You're probably using Xcdroast, yes? That requires dvdrecord-pro, a binary only product from the same guy who makes the GPL cdrecord. dvdrecord is free for personal use, but requires a special key to run in free mode. A couple of Google look ups and you'll be burning in no time.
Unless you're opposed to it's nature as binary only. In which case you can use Nautilus's built in DVD recording abilities, which use growisofs, which is GPL.
Another way to think of it is "enterprise level interfaces". It's the equivalent of running QNX as your nuclear power plant - we cannot afford to fail, ever.
It's the fate of a fuckin' nation for chrissakes. It is 100% unacceptable that Grandma cannot vote (or her vote gets miscast) simply because she grew up in a poor hispanic neighborhood and has never used a computer before.
Of course, this is after the fact. If that controller at the power plant DOES fail, there better by god be a detailed report saying why and how to fix it. And said report better be without agenda such as "to put the nuclear meltdown in context".
"Windows 95 crashes all the time. You better just be grateful that it didn't meltdown sooner"
I would say that memetics really is more like the Saphir-Worf hypothesis. In many ways discredited, but resurfacing in modified forms.
The way memetics claims ideas propagate bears at least a superficial similarity to the way ideas propagate on the internet - the bloggers and the webzines and even slashdot all parrot each other intentionally and unintentionally. Now, even in this context you can probably gripe about the use of the workd meme here. But stuff like "Perl is line noise" is very much a meme in that sense. It get's aped and parroted, and said by anonymous cowards trying to look like they know what they are talking about - a meme. "I don't know where this line noise meme started" is a reasonable statement.
Besides, meme is a good word. I'm happy to have it back, even with a slightly altered meaning.
This is completely different. The biodome was about creating a self sustaining ecosystem. There is no such goal here. It's just "Can they budget their food and live with the stress".
It seems to me that Linus probably wants RTOS capabilities in the mainline. The issue is that most patches for it are excessively intrusive.
Some of Ingo Molnar's work is just to push down kernel latency in a general way, which is acceptable and more incremental in the mainline, while laying down an archetecture that makes it easy for a hard RT patch to be maintained, with minimal impact on the kernel.
Linux will never default to being a true RTOS across the board, forever and ever amen. So, while you're right on the money that some people hunger after RTOS when it isn't what they want, it doesn't change that some people really _do_ want RTOS in the kernel. Linus is rejecting it because of technical issues with the patch (dangerously intrusive, MontaVista can simply maintain the patch external for those who really need it, and did I mention that it's intrusive?), not because he thinks that a real time Linux is a bad idea (though it certainly is for me as a desktop user)
Does anyone know why Perl 6 didn't start with the Python VM? It's certainly designed for dynamically typed languages, and is (as I understand it) pretty divorced from the bytecode generator
Are they outsourced webdesign and support company who doesn't know one way or another?
I work for a smallish web technology company. We have been approached for similar contracts in the past. Having talked recently with the other programmers and the sys admin, I was the only one to know of the SCO contraversy.
SCO is really not a huge fuck off company (though they like to pretend). I imagine that they at least have to higher designers and marketers (at least back when they were selling products), if not a complete outside developement company. We only charge 40 bucks an hour, and we'll do hosting. We could easily setup a weblog with comments and a snazzy SCO logo in a couple of hours.
On the other hand, one of the advantages of working for a company this size - if I'd told my boss that these guys were evil, we'd have punted them to the curb.
Have you tried to run multiple kernels with the Nvidia drivers? Everytime I booted into a different kernel, I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver. And what about 4k stacks?
Besides, you didn't answer his question - he said "What's a good card with solid open source drivers?" You said "Nvidia has open source drivers but they suck, you shouldn't care about the binary only drivers."
I'd still advocate a Nvidia or ATI card. ATI makes regular code drops to the DRI and Mesa projects, and the open source drivers are of reasonable quality, and the nv drivers are high profile, with lots of work going into them. These cards are the most likely to see solid render acceleration in the future as XAA is replaced with a new acceleration architecture, so even with the Open Source drivers you'll see best performance with stuff like Composite (the basis of much of the X11 6.8.0 eye candy) with these cards.
Of the two, ATI and Nvidia, the open source drivers seem to be of roughly the same quality in my experience, but the Nvidia binary driver is far superiour to the ATI binary driver. ATI has got more bang for your buck, the GATOS project is working to support a lot of ATI's extra features, and ATI seems minimally more involved in the community with an eye to becoming moreso.
I think that pushes things solidly in ATI's favor if you're absolutely commited to the open source driver. If you're willing to use the binary driver, things become more even - it's ATI's price versus Nvidia's better support for the card under Linux/BSD
I think that Syllable or not, thinking of an alternative OS that has the same relationship to Windows as FireFox has to IE is exactly the right mentality.
FireFox was the browser that was supposed to be targeted at people knowledgable enough to install it, who we're limited by the IE experience.
When we talk about Desktop Linux for example, we often talk about "easy enough for my grandma to use" which is precicely the wrong litmus test. I've been idlling on a linux distro at home some, and my goal has always been to make the Linux distro that all the XP power users want to use.
Think about it. Every windows user I know who ran or runs IE has a popup blocker installed, the google toolbar, AdAware, and has half a dozen windows open most of the time. FireFox is perfect for them, because it was targeted at them. Grandma (well, not mine, she won't touch the computer, and my grandfather is a computer geek) will just click on the three icons she knows how to use - Linux, Windows, SkyOS, Syllable, Macintosh, it's all pretty colors to her. So don't target her!
I've got an OS here. It's multiuser design makes it hard to get viruses or for your sister to install spyware which screws over everybody else. It comes with a firewall, it comes with antivirus, it comes with a multiprotocol instant messeging client, it comes with a tabbed browser, it comes with a pop up blocker, it comes with a spam filter, it comes with a word processor, it comes with a spreadsheet, it comes with an image editor. It comes with all of the things you pirate to make your pirate copy of WinXP not suck, all nicely polished and working together out of the box. It's legal, it's free, it's simple, it's featureful. It doesn't dumb things down for your Grandma, it doesn't pander you with saturated colors and friendly but unhelpful error messages, it doesn't talk down to you for not already understanding everything about it. It's the OS for people who care what OS they're running.
Build it and they will come. Be it Syllable, SkyOS, Linux, BSD, or hell, Windows.
Close. Dual licencing is a twisty maze of tainted code, all alike.
Why not a simple GPL licence, with the requirement that anything commited to the core project is licenced back to Sun. Sun has complete control over the core implementation, Sun has complete control over the Java trademark, the Java Community Process controls the standard. Who looses?
GTK had issues on Win32, expecially early on. This made Gaim hard to use, and I had lots of periodic crashes. On Windows, I _still_ prefered it to Trillian.
I wanted to use Trillian so bad, but it had one of the worst interfaces I have ever used. Period. Those of you getting ready to yell at me, are you using.78, the free version, or are you using 1.x the pay version? The pay version's only signifigant advantage to me was the interface didn't suck ass. "nowhere near ready for 1.0" - Ha! Apparently neither was the free version of Trillian, in the developer's mind.
Gaim's core is stable and fabulous. It's the basis of just about every instant messaging client outside of windows.
As for your complaints about MSN, I wonder how many of those are parts of the protocols design that the maintainer speaks of. I left MSN because I had problems with the MSN client and with Trillian - contant disconnects, and obscure errors.
It's more like those kids who are already on the internet will continue using open environments (AOL chatrooms, IRC, message boards) where the token is useless, and those who aren't web savvy will loose the damn thing.
The way to make these used is to make kids want to use them - for example, providing places where kids feel more secure or comfortable with some guarentee of the identity of their co-chatters. On the other hand, we're just lulling those kids into a false sense of security for many of the reasons you list above, regardless of whether or not what you mention comes to pass, but because it teaches them to trust weak technology without thinking.
Mostly because I didn't believe Sun to be that incredibly stupid.
I mean, it's not surprising that Sun isn't real happy about Linux. There are only three enterprise Unixes left: Irix, AIX, and Solaris. Only one hasn't been phased out by it's parent company for Linux. Sun's betting on being THE enterprise Unix vendor. Fighting Linux is a reasonable strategy.
But the Redhat == Linux == No Enterprise Power strategy is so dumb even MS figured out it was wrong. Fight Redhat, cool, Redhat is a competitor. But trying to fight Linux by pigeonholing it will never work. Linux is a technology. It's like AOL trying to fight the open Web by saying the Web == Earthlink == None of our wonderful proprietary content. It doesn't make any sense.
Sun will loose because the quality of their products doesn't matter because that quality only means anything in an IT world that is slowing ceasing to exist, and Sun can't figure out how to deal with it. Linus Torvalds is not your competitor! Your competitors are still IBM and SGI for the high end, custom hardware market (with Apple scooting in), and Redhat and Novell for the midrange commodity hardware market, even if they are all running Linux. IBM still has the resources to support Linux richly, so you can't win this battle this way, you'll just loose to IBM with Linux instead of Redhat.
I'd like to see Sun get this right. Linux needs someone to keep it honest, and the BSD's are becoming less and less general purpose, loosing their ability to compete in the exact same area's as the distros. Linux needs a competeing strong Unix kernel, and a competeing strong desktop kernel. We've got OS X and Windows - where is our enterprise server OS?
Yes, it's totally reasonable for someone to beef up a server in anticipation of a third party putting a link up on slashdot. This is because Yoper stands for I CAN SEE THE FUTURE AND ANTICIPATE THE ACTIONS OF ANONYMOUS THIRD PARTIES![*]
mplayer has as part of it's arechetectural design to squeeze every frame it can out of the hardware. That's one of the reasons it's build process has historically been so complex, and the reason it has a strictly single threaded design (or at least did last I checked).
mplayer plays just about everything, and is pretty ubiquitous. Xine has been in RC status forever now, and pulls in plenty of its codec work from mplayer anyway.
mplayer is the bottom line for video playback on alternative OS's. Get it into mplayer, and it'll quickly spread to other players.
Actually, you should have kept reading. For one, hyperbole is standard in this kind of literature.
Two, he makes the argument (quite well, I think) that other than providing a similar kind of service there isn't any similarity between POTS technology and VoIP. He points out that PSTN is an almost intentionally neutered technology, and VoIp isn't.
You sayd VoIP should have been done a long time ago - duh! We've established you didn't read the article, so of course you missed the reasons why VoIP is growing and has taken this long to get here (namely the fact that it's a different technology, and so interfacing with PSTN is hard, especially hard considering the desire of most telco's to keep VoIP out).
As for pronouncing it "voyp" not only is your claim silly, but the article is text m'kay? No pronunciation invloved.
XP is 1000 times as stable as 2000, but it's with this trade off: device drivers and bad hardware can crash the system.
What?
Device drivers have run in executive memory space since NT 3.1. Since when can 2k not be crashed by a driver that WILL crash XP? 2k moved the GDI into the executive, so the stability level with video drivers is the same between the two, and bad hardware will ALWAYS crash a system equally. Sure, XP's pretty stable, and I'd even argue that since it was less of a archetectural change than NT->2k was, it may even be more stable than 2k, but your sentence doesn't make any sense.
There isn't any design decision that I know of in XP that makes it less stable vis-a-vis bad drivers but more stable overall. That's bunk. In fact, XP introduced driver signing as an answer to 2k's driver issues. And no OS can escape bad hardware, period.
Lots of people are pointing out the obvious connection between money and politics. But there is a historical connection that needs to be pointed out.
Many moons ago, most places in the US didn't have power, or phone service. So the US made deals with private companies, wherein the utility company would provide a service (such as phone lines) in areas where building the infrastructure would ordinarily be cost prohibitive. In exchange, they got monopoly guarantees for long periods of time on those areas.
Telco's are used to getting their way (I worked for Bellsouth Internet for a few years). After all, BellSouth makes a profit even if you get Earthlink DSL in the South, because BellSouth has a monopoly on the network, provided by the federal government. There is a long history in the USA of enforcing monopolies for utility companies, that in many cases has far outlived it's consumer benefit
Long answer: Kdrive and much of the Xorg work are hosted on freedesktop.org. Kdrive is on the back burner which Xorg kicks up. Much of the work in Kdrive is informing the implementation in Xorg (like the Composite extension, and the driver extensions for hardware Render acceleration)
Fake transparency is the eterm which is transparant, but only shows the root window, or KDE menu's doing alpha blending internally to give drop shadows.
I've found drop shadows make it easier to distiguish between lots windows on OS X, and lots of X apps already use transparancy, but their doing internally using the host processor. And certainly compositing would solve bug reports in certain desktop environments that, say, Xearth doesn't play nice with desktop icons.
This is really powerful, generalized improvements to the platform
Okay, so I know that is the kind of thing that the FLOSS zealots say all the time. But it is so obviously true in this case.
MS is betting the company on Longhorn. No really. Their two major revenue streams, and the foundation of the modern MS is Windows and Office. Windows is a twisty maze of backwards compatibility all alike to keep both users and developers favorable to the platform. Office is packed full of enterprise features that Joe User never needs because Joe CEO does.
MS down to it's ancient roots with custom programming languages and tools, is firmly in the realm of the rich client. Linux and BSD and OS X (and SkyOS and BeOS, and Syllable and . . . ) are becoming more prevalent because suddenly fully half of a users apps are portable! No not Office or Photoshop, but Yahoo and Google. Thin clients!
The gigahertz war between AMD and Intel last left MS with a glut of processing power and no software capable of using it. Once MS caught up with the processor, they drove home the power of the rich client, and reestablished their platform as the primary environment for building them.
It's happened again. Processor power is far beyond what 90% of the increasingly computer literate public needs, just like when x86 procs hit 1Ghz. But this time there is a growing base of truly alternative development and user platforms (not just OS/2 and MacOS 8, but the various POSIX and embedded platforms) while on the other side, the thin client has a solid hold in several key applications (email, dictionaries, encyclopedias, hell, even video games).
MS wants to emulate the success of Windows 95. They want to bring an enterprise technology to the masses (NT, XP was really just a dry run for that), show users that there is a reason for all this new hardware, and reestablish themselves as THE application development environment for rich clients. It's not just getting users to upgrade (though that would make them super happy) its getting developers to use the technology.
And they've realized that they can't bet on a huge upgrade kick to make Avalon and Indigo dominant, XP taught and continues to teach them that. So bringing these heavy investment technologies to a wider audience is the only way that MS can continue to be the largest software company in the world, and see any kind of rapid return on Longorn. If they loose this battle, they become the desktop version of Sun Microsystems. A giant, who still does good work, and whose technologies still have some milage, but ultimately in it's final days
Slashdot Mirror
That's 'a splode'.
Jeez. Get your obscure internet references correct prior to posting.
You're probably using Xcdroast, yes? That requires dvdrecord-pro, a binary only product from the same guy who makes the GPL cdrecord. dvdrecord is free for personal use, but requires a special key to run in free mode. A couple of Google look ups and you'll be burning in no time.
Unless you're opposed to it's nature as binary only. In which case you can use Nautilus's built in DVD recording abilities, which use growisofs, which is GPL.
Damn straight.
Another way to think of it is "enterprise level interfaces". It's the equivalent of running QNX as your nuclear power plant - we cannot afford to fail, ever.
It's the fate of a fuckin' nation for chrissakes. It is 100% unacceptable that Grandma cannot vote (or her vote gets miscast) simply because she grew up in a poor hispanic neighborhood and has never used a computer before.
Of course, this is after the fact. If that controller at the power plant DOES fail, there better by god be a detailed report saying why and how to fix it. And said report better be without agenda such as "to put the nuclear meltdown in context".
"Windows 95 crashes all the time. You better just be grateful that it didn't meltdown sooner"
I would say that memetics really is more like the Saphir-Worf hypothesis. In many ways discredited, but resurfacing in modified forms.
The way memetics claims ideas propagate bears at least a superficial similarity to the way ideas propagate on the internet - the bloggers and the webzines and even slashdot all parrot each other intentionally and unintentionally. Now, even in this context you can probably gripe about the use of the workd meme here. But stuff like "Perl is line noise" is very much a meme in that sense. It get's aped and parroted, and said by anonymous cowards trying to look like they know what they are talking about - a meme. "I don't know where this line noise meme started" is a reasonable statement.
Besides, meme is a good word. I'm happy to have it back, even with a slightly altered meaning.
This is completely different. The biodome was about creating a self sustaining ecosystem. There is no such goal here. It's just "Can they budget their food and live with the stress".
Lot of redudency is not needed at all.
It seems to me that Linus probably wants RTOS capabilities in the mainline. The issue is that most patches for it are excessively intrusive.
Some of Ingo Molnar's work is just to push down kernel latency in a general way, which is acceptable and more incremental in the mainline, while laying down an archetecture that makes it easy for a hard RT patch to be maintained, with minimal impact on the kernel.
Linux will never default to being a true RTOS across the board, forever and ever amen. So, while you're right on the money that some people hunger after RTOS when it isn't what they want, it doesn't change that some people really _do_ want RTOS in the kernel. Linus is rejecting it because of technical issues with the patch (dangerously intrusive, MontaVista can simply maintain the patch external for those who really need it, and did I mention that it's intrusive?), not because he thinks that a real time Linux is a bad idea (though it certainly is for me as a desktop user)
Does anyone know why Perl 6 didn't start with the Python VM? It's certainly designed for dynamically typed languages, and is (as I understand it) pretty divorced from the bytecode generator
Are they outsourced webdesign and support company who doesn't know one way or another?
I work for a smallish web technology company. We have been approached for similar contracts in the past. Having talked recently with the other programmers and the sys admin, I was the only one to know of the SCO contraversy.
SCO is really not a huge fuck off company (though they like to pretend). I imagine that they at least have to higher designers and marketers (at least back when they were selling products), if not a complete outside developement company. We only charge 40 bucks an hour, and we'll do hosting. We could easily setup a weblog with comments and a snazzy SCO logo in a couple of hours.
On the other hand, one of the advantages of working for a company this size - if I'd told my boss that these guys were evil, we'd have punted them to the curb.
Have you tried to run multiple kernels with the Nvidia drivers? Everytime I booted into a different kernel, I had to uninstall and reinstall the driver. And what about 4k stacks?
Besides, you didn't answer his question - he said "What's a good card with solid open source drivers?" You said "Nvidia has open source drivers but they suck, you shouldn't care about the binary only drivers."
I'd still advocate a Nvidia or ATI card. ATI makes regular code drops to the DRI and Mesa projects, and the open source drivers are of reasonable quality, and the nv drivers are high profile, with lots of work going into them. These cards are the most likely to see solid render acceleration in the future as XAA is replaced with a new acceleration architecture, so even with the Open Source drivers you'll see best performance with stuff like Composite (the basis of much of the X11 6.8.0 eye candy) with these cards.
Of the two, ATI and Nvidia, the open source drivers seem to be of roughly the same quality in my experience, but the Nvidia binary driver is far superiour to the ATI binary driver. ATI has got more bang for your buck, the GATOS project is working to support a lot of ATI's extra features, and ATI seems minimally more involved in the community with an eye to becoming moreso.
I think that pushes things solidly in ATI's favor if you're absolutely commited to the open source driver. If you're willing to use the binary driver, things become more even - it's ATI's price versus Nvidia's better support for the card under Linux/BSD
I think that Syllable or not, thinking of an alternative OS that has the same relationship to Windows as FireFox has to IE is exactly the right mentality.
FireFox was the browser that was supposed to be targeted at people knowledgable enough to install it, who we're limited by the IE experience.
When we talk about Desktop Linux for example, we often talk about "easy enough for my grandma to use" which is precicely the wrong litmus test. I've been idlling on a linux distro at home some, and my goal has always been to make the Linux distro that all the XP power users want to use.
Think about it. Every windows user I know who ran or runs IE has a popup blocker installed, the google toolbar, AdAware, and has half a dozen windows open most of the time. FireFox is perfect for them, because it was targeted at them. Grandma (well, not mine, she won't touch the computer, and my grandfather is a computer geek) will just click on the three icons she knows how to use - Linux, Windows, SkyOS, Syllable, Macintosh, it's all pretty colors to her. So don't target her!
I've got an OS here. It's multiuser design makes it hard to get viruses or for your sister to install spyware which screws over everybody else. It comes with a firewall, it comes with antivirus, it comes with a multiprotocol instant messeging client, it comes with a tabbed browser, it comes with a pop up blocker, it comes with a spam filter, it comes with a word processor, it comes with a spreadsheet, it comes with an image editor. It comes with all of the things you pirate to make your pirate copy of WinXP not suck, all nicely polished and working together out of the box. It's legal, it's free, it's simple, it's featureful. It doesn't dumb things down for your Grandma, it doesn't pander you with saturated colors and friendly but unhelpful error messages, it doesn't talk down to you for not already understanding everything about it. It's the OS for people who care what OS they're running.
Build it and they will come. Be it Syllable, SkyOS, Linux, BSD, or hell, Windows.
. . .you insensitive clod!
*Sigh*
Close. Dual licencing is a twisty maze of tainted code, all alike.
Why not a simple GPL licence, with the requirement that anything commited to the core project is licenced back to Sun. Sun has complete control over the core implementation, Sun has complete control over the Java trademark, the Java Community Process controls the standard. Who looses?
GTK had issues on Win32, expecially early on. This made Gaim hard to use, and I had lots of periodic crashes. On Windows, I _still_ prefered it to Trillian.
.78, the free version, or are you using 1.x the pay version? The pay version's only signifigant advantage to me was the interface didn't suck ass. "nowhere near ready for 1.0" - Ha! Apparently neither was the free version of Trillian, in the developer's mind.
I wanted to use Trillian so bad, but it had one of the worst interfaces I have ever used. Period. Those of you getting ready to yell at me, are you using
Gaim's core is stable and fabulous. It's the basis of just about every instant messaging client outside of windows.
As for your complaints about MSN, I wonder how many of those are parts of the protocols design that the maintainer speaks of. I left MSN because I had problems with the MSN client and with Trillian - contant disconnects, and obscure errors.
Ha!
It's more like those kids who are already on the internet will continue using open environments (AOL chatrooms, IRC, message boards) where the token is useless, and those who aren't web savvy will loose the damn thing.
The way to make these used is to make kids want to use them - for example, providing places where kids feel more secure or comfortable with some guarentee of the identity of their co-chatters. On the other hand, we're just lulling those kids into a false sense of security for many of the reasons you list above, regardless of whether or not what you mention comes to pass, but because it teaches them to trust weak technology without thinking.
Mostly because I didn't believe Sun to be that incredibly stupid.
I mean, it's not surprising that Sun isn't real happy about Linux. There are only three enterprise Unixes left: Irix, AIX, and Solaris. Only one hasn't been phased out by it's parent company for Linux. Sun's betting on being THE enterprise Unix vendor. Fighting Linux is a reasonable strategy.
But the Redhat == Linux == No Enterprise Power strategy is so dumb even MS figured out it was wrong. Fight Redhat, cool, Redhat is a competitor. But trying to fight Linux by pigeonholing it will never work. Linux is a technology. It's like AOL trying to fight the open Web by saying the Web == Earthlink == None of our wonderful proprietary content. It doesn't make any sense.
Sun will loose because the quality of their products doesn't matter because that quality only means anything in an IT world that is slowing ceasing to exist, and Sun can't figure out how to deal with it. Linus Torvalds is not your competitor! Your competitors are still IBM and SGI for the high end, custom hardware market (with Apple scooting in), and Redhat and Novell for the midrange commodity hardware market, even if they are all running Linux. IBM still has the resources to support Linux richly, so you can't win this battle this way, you'll just loose to IBM with Linux instead of Redhat.
I'd like to see Sun get this right. Linux needs someone to keep it honest, and the BSD's are becoming less and less general purpose, loosing their ability to compete in the exact same area's as the distros. Linux needs a competeing strong Unix kernel, and a competeing strong desktop kernel. We've got OS X and Windows - where is our enterprise server OS?
Yes, it's totally reasonable for someone to beef up a server in anticipation of a third party putting a link up on slashdot. This is because Yoper stands for I CAN SEE THE FUTURE AND ANTICIPATE THE ACTIONS OF ANONYMOUS THIRD PARTIES![*]
*This acronym is not english of course.
mplayer has as part of it's arechetectural design to squeeze every frame it can out of the hardware. That's one of the reasons it's build process has historically been so complex, and the reason it has a strictly single threaded design (or at least did last I checked).
mplayer plays just about everything, and is pretty ubiquitous. Xine has been in RC status forever now, and pulls in plenty of its codec work from mplayer anyway.
mplayer is the bottom line for video playback on alternative OS's. Get it into mplayer, and it'll quickly spread to other players.
Actually, you should have kept reading. For one, hyperbole is standard in this kind of literature.
Two, he makes the argument (quite well, I think) that other than providing a similar kind of service there isn't any similarity between POTS technology and VoIP. He points out that PSTN is an almost intentionally neutered technology, and VoIp isn't.
You sayd VoIP should have been done a long time ago - duh! We've established you didn't read the article, so of course you missed the reasons why VoIP is growing and has taken this long to get here (namely the fact that it's a different technology, and so interfacing with PSTN is hard, especially hard considering the desire of most telco's to keep VoIP out).
As for pronouncing it "voyp" not only is your claim silly, but the article is text m'kay? No pronunciation invloved.
You know something? I was scanning through the posts thinking "noone's said it yet. Fuck, I'll have to do it myself"
And then the Anonymous coward saved me from a pitiful karma bomb.
Thank you Anonymous Coward! For saving my soul from temptation, and making Slashdot the epitome of wit and erudition that she is today!
XP is 1000 times as stable as 2000, but it's with this trade off: device drivers and bad hardware can crash the system.
What?
Device drivers have run in executive memory space since NT 3.1. Since when can 2k not be crashed by a driver that WILL crash XP? 2k moved the GDI into the executive, so the stability level with video drivers is the same between the two, and bad hardware will ALWAYS crash a system equally. Sure, XP's pretty stable, and I'd even argue that since it was less of a archetectural change than NT->2k was, it may even be more stable than 2k, but your sentence doesn't make any sense.
There isn't any design decision that I know of in XP that makes it less stable vis-a-vis bad drivers but more stable overall. That's bunk. In fact, XP introduced driver signing as an answer to 2k's driver issues. And no OS can escape bad hardware, period.
Lots of people are pointing out the obvious connection between money and politics. But there is a historical connection that needs to be pointed out.
Many moons ago, most places in the US didn't have power, or phone service. So the US made deals with private companies, wherein the utility company would provide a service (such as phone lines) in areas where building the infrastructure would ordinarily be cost prohibitive. In exchange, they got monopoly guarantees for long periods of time on those areas.
Telco's are used to getting their way (I worked for Bellsouth Internet for a few years). After all, BellSouth makes a profit even if you get Earthlink DSL in the South, because BellSouth has a monopoly on the network, provided by the federal government. There is a long history in the USA of enforcing monopolies for utility companies, that in many cases has far outlived it's consumer benefit
I thought midichlorians explained the force.
I know, I know. I didn't buy it either
Short answer: no.
Long answer: Kdrive and much of the Xorg work are hosted on freedesktop.org. Kdrive is on the back burner which Xorg kicks up. Much of the work in Kdrive is informing the implementation in Xorg (like the Composite extension, and the driver extensions for hardware Render acceleration)
Fake transparency is the eterm which is transparant, but only shows the root window, or KDE menu's doing alpha blending internally to give drop shadows.
I've found drop shadows make it easier to distiguish between lots windows on OS X, and lots of X apps already use transparancy, but their doing internally using the host processor. And certainly compositing would solve bug reports in certain desktop environments that, say, Xearth doesn't play nice with desktop icons.
This is really powerful, generalized improvements to the platform
Okay, so I know that is the kind of thing that the FLOSS zealots say all the time. But it is so obviously true in this case.
MS is betting the company on Longhorn. No really. Their two major revenue streams, and the foundation of the modern MS is Windows and Office. Windows is a twisty maze of backwards compatibility all alike to keep both users and developers favorable to the platform. Office is packed full of enterprise features that Joe User never needs because Joe CEO does.
MS down to it's ancient roots with custom programming languages and tools, is firmly in the realm of the rich client. Linux and BSD and OS X (and SkyOS and BeOS, and Syllable and . . . ) are becoming more prevalent because suddenly fully half of a users apps are portable! No not Office or Photoshop, but Yahoo and Google. Thin clients!
The gigahertz war between AMD and Intel last left MS with a glut of processing power and no software capable of using it. Once MS caught up with the processor, they drove home the power of the rich client, and reestablished their platform as the primary environment for building them.
It's happened again. Processor power is far beyond what 90% of the increasingly computer literate public needs, just like when x86 procs hit 1Ghz. But this time there is a growing base of truly alternative development and user platforms (not just OS/2 and MacOS 8, but the various POSIX and embedded platforms) while on the other side, the thin client has a solid hold in several key applications (email, dictionaries, encyclopedias, hell, even video games).
MS wants to emulate the success of Windows 95. They want to bring an enterprise technology to the masses (NT, XP was really just a dry run for that), show users that there is a reason for all this new hardware, and reestablish themselves as THE application development environment for rich clients. It's not just getting users to upgrade (though that would make them super happy) its getting developers to use the technology.
And they've realized that they can't bet on a huge upgrade kick to make Avalon and Indigo dominant, XP taught and continues to teach them that. So bringing these heavy investment technologies to a wider audience is the only way that MS can continue to be the largest software company in the world, and see any kind of rapid return on Longorn. If they loose this battle, they become the desktop version of Sun Microsystems. A giant, who still does good work, and whose technologies still have some milage, but ultimately in it's final days