have some things in common. If you agree, befreidn me. I've already befriended you because I like your posts.
Personally, I agree with that statement... unfortunately my employer doesn't. They want the accountability of a big vendor. Now that HP is seeling RedHat, I may be in better shape though.
But, hey... I was able to convince them that Sun was a bad idea, and now that a budget crunch is upon us, they might be more open to OSS. For us, getting our staff up to snuff on OSS products isn't much of a stretch and wouldn't require hiring anyone new on, so... it may very well be a distinct possibility in the near future.
I use OO.o myself on both the Linux and Windows platforms. While I am very happy that there is an OSS alternative to MS Office, I have run into quite a few issues with OO.o that make it a little harder to use.
When my wife and I were getting married last Summer, we needed to make an insert to send out with our invitations. We used OO.o (it had just gone 1.0 when we were making our insert) and had a lot of difficulty with setting up text boxes for layout. In MS Office, you just insert a text box and stretch it out to the size you need using a marquee tool. Then you can set properties on that text box. If you don't want it to have a line around it, you select 'no line' from the line style of it's properties. Or you can change the background color of the text box, etc... In OO.o there was no functionality exactly like this. We finally figured out how to do what we wanted to do, but it was cumbersome and took a lot longer than it should have. In addition, it was also a lot less accurate. Fortunately, I have little need for an Office suite about 99% of the time.
I DO expect OO.o to get better and better as the development continues. However, I hope that the developers at OO.o eventually set up some kind of system (kind of like the folks at Transgaming) that allows people to vote on "most desired features". This way they can address the needs and desires of the users in a direct way.
I KNOW I'll get modded down for this, but here goes.
I currently work with Sun products pretty intimately at work. I have to say that while the Solaris OS and it's related contract support from Sun is better than Microsoft's Windows OS and it's related support, I will warn EVERYONE away from SunONE products.
I've been working with iPlanet Messaging Server for about two years and have had some of the most outrageously poor technical support I've ever gotten from a vendor. After the Sun/Netscape alliance ended, Sun got the iPlanet products for themselves. So, the new iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 suite should now be known as SunONE Messaging Server... any day now.
The problems that I've had with this system are so incredibly stupid as to be unbelievable:
-multiple administration interfaces that are half broken. (They actually told me to use one interface to do user deletions and another interface to modify users, and yet another one to add users!) -dense and very pooly laid out documentation (Read thousands of pages that barely help you get anywhere.) -user forums that up until last year almost never worked or archived messages (WHY did they take away the NNTP groups they used to have!!!??) -inconsistencies throughout the entire system with regard to how one would make changes to mail users or implement new mail domains when hosting multiple mail domains. -No decent admin interface to the LDAP db. (Their "Java Console" is the slowest piece of shit I've ever worked with. Screen updates take about 5-10 minutes just to get a menu to pop up!!) -No decent GUI based tools to deal with high volume data in LDAP (I'm sorry, but walking through a text file that describes your users, groups, domains and configuration that is megabytes in size, is NOT realistic! They need a hierarchical representation of data in a GUI based app. And NO... the Java Console is NOT it!) -Major naming inconsistencies. (Some parts of SunONE iMS are called "Netscape", other parts are "iPlanet" and others are "Sun". None are currently "SunONE" yet. The only excuse I hear is that they are slowly "getting there". !!!??? It's been TWO FUCKING YEARS!!!! You'd think they would have, at least, gotten the mnaming straight and provided on Admin tool rather than the four or five that they currently have, half of which shouldn't be used for certain operations!!)
When I bitch about these things to support, I get the same old tired answer "...iMS is a product that is in development, so it should be expected that some things will be a little inconsistent. Just wait a little longer" I've been waiting two years.
After a recent migration from iMS 5.1 to iMS 5.2, I found that their recommendation was to install the new mail system on a "test box" and run with it for a few months before going live with the real thing. They didn't recommend that I do an "upgrade in place" on our original box if we didn't want to have any downtime. WTF???!! Of course we don't want ANY downtime on a mail system. The techs I talked to said to expect anywhere from a 24-36 hour total working time (read a few work days) of downtime while migrating to the new version of iMS. !!!??? We wound up buying a new box to start clean with iMS 5.2 and then migrated users, groups, domains and mail over. The other box will become our redundant backup system. However, I told my boss that we should NEVER buy anything from Sun again. And you know what? They listened. We are doing a multimillion dollar transistion to a new data base system. The database vendor was pushing Sun, but said that the product would also run on HP-UX. We already have a very close relationship with HP (and history with Compaq and DEC). So... we told them no thanks and went with HP-UX instead of Sun.
Once we've gotten some years of use out of our Sun boxes, they will be retired and replaced with HP-UX boxes.
I hope Sun straightens out the SunONE products. The amount of time I've spent trying to learn that crap could probably h
You make a good point. The Earth DOES rotate around the sun. That IS a fact.
So... refute this fact:
War is destructive, violent and largely useless in the 21st century.
There are plenty of ways to elicit regime change and none of them require massive loss of life. Hell... I'd even back black-ops to take out Saddam and his regime at this point in time. What I am saying is that sometimes, if people aren't listening (because they've been brainwashed by a very crafty regime: Bush) you need to wake people up to the truth. Sometimes the only way to do that is by making some kind of display that no one can ignore. And, sadly, sometimes people don't want to wake up... They just want to turn over and hit the snooze button a few more times and they get pissed off when something isn't letting them. That's the point.
Before I start this, I have to make sure that people reading it actually "get" what XFree86 is. A lot of people who complain about X (in the generic sense) think that it IS the GUI. They see that X shaped cursor and the 50% gray background and think "ewwww!" But what they don't understand is that the "GUI", as they perceive it, is really an environment like KDE or GNOME. Assuming we are talking KDE... you need X for KDE to run and vice-versa. They are interdependent. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say "I like KDE better than X Windows". With that said:
After reading some of the comments on the OS News board, it seems to me that there are two needs arising out of the discussions:
-Continuing development of XFree86 and it's robust feature set (many of which are sadly lacking in Windows unfortunately)
-A completely new non-networkable direct rendered system (more like the Windows approach)
First of all, to make my case, I will tell you to think of it in terms of a standard console vs. a framebuffer console. They both have their place for two different types of users. In the same way, a system like XFree86 and some new direct rendered display system will have acceptance with certain kinds of users.
I, personally, love XFree86 and all it has to offer. It performs very well for me on a local workstation as well as over my home network and at my place of employ. Displays are easily exported on a per application or per session basis as needed. And with the LBX proxy, I can use it when VPNed into my workplace.
It's VERY flexible: I typically run 3-4 X servers on my workstation and laptop so that I can dedicate full screens for certain things at different resolutions or run under different users simultaneously on each display. (To those in the know: How's that for fast user switching? XP cough cough...:) Ctl-Alt-F8 and you are one user, Ctrl-Alt-F9 and you are another, etc...)
For example, if I am playing a game (Sierra's Lighthouse for instance) under Wine, I like to do it full screen, with no desktop environment at all. Just the game. What's even nicer is that I can actually make the display large enough the Lighthouse isn't a small window with black space around it, it almost becomes full screen. Same thing with Riven. All this while I still have IRC downloading the latest episode of Enterprise in another session as another user. All I need to do to check on my download progress is the Virtual Console key combo.
Now... I will say that if a project starts up to provide a direct rendered system. This could actually be a good thing. It would probably meet the needs of the generic home user fairly well, and remote desktop services could be provided by something like VNC or an RDP clone. I do admit that Joe Average is probably going to have little use now and in the future for X type capabilities. So, this new system should be packed with other "consumer" features. Specifically, the 3D support for games, DVD and MPEG acceleration where applicable and TV in/out support for cards that have such features. A project like this would do a lot to make Linux more palatable to the average consumer. All a distro would have to do then is break down their distros into categories (RedHat for example):
-RedHat "Lite" - A distro for the average consumer that is rypically pre-installed on new systems. No X, no devel tools, no servers, just a very basic OS that allows them to safely get on the Internet, run some productivity apps and play some games.
-RedHat "WS" - As it exists currently. With X (just the direct rendering system that people are alluding to), devel tools, basic servers and some of the enterprise features that power users crave.
-RedHat "Collection" - Capable of installing every distro from one set of disks. You just choose which distro combo you want.
So... don't bash X because you don't understand it. It's a great system with a great feature set. It would be nice to see 3D acceleration networkable or even clusterable though...
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I still have yet to understand what kind of problems people have with X! It seems to work fine from my perspective. And no... I'm not using twm and a few xterms. I am an eye-candy addict, so I've been bouncing around between the Enlightenment wm, KDE and GNOME. So far, I've seen NONE of the issues that people seem to complain about. X is snappy, and as of RedHat 8, looks just as good as Windows with the exception of a few apps that don't take advantage of the nicely rendered fonts in X. I haven't seen any kind of performance problems and I tend to run more than one X server on the same machine, at one time. the people who say X "looks ancient" either don't know how to use X, or are thinking about what it looked like in 1997. The support for video cards is very nice, and ever since X went modular in it's 4.0 series, it's been incredibly flexible. About the only other issue I can see has nothing to do with X's performance, but has everything to do with the development of X. I echoed Alan Cox's statment in the last discussion. Yes... something "wild" does need to be done to get development on X going. I think a lot of the problems are probably caused by the fact that the CODE is incredibly dense and is not written in a way that people used to writing GNU software are accustomed to. ON that front... yes X does have problems.
Actually, I am reminded of the state of fonts when I was using Windows 3.1 with regard to having more than one format. When I got my first PC, it had Windows 3.1 on it. Since I planned to be a professional desktop publisher at the time, I new that TrueType fonts were inferior for professional publications. So, I purchased some Adobe fonts and installed the Adoby Type Manager. This worked great for my printing, but made things kind of weird with regard to the rest of the system.
In XFree86, I think it WOULD be a good idea of a set of defacto TrueType fonts were packaged with X. I think I remembered hearing that there were copyright problems or something... which is why we don't have a native TrueType font pack or software for easily creating TrueType fonts in Linux. But, the point is that SOMETHING needs to be done about the basic set of fonts that X comes with.
As far as the potential conflict between the two projects, I say "let the best man win". Sometimes, you are never going to get past the arguing about which approach is better and you just wind up talking and never doing. If either project winds up with something inferior, it will be dropped in a second by most users and distros. So let's have at it and get some work done!
I have to agree. Until the End of the World is very close, in terms of being a favorite, to Wings of Desire. It has a completely different feel than Wings. A lot more accessible. I will be looking forward to a DVD release if that happens. :) In fact, this movie is what inspired my wife and I to take a trip to Australia. (We didn't make it to Coober Pedy, but we were in the outback.) Just a fantastic movie! I have to agree. Anyone who appreciates that movie makes it onto my friends list even if we never agree on anything else. :)
Running out of steam are we asswipe?
Hmmm. Where do I start with this one? I didn't post any of the above for one thing. I don't think I'd participate in such a challenge since it sounds like you are pretty unscrupulous in the first place. My Linux servers are running just fine for a few years now thank you very much. They are doing just what I need with stability, security and robustness. It sounds to me like you just like picking fights with people.
You are completely mistaken. Windows does NOT have PDF functionality built into it ANYWHERE. Yes, you can use *Postscript* drivers for some printer in Windows, but that is NOT PDF. Why don't you go and do something about your ignorance with regard to computers? If you want PDF capabilities in Windows, you need to buy the Adobe product. So, you are completely wrong (as usual), it's NOT built into the OS.
Hehehehe. I like the asswipe post from the other AC. It's VERY appropriate.
My god you are ill informed!!! You subscribe to the security through obscurity approach? Ha! Lame!
Full disclosre is the best security model. Expose everything so that something can be done about it. By displaying the mechanisms of the security hole, you also light a fire under the ass of anyone responsible for it. Open source is the best at tackling this since the coders are on the problem as soon as it's revealed. The fix is usually availble within a day if not hours after the announcement. On the other hand, companies like Microsoft and Sun sit on their asses babbling about "unknown issues" when someone DOES find a problem and brings it to their attnetion. It's not a wonder that their products are hacked so frequently.
Well... I guess that means that's the end of the line for Anime and Hentai fans... Per Bowie J. Poag anyway.
Moderators note: Funny -1
Could wind up passing, given the decidedly conservative nature of the Supreme Court and the current administration now. After all, it's almost a "thoughtcrime" to be opposed to the war right now.
Fuck you! (Wait two minutes)...
Here's a Paul Verhoven film only a small few are probably familiar with. It starred Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It was called "Flesh and Blood". I saw it back in high school (1987) when a friend of mine brough it over. It couldn't decide whether it wanted to be a comedy, a drama, and action film or a period piece. It excelled at none of those roles, but was still somewhat charming. Poor acting (with the exception of Rutger Hauer), terrible direction, but... there are some great lines from it:
While the band of merry merecnaries are setting up camp in the rain and find a statue of St. Martin:
Friar (said maniacaly): "Look! It's a hand. This is a sign from god!!!"
Henchman: "Bah!! It looks like a lump of shit!"
or
As the mercenaries loot, rape and pillage a small kingdom:
Female merc 1 (While picking threw jewelery): "Oh... they're all so beautiful. I don't know which one to take."
Female merc 2: "Take them both you silly bitch!!"
This really should be a cult film.
Hmmm... Might you be a Scientologist? How's Xenu the clam today? ;P
Wim Wenders film: Wings of Desire
Two and half hours of truth, beauty and love. Of course any film by him is really good, but highly overlooked.
Wow. I didn't know that. So AfterStep is really gone? That's a shame. It was my first windowmanager of choice when I moved to Linux in 97.
Yes. Actually they are quite popular when compared to some of the music I listen to. Imbruglia and Dion are still pretty mainstream stuff.
Most of them will see the numbers and the hype and believe it. But, as many others have said, it IS a myth. Don't believe it? Try this:
If you are a Linux user:
du -h
Tar and gzip the folder, then do a vdir on it.
What do you see? Same size? Possibly even larger?
If you are a Windows user:
Right click and get properties on a folder full of mp3s or oggs.
Zip it up and compare the zip file's size with the size of the original folder.
Again, what do you see? Same size? Possibly even larger?
Like someone else said, you can't compress what's already compressed.
Now we will know who to boycott in protest of braindead copy protection schemes. Probably won't matter much to me anyway, since all the music I buy isn't popular enough to be profitable and hence doesn't employ copy protection...
Someone needs to mod the parent up. Here's a repost of someone "telling it like it is":
While it might make some folks happy that E17 is jumping the alpha-blending anti-aliasing bandwagon behind Apple's OS X, what annoys me it that they do not copy the intelligent concept behind Aqua: display PDF.
What Apple has done is define an abstraction for graphical applications. What others are copying are some of the nice uses of those abstractions: anti-aliasing and alpha-blending.
It's really a shame the only thing they understand is the surface details, and don't get the underlying beauty.
Didn't Afterstep become GNUStep?
I have to agree with you, I miss the abundance of window managers that used to be out there. All the different approaches, the interesting ideas, etc... Now the innovation that was taking place is kind of dying. GNOME and KDE are nice, but they don't try much that is edgy. Enlightenment is about the last stop these days if you want to see some innovative ideas in GUI design.
I think a lot of this has to do with lowest common denominator thinking. MOST people are satisfied to be able to just maximize, minimize and close windows. In fact a friend of mine still questions the need for multiple desktops and windowshading. I think the point is that we need multiple approaches to be able to satisfy varying work environments. It's kind of like writing your own .bash_profile. No two are (or should be) alike, if you are talking about an advanced user. The GUI should be the same way. That's what projects like GNOME and KDE seem to forget. They are too focused on beating Windows by being the same.
Hello. Would you please check out my journal? I think we have some things in common. If you agree, befreidn me. I've already befriended you because I like your posts.
Personally, I agree with that statement... unfortunately my employer doesn't. They want the accountability of a big vendor. Now that HP is seeling RedHat, I may be in better shape though.
But, hey... I was able to convince them that Sun was a bad idea, and now that a budget crunch is upon us, they might be more open to OSS. For us, getting our staff up to snuff on OSS products isn't much of a stretch and wouldn't require hiring anyone new on, so... it may very well be a distinct possibility in the near future.
I use OO.o myself on both the Linux and Windows platforms. While I am very happy that there is an OSS alternative to MS Office, I have run into quite a few issues with OO.o that make it a little harder to use.
When my wife and I were getting married last Summer, we needed to make an insert to send out with our invitations. We used OO.o (it had just gone 1.0 when we were making our insert) and had a lot of difficulty with setting up text boxes for layout. In MS Office, you just insert a text box and stretch it out to the size you need using a marquee tool. Then you can set properties on that text box. If you don't want it to have a line around it, you select 'no line' from the line style of it's properties. Or you can change the background color of the text box, etc... In OO.o there was no functionality exactly like this. We finally figured out how to do what we wanted to do, but it was cumbersome and took a lot longer than it should have. In addition, it was also a lot less accurate. Fortunately, I have little need for an Office suite about 99% of the time.
I DO expect OO.o to get better and better as the development continues. However, I hope that the developers at OO.o eventually set up some kind of system (kind of like the folks at Transgaming) that allows people to vote on "most desired features". This way they can address the needs and desires of the users in a direct way.
I KNOW I'll get modded down for this, but here goes.
I currently work with Sun products pretty intimately at work. I have to say that while the Solaris OS and it's related contract support from Sun is better than Microsoft's Windows OS and it's related support, I will warn EVERYONE away from SunONE products.
I've been working with iPlanet Messaging Server for about two years and have had some of the most outrageously poor technical support I've ever gotten from a vendor. After the Sun/Netscape alliance ended, Sun got the iPlanet products for themselves. So, the new iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 suite should now be known as SunONE Messaging Server... any day now.
The problems that I've had with this system are so incredibly stupid as to be unbelievable:
-multiple administration interfaces that are half broken. (They actually told me to use one interface to do user deletions and another interface to modify users, and yet another one to add users!)
-dense and very pooly laid out documentation
(Read thousands of pages that barely help you get anywhere.)
-user forums that up until last year almost never worked or archived messages (WHY did they take away the NNTP groups they used to have!!!??)
-inconsistencies throughout the entire system with regard to how one would make changes to mail users or implement new mail domains when hosting multiple mail domains.
-No decent admin interface to the LDAP db. (Their "Java Console" is the slowest piece of shit I've ever worked with. Screen updates take about 5-10 minutes just to get a menu to pop up!!)
-No decent GUI based tools to deal with high volume data in LDAP (I'm sorry, but walking through a text file that describes your users, groups, domains and configuration that is megabytes in size, is NOT realistic! They need a hierarchical representation of data in a GUI based app. And NO... the Java Console is NOT it!)
-Major naming inconsistencies. (Some parts of SunONE iMS are called "Netscape", other parts are "iPlanet" and others are "Sun". None are currently "SunONE" yet. The only excuse I hear is that they are slowly "getting there". !!!??? It's been TWO FUCKING YEARS!!!! You'd think they would have, at least, gotten the mnaming straight and provided on Admin tool rather than the four or five that they currently have, half of which shouldn't be used for certain operations!!)
When I bitch about these things to support, I get the same old tired answer "...iMS is a product that is in development, so it should be expected that some things will be a little inconsistent. Just wait a little longer" I've been waiting two years.
After a recent migration from iMS 5.1 to iMS 5.2, I found that their recommendation was to install the new mail system on a "test box" and run with it for a few months before going live with the real thing. They didn't recommend that I do an "upgrade in place" on our original box if we didn't want to have any downtime. WTF???!! Of course we don't want ANY downtime on a mail system. The techs I talked to said to expect anywhere from a 24-36 hour total working time (read a few work days) of downtime while migrating to the new version of iMS. !!!??? We wound up buying a new box to start clean with iMS 5.2 and then migrated users, groups, domains and mail over. The other box will become our redundant backup system. However, I told my boss that we should NEVER buy anything from Sun again. And you know what? They listened. We are doing a multimillion dollar transistion to a new data base system. The database vendor was pushing Sun, but said that the product would also run on HP-UX. We already have a very close relationship with HP (and history with Compaq and DEC). So... we told them no thanks and went with HP-UX instead of Sun.
Once we've gotten some years of use out of our Sun boxes, they will be retired and replaced with HP-UX boxes.
I hope Sun straightens out the SunONE products. The amount of time I've spent trying to learn that crap could probably h
You make a good point. The Earth DOES rotate around the sun. That IS a fact.
So... refute this fact:
War is destructive, violent and largely useless in the 21st century.
There are plenty of ways to elicit regime change and none of them require massive loss of life. Hell... I'd even back black-ops to take out Saddam and his regime at this point in time. What I am saying is that sometimes, if people aren't listening (because they've been brainwashed by a very crafty regime: Bush) you need to wake people up to the truth. Sometimes the only way to do that is by making some kind of display that no one can ignore. And, sadly, sometimes people don't want to wake up... They just want to turn over and hit the snooze button a few more times and they get pissed off when something isn't letting them. That's the point.
Before I start this, I have to make sure that people reading it actually "get" what XFree86 is. A lot of people who complain about X (in the generic sense) think that it IS the GUI. They see that X shaped cursor and the 50% gray background and think "ewwww!" But what they don't understand is that the "GUI", as they perceive it, is really an environment like KDE or GNOME. Assuming we are talking KDE... you need X for KDE to run and vice-versa. They are interdependent. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say "I like KDE better than X Windows". With that said:
After reading some of the comments on the OS News board, it seems to me that there are two needs arising out of the discussions:
-Continuing development of XFree86 and it's robust feature set (many of which are sadly lacking in Windows unfortunately)
-A completely new non-networkable direct rendered system (more like the Windows approach)
First of all, to make my case, I will tell you to think of it in terms of a standard console vs. a framebuffer console. They both have their place for two different types of users. In the same way, a system like XFree86 and some new direct rendered display system will have acceptance with certain kinds of users.
I, personally, love XFree86 and all it has to offer. It performs very well for me on a local workstation as well as over my home network and at my place of employ. Displays are easily exported on a per application or per session basis as needed. And with the LBX proxy, I can use it when VPNed into my workplace.
It's VERY flexible: I typically run 3-4 X servers on my workstation and laptop so that I can dedicate full screens for certain things at different resolutions or run under different users simultaneously on each display. (To those in the know: How's that for fast user switching? XP cough cough... :) Ctl-Alt-F8 and you are one user, Ctrl-Alt-F9 and you are another, etc...)
For example, if I am playing a game (Sierra's Lighthouse for instance) under Wine, I like to do it full screen, with no desktop environment at all. Just the game. What's even nicer is that I can actually make the display large enough the Lighthouse isn't a small window with black space around it, it almost becomes full screen. Same thing with Riven. All this while I still have IRC downloading the latest episode of Enterprise in another session as another user. All I need to do to check on my download progress is the Virtual Console key combo.
Now... I will say that if a project starts up to provide a direct rendered system. This could actually be a good thing. It would probably meet the needs of the generic home user fairly well, and remote desktop services could be provided by something like VNC or an RDP clone. I do admit that Joe Average is probably going to have little use now and in the future for X type capabilities. So, this new system should be packed with other "consumer" features. Specifically, the 3D support for games, DVD and MPEG acceleration where applicable and TV in/out support for cards that have such features. A project like this would do a lot to make Linux more palatable to the average consumer. All a distro would have to do then is break down their distros into categories (RedHat for example):
-RedHat "Lite" - A distro for the average consumer that is rypically pre-installed on new systems. No X, no devel tools, no servers, just a very basic OS that allows them to safely get on the Internet, run some productivity apps and play some games.
-RedHat "WS" - As it exists currently. With X (just the direct rendering system that people are alluding to), devel tools, basic servers and some of the enterprise features that power users crave.
-RedHat "Collection" - Capable of installing every distro from one set of disks. You just choose which distro combo you want.
So... don't bash X because you don't understand it. It's a great system with a great feature set. It would be nice to see 3D acceleration networkable or even clusterable though...