Let's face it, blogs are vanity projects. You could just as simply write in your paper diary and keep it under your pillow like a little girl. Instead, you choose to put your diary on the web and open it up for criticism and comments. This is just another way of demanding attention.
I think you're over-generalizing. Yes, many blogs are indeed vanity projects where people say whatever they feel like about subjects nobody cares about, but there are good, worth-while blogs out there which have nothing to do about vanity.
Developer blogs are one such style of blog, which can be very useful. You can use these types of blogs to get "inside knowledge" on development projects, and get some insight into the developers themselves, while peerhaps learning some interesting tricks and techniques along the way.
Unfortunately, that is pretty time consuming and troublesome. Having to come up with original content every day to keep people coming back to your blog is pretty difficult.
You know, I've never understood why some people feel the need to post in their blogs every single day. It's like back in Grade 3, when the teacher insisted we write something in our journals every freaking day (I remember telling my teachers that I had nothing to say. They'd always say that I should write about my morning. But how many times can an 8-year-old kid write "I ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, and then came to this dump"??? But I digress).
I run a small developer blog that nobody ever visits (well, so far as I know:) ) here, where I talk about Open Source development projects I'm working on, example code in various languages/APIs, comment on tradde shows I attend, etc. But if I have nothing to say for three weeks, I won't post anything for three weeks. If people want to find out when I have something to say, that's what the RSS feed is for. If they want to know what I'm up to between times, they can e-mail me.
So I agree with you on this point. I think that blogs can serve a useful purpose, but if you're writing in your blog just for the sake of writing in your blog, and have nothing useful to say, you should probably take up a new hobby.
Switching to Linux is worth it just to escape the insane world of Windows shareware where people seriously expect you to pay $50 for the crapy semi functional app they spent 2 hours in VB on.
But you know what? There is a lot of that "Windows Shareware" which simply isn't available on Linux, free or otherwise. And it's those crappy shareware applications which are often the stumbling blocks for end users to switch to anything.
In particular, card games. Yes, Linux has Solataire in all its variations down pat pretty good, but it's hard to find a decent version of Euchre, Cribbage, Hearts, or all other sorts of such games. Linux just doesn't have them.
And trust me -- I hear about it all the time. Several years ago my mother decided to upgrade her old OS/2 based machine. She's exactly the type of user we're talking about here -- she doesn't know diddly about much of anything other than how to turn the computer on, use the mouse, and type stuff on the keyboard. She wouldn't know a compiler or even a command prompt from the Sultan of Brunei.
As she doesn't even know how to maintain a machine, and as she always calls on me to fix her system or even install new software for her (she won't do it herself -- downloading new wallpapers is as risque as she gets when it comes to the computer), Linux was a natural fit: it was cheap (as in free), is very easy to maintain remotely (her old OS/2 system needed a somewhat slow remote desktop solution so I could save an hours drive if she needed help), and is something she would have a hard time screwing up (as she doesn't have root access, of course).
(It helped that all she really ever does is surf the web and play some really basic games, with the occassional glance at her e-mail (once a month maybe...). She ran Mozilla on OS/2, so switching to Linux didn't mean having to learn a big pile of new software, and she didn't have any documents to speak of that needed a specific Office suite, so switching was pretty painless for her overall).
Her system runs beautifully, and requires very little maintenance. And yet at least once a week I hear her moans of derision that Linux doesn't have any "good games". And in her parlance, we're not talking about FPS's and RTS's. We're talking Hearts. And Cribbage. And Euchre.
She does have Majohngg, and Digger, and some solataire games -- but every week for the past several years since switching her to Linux I get asked "So son, have any new card games come out for Linux yet?". Ugh.
And it doesn't exactly help that a friend of hers up at the family cottage is always talking about how he plays cards online on his Windows machine (fortunately, Mom is forced to use a very poorly thought out Windows-based system at her office, and hates Windows with a passion. Way to go, Mom!;) ). She hasn't asked for me to switch her to Windows at all, but she has been talking about buying a Mac for the sole purpose of being able to play all sorts of crappy card games.
(And no, for some reason she doesn't like playing such games online. She wants to play against the computer. I think she dislikes the lag when playing with clueless people who take three minutes to figure out which of the two remaining cards in their hand to play next:) ).
Okay -- it's late and I'm rambling. But the point remains: many of those Shareware applications you call "crappy" are exactly the sorts of applications your typical know-nothing end user wants. Mom could care less that Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is available for Linux. She just wants a Euchre, Hearts, and Cribbage with some decent graphics and gameplay.
(If I just had more time between the half dozen OSS projects I'm already working on, I'd start one to write a pile of card games for Linux, just so Mom would stop asking, and hopefully to remove one more barrier preventing the unwashed masses from switching to Linux).
OpenTAPAS is the Open Source Technology Assisted Practice Application Suite, which is designed specifically for physicians in clinical settings, and includes calendaring, messaging, and document storage, using both a web interface and PalmOS 5-based handheld systems. The messaging system in completely encrypted. OpenTAPAS is developed by the EGADSS Team at the University of British Columbia, and is headed by a family physician who is currently in clinical practice, and is backed up by the Vancouver Costal Health Service. Not only is it actively developed and maintained, but the project output is used by about 25 physicians in their day-to-day operations.
The document storage/retrieval system uses Plucker, a standard PalmOS document format and reader for offline hyperlinked document storage and viewing.
The jSyncManager is a pure Java, Open Source data synchronization system for PalmOS-based handhelds. It is completely platform portable, and provides a multi-port synchronization server which can synchronize hundreds of handhelds simultaneously through a single process. It is very highly optimized, and supports the jConduit plug-in architecture (it can also run conduits written for Palm's Conduit Development Kit for Java (aka "jsync", but no relation to the jSyncManager, which predates Palm's use of the name), if you're so inclined). Adding new synchronization routines is easier than other Linux-based PalmOS synchronization solutions, is easier for end-users to use (no "press HotSync first then start your application" junk like with some other systems...just drop your handheld into the dock and press the HotSync button as you would on Windows), and provides a security authentication module (which currently uses 4-factor security to identify users and handhelds, to ensure outsiders can't synchronize to your system).
And it's all Open Source software, licensed under the GPL/LGPL.
If you're interested, let me know and I'll get you in touch with the leader of the OpenTAPAS project personally. The project is evolving (Phase II of development is set to start very soon, implementing an encrypted patient record system which will synchronize with standard eHealth record formats so you can carrry patient summaries and mark up patient records on your Palm), so there is a lot of good stuff coming down the pipe. And as it's Open Source, as they say, the more the merrier!
(Disclaimer: I'm a paid member of the OpenTAPAS project, and the originator, administrator, and lead developer of the jSyncManager Project).
If your target market is 20-50 customers and it's a niche piece of software, you're dreaming if you think anyone is going to do any work on it, much less submit patches back.
Even the smallest projects can form a community if they are sufficiently unique, and meet a need that isn't met elsewhere.
It's hard to say anything about the target market of a piece of software without knowing more about the software in question. Those 20 - 50 customers may be those who are willing (and able) to pay $10k USD for a software package. But who knows -- maybe if it is effectively free it is something that will find use, in whole or in part, by a larger number of users, for quite some time to come. It all depends on what it does.
Yaz.
Re:DivX 6 is Out...for Windows 2000/XP.
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
Sure. MEncoder, which is part of MPlayer, claims to be able to encode H.264.
HTH!
Yaz.
DivX 6 is Out...for Windows 2000/XP.
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Everyone else is currently left out in the cold.
We're hard at work on the DivX Create Bundle for Mac and the DivX Play Bundle for Mac. Rest assured that we'll let you know the second they are ready for release. In the meantime, please continue to use DivX 5.2.1 or DivX Pro(TM) 5.2.1 for Mac OS X.
But, as I talk a bit more about elswhere, for most people it doesn't make half as much sense as using a Darwin distro like OpenDarwin on your servers for OS X client networks.
I'm not quite so sure I agree. As the recent Anandtech article showed, the kernel in OS X and Darwin can really bog things like databases and web servers under excessive connections, due to the coarse threading inside Mach.
Besides which, there is a much larger choice of server applications on Linux. Need to run DB2? Not goinng to happen on OpenDarwin. Or Novell's cool administrative tools? Linux again.
That's not to say that I have anything against Darwin and its derivitives -- I'm technically running Darwin as part of Tiger. I just think you'd have a lot of work to do to convince me that OpenDarwin makes a better small server choice for OS X networks than Linux.
For the record, I'm both an OS X and a Linux user.
I think that OS X on Intel, if it has any effect on Linux at all (and I'm not quite conviced yet that it will), will probably be positive, particularily in smaller networks like my own.
OS X is a fantastic client and development OS. I do all of my development on OS X these days, as well as all of my e-mail, web browsing, Skype usage, iChat/AIM instant messaging, gaming, music (iTunes/iPod), video playback, and device synchronization. From a user perspective, OS X is damn near perfect IMO. From a developer perspective, I like Cocoa and Objective-C these days more than just about any APIs available on Linux (with Linux having the advantage than when things go really bad, at least I have all the sources to try to trace a problem, and not just some of the sources). It has desktop Linux beat 15 ways from Sunday.
However, networks still need servers, and while Apple has done some interesting things with its Xserve line, an inexpensive Intel box running Linux is a vasty better server platform than OS X is. And it's also vastly cheaper.
This contrast could help Linux if Apple's new Intel systems do start winning over Windows users. Linux servers are based on much the same Open Source server technologies that OS X is built upon, so using Linux on your servers for OS X client networks just makes sense. It's more cost effective, and the two have much the same settings between them.
I'm still not convinced that Windows users are going to start switching en-masse to OS X just because it runs on Apple custom Intel machines, but we'll have to wait and see. If they do, I see this as an opportunity for Linux in the server space, and not as a net detriment.
As to the idea of Virtual PC running at native speeds, I am unwilling to call this as a negative. (It sounds too much like the complaints of the buggy-whip makers.)
They who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.
If anything, full speed VPC will help Mac adoption as the few programs which require Windows can then be used inside of OS X.
Yeah. After all, it did OS/2 a whole lot of good that it could run Windows 3.1 applications in protected memory space, and pre-emptively multitask them back in 1992.
The key factor here is which of the desktops provide the better user experience. That desktop will become the dominant one, assuming that apps from either OS can be used. When that happens, it will make more sense for software houses to program for that dominant desktop.
Sorry, but you're failing to learn from history.
Back before Windows 95, OS/2 had a significantly better desktop environment than Microsoft Windows did. It ran Win16 applications, typically better than Windows itself did. I knew of a lot of Windows developers who did their development on OS/2 because of its better memory management, pre-emptive multitasking, and crash protection.
And what good did any of this do for OS/2? I remember personally contacting ISVs to talk to them about porting their popular software to OS/2, and the answer I always got was "why, when it runs our Windows software so well?". They didn't care one whit about the desktop environment, or the fact that their Win13 and Win32s applications looked bad on OS/2, and ran worse than native applications, didn't integrate into the desktop environment, couldn't use long filenames, etc. They cared only about one thing: how do we target the largest possible market at the lowest cost?
I don't see that much has changed within the industry. There are a lot of Windows-only ISVs out there who have no intention of putting any effort into making OS X applications, but who wouldn't mind increasing their userbase. And there are a lot of other ISVs out there who put minimal effort into OS X native applications, but who would love to do away with the additional staff and costs associated with that.
Fortunately for Apple, unline IBM they already have a significant development community using their APIs. Cocoa is an absolute joy to develop with. If anything, I would think that instead of having good Windows emulation, what Apple really needs to do is to port Xcode and Cocoa to Windows and Linux, and get developers on those platforms to write applications to their APIs, and allow existing Xcode developers create apps which will run on Windows and Linux. That is where the real battle is -- for the hearts and minds of developers. If you permit Windows to run on OS X as well as on native Windows, you concede the most important battle by telling developers that using the Windows APIs is just as good as using your own APIs.
That is the lesson IBM learned the hard way. They continued to make that mistake with their Open32 APIs, which mirrored the most common Win32 APIs in order to permit Win32 applications to be recompiled to run on OS/2. That didn't work out too well either.
That was introduced about 10 years ago. Do you want OS X in 10 years to be where OS/2 is today?
So was a 4 mhz Zilog Z80. I know because I had one. It was my pride and joy at the time. But I think that we can all agree (okay, except perhaps for my nemesis in this discussion) that the average embedded system CPU is not going to work for a modern desktop.
Yeah, but if you had a Beowulf cluster of those...
I have a couple of Garmin GPSs that use 80186 family CPUs and the CPUs only cost a few bucks. That doesn't mean that those chips are suitable for use in desktop systems.
Actually, while IBM and the clone makers skipped on the 80186 as a core system CPU, the Unisys ICON Series I and II desktop computers both ran off the Intel 80186 (running QNX at that).
So that chip was (at one time) suitable for desktop systems:).
Well I believe if you wanted money you wouldn't be giving away the code for free, or maybe you should get into phone support. I heard that's where all the money is
Let's get a few things straight, okay?
First off, I'm not asking Google to give me money. Not that I wouldn't take it if it were offered, but I think there are other more deserving OSS developers.
Secondly, I am in fact being paid to do Open Source development, although this hasn't always been the case. I'm fortunate enough that the quality of my project allowed it to be selected to be the core part of a research project for a medical practice software development project, and I'm being paid well to be a consultant and developer.
But I'm one of the rare lucky ones. There are lots of excellent Open Source Developers who toil in obscurity and get nothing. Yet, corporations like Google (and many, many others, not to mention an untold number of governments and individuals) often benefit from their work.
My comments continue to stand. If Google wants to throw around some money to promote Open Source, helping out more starving developers and projects who already contribute to Open Source is a better place to start.
I think this is a very grand move by Google, so don't take this the wrong way, but what about trying to provide some money to people who are already coding Open Souce Software, and who do so purely for the love of it, and who could otherwise really use the money?
There are a lot of "starving coders" out there who are working in Open Source. Indeed, in several of my projects I tend to find that some of the better developers are those who have lost their jobs, or who have had to take some other job, and who want to keep their coding skills fresh by working on a project, doing the type of coding they really want to do.
These are the people I'd send money to first. They're already producing Open Source code, and for the vasst majority of them, nobody is lining up to throw money at them like this.
Think about this: how many of these students who receive this stipend will wind up continuing to contribute to the Open Source community after they graduate? I'm willing to bet that the ones who are likely to willingly participate in an Open Source project and who have an aptitude for it are already doing so, and are already somewhat aware of what Open Source means, and how Open Source projects are administered and maintained. For the others, what guaranteee is it that the money is well spent? What if they get their money, fulfill the requirements of the award, and then never produce or contribute to an Open Source project again?
I think Google's gesture is grand -- but maybe they should start rewarding some of the existing foot soldiers of Open Source before offering OSS "recruitment bonuses" to people who may never contribute anything useful to the OSS movement/codebase.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project (and several others).
A much more stereotypical response in the US would be for NASA to pay the family 200% of the value of what they lost, and the scrupulous family would still insist on suing for additional millions for the "emotional damage" resultant from the loss of their goldfish.
Don't forget then selling the rights to their story to Fox in order to make it into a movie-of-the-week, where while the main stage falls in some cornfield in central Nebraska, killing three chickens in the process, some part inexplicably falls onto the Eiffel Tower, causing an explosion that levels 40 city blocks in Paris, France.
Surely it wouldn't take them that long to code Vorbis support?!:)
Vorbis container support may be possible, but Ogg is probably not going to happen any time soon.
The big problem with Ogg is that the default decoder is very heavily reliant on floating point calculations of the kind that pretty much requires a floating point processor to calculate in a timely manner. The majority of music playback devices (like the iPod) are designed for integer calculations.
There was work being done a few years ago by the Vorbis developers on an integer Ogg decoder (the name of which escapes me at the moment, although I believe it started with a "T"), but at the time it was up in the air as to whether it would be openly licensed or not, and I haven't seen or heard anything about its development in nearly two years.
Apple isn't going to sit down and write its own Ogg Vorbis integer decoder just to satisfy thre people in/., nor should they. And I wouldn't expect them to jam an FPU into the iPod either, as this would unnecessarily raise the price of the iPod with no benefit for the vast majority of owners.
Let's ask what OS is better. The Apple and Linux people will go at each others throats and will in the end agree that they hate Window$.
I, for one, envision a different outcome. One which is more fair to everyone involved:
"Well ladies and gentlemen, I don't think any of our contestants this evening have succeeded in encapsulating the intricacies of kernel design, so I'm going to award the first prize this evening to the girl with the biggest tits."
'd say the biggets problem with this is making sure the plastic in all the components is oil-compatible, i.e. doesn't degrade or dissolve. The bottoms of most shoes do, as anyone knows who stepped in a puddle of oil in a garage. So why not plastic used as structural material and insulation?
Oil isn't even necessarily the best material to do this -- it's probably just the cheapest and easiest for a hobbiest to get hold of.
Liquid Fluorocarbon does an excellent job. The Ontario Science Centre used to have a great display of an operating television completely submurged in a small vat of the stuff. And fluorocarbon is effectively a plastic itself, and thus is harmless to plastics (unlike many oils).
That doesn't mean that 34 is the best gas mileage I get, of course.
I think you need to run some more tests there, as you should be able to do significantly better than that.
For example, if you leave your car parked in the driveway and walk, you should get near infinite fuel efficiency at 0 kph. You only have to worry about evaporation and the natural breakdown of the fuel in your tank.
(Sorry -- the mathematician in me decided to come out and be a smart-ass. The physicist in me would like to point out the the mathematician that we can do even better by putting the car in neutral while the engine is stopped and pushing it off a cliff -- you'll get ~9.8m/s^2 of acceleration without burning any fossil fuels whatsoever! Some days I just can't help myself...).
It's always great to hear from the/. peanut gallery of people who don't develop Open Source, who use lots of Open Source, but who don't generally donate any time, effort, or money to Open Source sound off on subjects like this, but maybe you'd like to hear from someone who is running an Open Source software project which does have a sponsor.
My project, the jSyncManager, has had a (somewhat indirect) sponsor for the past six months. Basically, this sponsor (who runs a department at a large University) needed an Open Source, platform neutral solution for synchronizing PalmOS-based handheld systems in the healthcare field, and decided to use the jSyncManager. In turn, they hired me on as a consultant to the project, doing Open Source software development.
This has been useful, as I've been doing Open Source development full time for the past year. It gives me a chance to work on my projects. The output I create for them is Open Source (GPL). And I have some funds I can now use towards the jSyncManager Project. They have also donated resources back to the jSyncManager Project.
I'm not going to get rich off their funding and the resources they've donated (sending me new handheld hardware was a huge boost, for example) -- but it's more than enough to support the needs of the project.
So please take a moment to take a look at their project (TAPAS). I would have continued jSyncManager development even without them, but their support has been a huge help, and has allowed me to do things like eat on a regular basis:).
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
Anyone else remember how Microsoft claimed that Windows 3.1 was better than Windows 3.0 because it did away with the dreaded "Unexpected Application Error" (UAE)? All the same errors typically occured -- it was just that Microsoft had renamed the error from "Unexpected Application Error" to "General Protection Fault" (GPF).
Unfortunately, now just as then PHB's fall for it.
That's a pipe dream, but seriously, if nobody capitalizes on this, it's a total missed opportunity to break the Microsoft monopoly.
One could argue that Apple has indeed capitalized upon this with Mac OS X Tiger, coming out tomorrow, which contains a lot of Open Source code in it (Darwin/FreeBSD, Apache, CUPS with an excellent interface, etc). And guess what? People are sitting up and taking notice.
The problem is, you need someone with deep pockets to finance all the boring aspects of making a unified-feeling distribution and fixing all the intricate bits (like CUPS or whatnot), but if they did, and slapped a big old IBM on the cover, it'd be dynamite. And having IBM on it would probably add a center juggernaut quality that might make hardware companies more interested in doing proper driver support.
No, no, and no. While IBM may have the deep pockets to do something like this, they are absolutely the WRONG company to do it. And I say this having previously been a long time IBM OS customer and as a former IBM employee.
First off, hardware companies have traditionally been afraid of IBM, because IBM has traditionally been a competitor (a view which probably hasn't changed much with the sale to Lenovo). Just take a look at how many hardware companies stepped up and supported IBM's previous consumer OS attempt, OS/2: support was often half-hearted, pathetic, or nil. The fact that IBM was behind it scared off potential hardware vendors (who, BTW, don't make their money off writing device drivers anyhow, and thus tend to like to keep driver development costs low by targeting as few platforms as possible).
Secondly, as anyone who bought in to IBM's OS/2 WARP v3 push and needed support probably knows, IBM just isn't set-up to provide end-user support. They have no experience nor expertise in consumer software support, and didn't do a terribly good job of it.
Sorry, but IBM creating their own consumer Linux would be the touch of death. IBM seems to know this themselves -- they have always expressed that they have no interest in creating their own Linux distribution, instead relying on partners to do this for them (like RedHat). There are much better options for such a company to produce such a Linux distro (and based on what I saw at LinuxWorld Canada last week, there are certainly some companies out there who are interested in trying).
If they do release it in Canada, that'll give all of us US-based Who fans a *much* better option for buying DVDs, rather than importing R2 releases from the UK. Damn, I wish someone would hurry up and sell us this damn thing, so I can stop stealing it.
I know this is complete and utter blasphemy in the US -- but why not call up your cable or satellite company and ask that they carry the CBC?
Okay, they'll probably blow you off, but nothing ever happens when you don't try:).
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're over-generalizing. Yes, many blogs are indeed vanity projects where people say whatever they feel like about subjects nobody cares about, but there are good, worth-while blogs out there which have nothing to do about vanity.
Developer blogs are one such style of blog, which can be very useful. You can use these types of blogs to get "inside knowledge" on development projects, and get some insight into the developers themselves, while peerhaps learning some interesting tricks and techniques along the way.
You know, I've never understood why some people feel the need to post in their blogs every single day. It's like back in Grade 3, when the teacher insisted we write something in our journals every freaking day (I remember telling my teachers that I had nothing to say. They'd always say that I should write about my morning. But how many times can an 8-year-old kid write "I ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, and then came to this dump"??? But I digress).
I run a small developer blog that nobody ever visits (well, so far as I know :) ) here, where I talk about Open Source development projects I'm working on, example code in various languages/APIs, comment on tradde shows I attend, etc. But if I have nothing to say for three weeks, I won't post anything for three weeks. If people want to find out when I have something to say, that's what the RSS feed is for. If they want to know what I'm up to between times, they can e-mail me.
So I agree with you on this point. I think that blogs can serve a useful purpose, but if you're writing in your blog just for the sake of writing in your blog, and have nothing useful to say, you should probably take up a new hobby.
Yaz.
But you know what? There is a lot of that "Windows Shareware" which simply isn't available on Linux, free or otherwise. And it's those crappy shareware applications which are often the stumbling blocks for end users to switch to anything.
In particular, card games. Yes, Linux has Solataire in all its variations down pat pretty good, but it's hard to find a decent version of Euchre, Cribbage, Hearts, or all other sorts of such games. Linux just doesn't have them.
And trust me -- I hear about it all the time. Several years ago my mother decided to upgrade her old OS/2 based machine. She's exactly the type of user we're talking about here -- she doesn't know diddly about much of anything other than how to turn the computer on, use the mouse, and type stuff on the keyboard. She wouldn't know a compiler or even a command prompt from the Sultan of Brunei.
As she doesn't even know how to maintain a machine, and as she always calls on me to fix her system or even install new software for her (she won't do it herself -- downloading new wallpapers is as risque as she gets when it comes to the computer), Linux was a natural fit: it was cheap (as in free), is very easy to maintain remotely (her old OS/2 system needed a somewhat slow remote desktop solution so I could save an hours drive if she needed help), and is something she would have a hard time screwing up (as she doesn't have root access, of course).
(It helped that all she really ever does is surf the web and play some really basic games, with the occassional glance at her e-mail (once a month maybe...). She ran Mozilla on OS/2, so switching to Linux didn't mean having to learn a big pile of new software, and she didn't have any documents to speak of that needed a specific Office suite, so switching was pretty painless for her overall).
Her system runs beautifully, and requires very little maintenance. And yet at least once a week I hear her moans of derision that Linux doesn't have any "good games". And in her parlance, we're not talking about FPS's and RTS's. We're talking Hearts. And Cribbage. And Euchre.
She does have Majohngg, and Digger, and some solataire games -- but every week for the past several years since switching her to Linux I get asked "So son, have any new card games come out for Linux yet?". Ugh.
And it doesn't exactly help that a friend of hers up at the family cottage is always talking about how he plays cards online on his Windows machine (fortunately, Mom is forced to use a very poorly thought out Windows-based system at her office, and hates Windows with a passion. Way to go, Mom! ;) ). She hasn't asked for me to switch her to Windows at all, but she has been talking about buying a Mac for the sole purpose of being able to play all sorts of crappy card games.
(And no, for some reason she doesn't like playing such games online. She wants to play against the computer. I think she dislikes the lag when playing with clueless people who take three minutes to figure out which of the two remaining cards in their hand to play next :) ).
Okay -- it's late and I'm rambling. But the point remains: many of those Shareware applications you call "crappy" are exactly the sorts of applications your typical know-nothing end user wants. Mom could care less that Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is available for Linux. She just wants a Euchre, Hearts, and Cribbage with some decent graphics and gameplay.
(If I just had more time between the half dozen OSS projects I'm already working on, I'd start one to write a pile of card games for Linux, just so Mom would stop asking, and hopefully to remove one more barrier preventing the unwashed masses from switching to Linux).
Yaz.
As you're a doctor, take a look at OpenTAPAS and the jSyncManager:
OpenTAPAS is the Open Source Technology Assisted Practice Application Suite, which is designed specifically for physicians in clinical settings, and includes calendaring, messaging, and document storage, using both a web interface and PalmOS 5-based handheld systems. The messaging system in completely encrypted. OpenTAPAS is developed by the EGADSS Team at the University of British Columbia, and is headed by a family physician who is currently in clinical practice, and is backed up by the Vancouver Costal Health Service. Not only is it actively developed and maintained, but the project output is used by about 25 physicians in their day-to-day operations.
The document storage/retrieval system uses Plucker, a standard PalmOS document format and reader for offline hyperlinked document storage and viewing.
The jSyncManager is a pure Java, Open Source data synchronization system for PalmOS-based handhelds. It is completely platform portable, and provides a multi-port synchronization server which can synchronize hundreds of handhelds simultaneously through a single process. It is very highly optimized, and supports the jConduit plug-in architecture (it can also run conduits written for Palm's Conduit Development Kit for Java (aka "jsync", but no relation to the jSyncManager, which predates Palm's use of the name), if you're so inclined). Adding new synchronization routines is easier than other Linux-based PalmOS synchronization solutions, is easier for end-users to use (no "press HotSync first then start your application" junk like with some other systems...just drop your handheld into the dock and press the HotSync button as you would on Windows), and provides a security authentication module (which currently uses 4-factor security to identify users and handhelds, to ensure outsiders can't synchronize to your system).
And it's all Open Source software, licensed under the GPL/LGPL.
If you're interested, let me know and I'll get you in touch with the leader of the OpenTAPAS project personally. The project is evolving (Phase II of development is set to start very soon, implementing an encrypted patient record system which will synchronize with standard eHealth record formats so you can carrry patient summaries and mark up patient records on your Palm), so there is a lot of good stuff coming down the pipe. And as it's Open Source, as they say, the more the merrier!
(Disclaimer: I'm a paid member of the OpenTAPAS project, and the originator, administrator, and lead developer of the jSyncManager Project).
Brad BARCLAY
Even the smallest projects can form a community if they are sufficiently unique, and meet a need that isn't met elsewhere.
It's hard to say anything about the target market of a piece of software without knowing more about the software in question. Those 20 - 50 customers may be those who are willing (and able) to pay $10k USD for a software package. But who knows -- maybe if it is effectively free it is something that will find use, in whole or in part, by a larger number of users, for quite some time to come. It all depends on what it does.
Yaz.
Sure. MEncoder, which is part of MPlayer, claims to be able to encode H.264.
HTH!
Yaz.
Everyone else is currently left out in the cold.
(Ref: http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/divx6.php).
No word on versions for any other platform either.
Personally, if I had my way more people would just use H.264, and then I wouldn't have to care.
Yaz.
I'm not quite so sure I agree. As the recent Anandtech article showed, the kernel in OS X and Darwin can really bog things like databases and web servers under excessive connections, due to the coarse threading inside Mach.
Besides which, there is a much larger choice of server applications on Linux. Need to run DB2? Not goinng to happen on OpenDarwin. Or Novell's cool administrative tools? Linux again.
That's not to say that I have anything against Darwin and its derivitives -- I'm technically running Darwin as part of Tiger. I just think you'd have a lot of work to do to convince me that OpenDarwin makes a better small server choice for OS X networks than Linux.
Yaz.
For the record, I'm both an OS X and a Linux user.
I think that OS X on Intel, if it has any effect on Linux at all (and I'm not quite conviced yet that it will), will probably be positive, particularily in smaller networks like my own.
OS X is a fantastic client and development OS. I do all of my development on OS X these days, as well as all of my e-mail, web browsing, Skype usage, iChat/AIM instant messaging, gaming, music (iTunes/iPod), video playback, and device synchronization. From a user perspective, OS X is damn near perfect IMO. From a developer perspective, I like Cocoa and Objective-C these days more than just about any APIs available on Linux (with Linux having the advantage than when things go really bad, at least I have all the sources to try to trace a problem, and not just some of the sources). It has desktop Linux beat 15 ways from Sunday.
However, networks still need servers, and while Apple has done some interesting things with its Xserve line, an inexpensive Intel box running Linux is a vasty better server platform than OS X is. And it's also vastly cheaper.
This contrast could help Linux if Apple's new Intel systems do start winning over Windows users. Linux servers are based on much the same Open Source server technologies that OS X is built upon, so using Linux on your servers for OS X client networks just makes sense. It's more cost effective, and the two have much the same settings between them.
I'm still not convinced that Windows users are going to start switching en-masse to OS X just because it runs on Apple custom Intel machines, but we'll have to wait and see. If they do, I see this as an opportunity for Linux in the server space, and not as a net detriment.
Yaz.
They who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.
Yeah. After all, it did OS/2 a whole lot of good that it could run Windows 3.1 applications in protected memory space, and pre-emptively multitask them back in 1992.
Sorry, but you're failing to learn from history.
Back before Windows 95, OS/2 had a significantly better desktop environment than Microsoft Windows did. It ran Win16 applications, typically better than Windows itself did. I knew of a lot of Windows developers who did their development on OS/2 because of its better memory management, pre-emptive multitasking, and crash protection.
And what good did any of this do for OS/2? I remember personally contacting ISVs to talk to them about porting their popular software to OS/2, and the answer I always got was "why, when it runs our Windows software so well?". They didn't care one whit about the desktop environment, or the fact that their Win13 and Win32s applications looked bad on OS/2, and ran worse than native applications, didn't integrate into the desktop environment, couldn't use long filenames, etc. They cared only about one thing: how do we target the largest possible market at the lowest cost?
I don't see that much has changed within the industry. There are a lot of Windows-only ISVs out there who have no intention of putting any effort into making OS X applications, but who wouldn't mind increasing their userbase. And there are a lot of other ISVs out there who put minimal effort into OS X native applications, but who would love to do away with the additional staff and costs associated with that.
Fortunately for Apple, unline IBM they already have a significant development community using their APIs. Cocoa is an absolute joy to develop with. If anything, I would think that instead of having good Windows emulation, what Apple really needs to do is to port Xcode and Cocoa to Windows and Linux, and get developers on those platforms to write applications to their APIs, and allow existing Xcode developers create apps which will run on Windows and Linux. That is where the real battle is -- for the hearts and minds of developers. If you permit Windows to run on OS X as well as on native Windows, you concede the most important battle by telling developers that using the Windows APIs is just as good as using your own APIs.
That is the lesson IBM learned the hard way. They continued to make that mistake with their Open32 APIs, which mirrored the most common Win32 APIs in order to permit Win32 applications to be recompiled to run on OS/2. That didn't work out too well either.
That was introduced about 10 years ago. Do you want OS X in 10 years to be where OS/2 is today?
Yaz.
Yeah, but if you had a Beowulf cluster of those...
;)
Yaz.
Actually, while IBM and the clone makers skipped on the 80186 as a core system CPU, the Unisys ICON Series I and II desktop computers both ran off the Intel 80186 (running QNX at that).
So that chip was (at one time) suitable for desktop systems :).
Yaz.
Let's get a few things straight, okay?
First off, I'm not asking Google to give me money. Not that I wouldn't take it if it were offered, but I think there are other more deserving OSS developers.
Secondly, I am in fact being paid to do Open Source development, although this hasn't always been the case. I'm fortunate enough that the quality of my project allowed it to be selected to be the core part of a research project for a medical practice software development project, and I'm being paid well to be a consultant and developer.
But I'm one of the rare lucky ones. There are lots of excellent Open Source Developers who toil in obscurity and get nothing. Yet, corporations like Google (and many, many others, not to mention an untold number of governments and individuals) often benefit from their work.
My comments continue to stand. If Google wants to throw around some money to promote Open Source, helping out more starving developers and projects who already contribute to Open Source is a better place to start.
Yaz.
I think this is a very grand move by Google, so don't take this the wrong way, but what about trying to provide some money to people who are already coding Open Souce Software, and who do so purely for the love of it, and who could otherwise really use the money?
There are a lot of "starving coders" out there who are working in Open Source. Indeed, in several of my projects I tend to find that some of the better developers are those who have lost their jobs, or who have had to take some other job, and who want to keep their coding skills fresh by working on a project, doing the type of coding they really want to do.
These are the people I'd send money to first. They're already producing Open Source code, and for the vasst majority of them, nobody is lining up to throw money at them like this.
Think about this: how many of these students who receive this stipend will wind up continuing to contribute to the Open Source community after they graduate? I'm willing to bet that the ones who are likely to willingly participate in an Open Source project and who have an aptitude for it are already doing so, and are already somewhat aware of what Open Source means, and how Open Source projects are administered and maintained. For the others, what guaranteee is it that the money is well spent? What if they get their money, fulfill the requirements of the award, and then never produce or contribute to an Open Source project again?
I think Google's gesture is grand -- but maybe they should start rewarding some of the existing foot soldiers of Open Source before offering OSS "recruitment bonuses" to people who may never contribute anything useful to the OSS movement/codebase.
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project (and several others).
Don't forget then selling the rights to their story to Fox in order to make it into a movie-of-the-week, where while the main stage falls in some cornfield in central Nebraska, killing three chickens in the process, some part inexplicably falls onto the Eiffel Tower, causing an explosion that levels 40 city blocks in Paris, France.
Yaz.
Because:
Yaz.
That hint enables Q2DX the hard way. The easier way is to open a terminal and paste in the following command:
HTH!
Yaz.
Vorbis container support may be possible, but Ogg is probably not going to happen any time soon.
The big problem with Ogg is that the default decoder is very heavily reliant on floating point calculations of the kind that pretty much requires a floating point processor to calculate in a timely manner. The majority of music playback devices (like the iPod) are designed for integer calculations.
There was work being done a few years ago by the Vorbis developers on an integer Ogg decoder (the name of which escapes me at the moment, although I believe it started with a "T"), but at the time it was up in the air as to whether it would be openly licensed or not, and I haven't seen or heard anything about its development in nearly two years.
Apple isn't going to sit down and write its own Ogg Vorbis integer decoder just to satisfy thre people in /., nor should they. And I wouldn't expect them to jam an FPU into the iPod either, as this would unnecessarily raise the price of the iPod with no benefit for the vast majority of owners.
Yaz.
I, for one, envision a different outcome. One which is more fair to everyone involved:
Yaz.
Oil isn't even necessarily the best material to do this -- it's probably just the cheapest and easiest for a hobbiest to get hold of.
Liquid Fluorocarbon does an excellent job. The Ontario Science Centre used to have a great display of an operating television completely submurged in a small vat of the stuff. And fluorocarbon is effectively a plastic itself, and thus is harmless to plastics (unlike many oils).
Yaz.
I think you need to run some more tests there, as you should be able to do significantly better than that.
For example, if you leave your car parked in the driveway and walk, you should get near infinite fuel efficiency at 0 kph. You only have to worry about evaporation and the natural breakdown of the fuel in your tank.
(Sorry -- the mathematician in me decided to come out and be a smart-ass. The physicist in me would like to point out the the mathematician that we can do even better by putting the car in neutral while the engine is stopped and pushing it off a cliff -- you'll get ~9.8m/s^2 of acceleration without burning any fossil fuels whatsoever! Some days I just can't help myself...).
Yaz.
It's always great to hear from the /. peanut gallery of people who don't develop Open Source, who use lots of Open Source, but who don't generally donate any time, effort, or money to Open Source sound off on subjects like this, but maybe you'd like to hear from someone who is running an Open Source software project which does have a sponsor.
My project, the jSyncManager, has had a (somewhat indirect) sponsor for the past six months. Basically, this sponsor (who runs a department at a large University) needed an Open Source, platform neutral solution for synchronizing PalmOS-based handheld systems in the healthcare field, and decided to use the jSyncManager. In turn, they hired me on as a consultant to the project, doing Open Source software development.
This has been useful, as I've been doing Open Source development full time for the past year. It gives me a chance to work on my projects. The output I create for them is Open Source (GPL). And I have some funds I can now use towards the jSyncManager Project. They have also donated resources back to the jSyncManager Project.
I'm not going to get rich off their funding and the resources they've donated (sending me new handheld hardware was a huge boost, for example) -- but it's more than enough to support the needs of the project.
So please take a moment to take a look at their project (TAPAS). I would have continued jSyncManager development even without them, but their support has been a huge help, and has allowed me to do things like eat on a regular basis :).
Brad BARCLAY
Lead Developer & Project Administrator,
The jSyncManager Project.
Anyone else remember how Microsoft claimed that Windows 3.1 was better than Windows 3.0 because it did away with the dreaded "Unexpected Application Error" (UAE)? All the same errors typically occured -- it was just that Microsoft had renamed the error from "Unexpected Application Error" to "General Protection Fault" (GPF).
Unfortunately, now just as then PHB's fall for it.
Yaz.
FYI, the directions provided in the link you referenced work just fine for FC3 as well.
Yaz.
One could argue that Apple has indeed capitalized upon this with Mac OS X Tiger, coming out tomorrow, which contains a lot of Open Source code in it (Darwin/FreeBSD, Apache, CUPS with an excellent interface, etc). And guess what? People are sitting up and taking notice.
No, no, and no. While IBM may have the deep pockets to do something like this, they are absolutely the WRONG company to do it. And I say this having previously been a long time IBM OS customer and as a former IBM employee.
First off, hardware companies have traditionally been afraid of IBM, because IBM has traditionally been a competitor (a view which probably hasn't changed much with the sale to Lenovo). Just take a look at how many hardware companies stepped up and supported IBM's previous consumer OS attempt, OS/2: support was often half-hearted, pathetic, or nil. The fact that IBM was behind it scared off potential hardware vendors (who, BTW, don't make their money off writing device drivers anyhow, and thus tend to like to keep driver development costs low by targeting as few platforms as possible).
Secondly, as anyone who bought in to IBM's OS/2 WARP v3 push and needed support probably knows, IBM just isn't set-up to provide end-user support. They have no experience nor expertise in consumer software support, and didn't do a terribly good job of it.
Sorry, but IBM creating their own consumer Linux would be the touch of death. IBM seems to know this themselves -- they have always expressed that they have no interest in creating their own Linux distribution, instead relying on partners to do this for them (like RedHat). There are much better options for such a company to produce such a Linux distro (and based on what I saw at LinuxWorld Canada last week, there are certainly some companies out there who are interested in trying).
Yaz.
I know this is complete and utter blasphemy in the US -- but why not call up your cable or satellite company and ask that they carry the CBC?
Okay, they'll probably blow you off, but nothing ever happens when you don't try :).
Yaz.