The line between "window manager" and "desktop environment" is very fuzzy. Very few window mangers *only* manage windows. Most of the ones that are useable as standalone have some "desktop" functionality, like the ability to launch apps via buttons and/or root menus. About all that standalone window mangers have that makes them shy of being desktop environments is a file manager and a GUI config tool.
The fuzzy distinction between window manager and desktop is why GNOME's supposed window manager independence didn't work out so well in practice.
Remember, Mac OS X is essentially NeXTSTEP. Since GNUStep is an implementation of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, supporting the OS X API is a natural outgrowth of that. The usefulness of supporting Mac OS X isn't a matter of being practical per se, rather just a matter of being properly NeXTish.
"Unfortunately, the first thing I thought of when I read this quote was Larry Wall's infamous quote describing the Three Virtues of a Programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris......"
Actually what you thought of is fairly pertinent to the discussion--so long as you realize that Larry Wall flipped the concepts of "laziness, impatience, and hubris" upside-down.
Laziness, Larry-Wall style, is doing a lot of work so that others or one's future self don't need to do as much work. This is *vicarious* laziness, doing the work up front so that others can be "lazy."
Impatience, Larry-Wall style, is also vicarious: spending the time to do the foundational work right so that others don't have to spend the time doing it and can just build on top of it--which takes less time.
Hubris, Larry-Wall style, is having the guts or gall to show your code so that everyone can see how wonderful it is. Perversely, this implies having the humility to accept criticism and fixes from those who find flaws in that [not-so] great and wonderful code.
Vicarious laziness and impatience are basically what the author of the article calls "beauty."
"Yes, there were security holes. Yes, they were easy to exploit. However, exploiting them and downloading company files is not legal. Period."
The catch is that until someone actually exploits the hole, it's not clear whether an actual hole exist. For all Brian knew, the attempt to download the Perl script could have failed and left only an error message, and there would have been no way of knowing that until he tried.
The Debian install doesn't autodetect *anything*, not even PCI devices. Also the packaging and admin tools are command-line based, which isn't bad if you like the command line, but would tend to confuse newbies who are used to GUIs.
That said, I currently use Debian and like it, but I cut my teeth on Red Hat, Mandrake, and FreeBSD first.
It's pretty clear from the context that RMS is not calling the current Qt non-free. Look near the end of his response:
"Ultimately the Qt developers responded to these efforts [GNOME and Harmony, the free Qt clone] by changing the license of Qt and making it free software. Qt is now available under the GNU GPL, and we discontinued working on Harmony (it was no longer necessary).
Note also that RMS said that "KDE was... a free GUI desktop interface that depended on a non-free library, Qt," not "KDE was... a free GUI desktop interface that depends on a non-free library, Qt."
"Isn't the open source/free inherently opposed to 'for sale' software?"
Sigh. This is such an old issue.
No, open source is not *inherently* opposed to 'for sale' software. In practice, making money directly from open source software is problematic, but that is a different question altogether.
"Imagine if every X application had to supply the font rendering libraries necessary to run. It would be a mess - DLL hell!"
False analogy. If you had it so that the font rendering libraries were only installed when the proprietary FooMonoPolyWare was installed, it would be a good analogy to what MS was doing.
"VisED used a brilliant command-bar at the top of the page which listed CTRL-KEY combos based on topic, then function.
For instance, CTRL-X while editing would turn the command bar at top to Quit-Related functions, such as QUIT, SAVE, CLEAR, etc. Other functions included advanced search and replace, cuting and pasting, and for users with enough access, reading and writing files off of the local Amiga's file system."
Sounds roughly like aee, which you can get at http://mahon.cwx.net/. aee has the key control sequences listed above the space for editing the text. From the way you described VisED, aee doesn't sound as sophisticated, but it seems about in the same ballpark.
"swordfish" is a bad choice for a password in any case because it is a word that can be found in the dictionary. Password crackers use dictionaries as sources of guessable passwords.
As far as I can tell from Mr. Hubbard's post, he is not stopping his work on FreeBSD, so his presence on the FreeBSD team *won't* be missed.
Re:I have watched the entire first season....
on
Andromeda
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· Score: 1
"I'm going to give season two a chance. But as I think back, I think that Star Trek TNG's first season: LAME, Star Trek: DS9 First Season: Oh, my god, this is LAME. Voyager: Took a few seasons and Seven of Nine (not for her boobs) to drag it out of the LAME pile to the passable pile."
...
"Babylon 5 and Farscape are the only two I can think off that don't fit that mold."
Actually, IMHO, the first season of B5 was OK. It took awhile to get rolling. Same thing with Farscape.
Re:Star Trek similarities unsurprising.
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 1
"was Star Trek really the first sci-fi concept with... dematerializtion devices?"
Actually, I think it *was* the first to have transporters. Rememeber that the original Star Trek was pretty low-budget. It was easier to stage transporters than shuttlecraft trips. It's not much different than McCoy's instruments all being fancy salt shakers.
"For example, you cannot legally distribute a binary of Python 2.0 linked with the GNU readline library. That sucks. But now it is legal to link Python 2.0.1 with readline and distribute that binary."
Um, no. The GNU readline library is GPL'd, which means that all programs which link to it must be GPL'd since they are considered "derived works" of GNU readline. Not even a program under the BSD-ish X license, which is GPL-compatible, can link to a GPL'd library.
What the license change to Python 2.0.1 means is that GPL'd programs can link to Python and use it as an embedded interpreter. Considering that a sizeable body of GPL'd software had linked to Python before it had become GPL-incompatible, the return of GPL compatibility is a Good Thing(TM).
AFAIK, RH's gcc isn't broken anymore. It's still Red Hat's "gcc-2.96", but it's been patched to deal with the bugs in the first release of gcc-2.96 (in RH 7.0). The compiler should be fine.
They wouldn't, most likely. Open sourcing BeOS, if it *could* be done--a big if--would simply be a way of helping to ensure that BeOS wouldn't die with Be, the company.
Actually, it looks like a number of companies are trying to do option #2 (Keep track of all your individual licences), but are given the runaround by the suppliers of their software--including Microsoft--when they try to figure out what exactly the terms are and get conflicting answers from various sales reps.
You're right in a way. It "doesn't take a genius to figure out how to handle Microsoft licencing." It takes a mind reader.
From assorted remarks I've seen on Slashdot and Linux Today, it seems that a lot of people seem to think of KDE and GNOME as Linux projects rather than Unix projects. Go figure.
Slashdot Mirror
> I appreciate better plumbing, but better plumbing does not move code
Wrong. Programmers use that plumbing to build apps.
The line between "window manager" and "desktop environment" is very fuzzy. Very few window mangers *only* manage windows. Most of the ones that are useable as standalone have some "desktop" functionality, like the ability to launch apps via buttons and/or root menus. About all that standalone window mangers have that makes them shy of being desktop environments is a file manager and a GUI config tool.
The fuzzy distinction between window manager and desktop is why GNOME's supposed window manager independence didn't work out so well in practice.
"So did Vigor [red-bean.com], the vi paperclip, make it into the 6.0 release?"
;)
If it did, that would make the Vim developers "wrong, lying and criminally insane"!
Because they are implementing NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP which is intimately tied with Objective C.
Remember, Mac OS X is essentially NeXTSTEP. Since GNUStep is an implementation of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, supporting the OS X API is a natural outgrowth of that. The usefulness of supporting Mac OS X isn't a matter of being practical per se, rather just a matter of being properly NeXTish.
"Unfortunately, the first thing I thought of when I read this quote was Larry Wall's infamous quote describing the Three Virtues of a Programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris......"
Actually what you thought of is fairly pertinent to the discussion--so long as you realize that Larry Wall flipped the concepts of "laziness, impatience, and hubris" upside-down.
Laziness, Larry-Wall style, is doing a lot of work so that others or one's future self don't need to do as much work. This is *vicarious* laziness, doing the work up front so that others can be "lazy."
Impatience, Larry-Wall style, is also vicarious: spending the time to do the foundational work right so that others don't have to spend the time doing it and can just build on top of it--which takes less time.
Hubris, Larry-Wall style, is having the guts or gall to show your code so that everyone can see how wonderful it is. Perversely, this implies having the humility to accept criticism and fixes from those who find flaws in that [not-so] great and wonderful code.
Vicarious laziness and impatience are basically what the author of the article calls "beauty."
I know AtheOS has its own GUI, but I imagine that have X on board would make porting most Unix apps easier. Has anyone attempted such a thing?
"US laws only apply in the US, thank you very much"
Tell that to Skylarov.
"Yes, there were security holes. Yes, they were easy to exploit. However, exploiting them and downloading company files is not legal. Period."
The catch is that until someone actually exploits the hole, it's not clear whether an actual hole exist. For all Brian knew, the attempt to download the Perl script could have failed and left only an error message, and there would have been no way of knowing that until he tried.
> a US actually in Russia is subject to Russian laws
But a U.S. citizen *outside* Russia is not subject to Russian laws, and a Russian *outside* the U.S. is not subject to U.S. laws.
Remember that what Skylarov did that was so offensive to Adobe was both legal in Russia and done on Russian soil.
The Debian install doesn't autodetect *anything*, not even PCI devices. Also the packaging and admin tools are command-line based, which isn't bad if you like the command line, but would tend to confuse newbies who are used to GUIs.
That said, I currently use Debian and like it, but I cut my teeth on Red Hat, Mandrake, and FreeBSD first.
It's pretty clear from the context that RMS is not calling the current Qt non-free. Look near the end of his response:
Note also that RMS said that "KDE was ... a free GUI desktop interface that depended on a non-free library, Qt," not "KDE was ... a free GUI desktop interface that depends on a non-free library, Qt."
"Isn't the open source/free inherently opposed to 'for sale' software?"
Sigh. This is such an old issue.
No, open source is not *inherently* opposed to 'for sale' software. In practice, making money directly from open source software is problematic, but that is a different question altogether.
"Imagine if every X application had to supply the font rendering libraries necessary to run. It would be a mess - DLL hell!"
False analogy. If you had it so that the font rendering libraries were only installed when the proprietary FooMonoPolyWare was installed, it would be a good analogy to what MS was doing.
"VisED used a brilliant command-bar at the top of the page which listed CTRL-KEY combos based on topic, then function.
For instance, CTRL-X while editing would turn the command bar at top to Quit-Related functions, such as QUIT, SAVE, CLEAR, etc. Other functions included advanced search and replace, cuting and pasting, and for users with enough access, reading and writing files off of the local Amiga's file system."
Sounds roughly like aee, which you can get at http://mahon.cwx.net/. aee has the key control sequences listed above the space for editing the text. From the way you described VisED, aee doesn't sound as sophisticated, but it seems about in the same ballpark.
"swordfish" is a bad choice for a password in any case because it is a word that can be found in the dictionary. Password crackers use dictionaries as sources of guessable passwords.
As far as I can tell from Mr. Hubbard's post, he is not stopping his work on FreeBSD, so his presence on the FreeBSD team *won't* be missed.
"I'm going to give season two a chance. But as I think back, I think that Star Trek TNG's first season: LAME, Star Trek: DS9 First Season: Oh, my god, this is LAME. Voyager: Took a few seasons and Seven of Nine (not for her boobs) to drag it out of the LAME pile to the passable pile."
...
"Babylon 5 and Farscape are the only two I can think off that don't fit that mold."
Actually, IMHO, the first season of B5 was OK. It took awhile to get rolling. Same thing with Farscape.
"was Star Trek really the first sci-fi concept with ... dematerializtion devices?"
Actually, I think it *was* the first to have transporters. Rememeber that the original Star Trek was pretty low-budget. It was easier to stage transporters than shuttlecraft trips. It's not much different than McCoy's instruments all being fancy salt shakers.
"For example, you cannot legally distribute a binary of Python 2.0 linked with the GNU readline library. That sucks. But now it is legal to link Python 2.0.1 with readline and distribute that binary."
Um, no. The GNU readline library is GPL'd, which means that all programs which link to it must be GPL'd since they are considered "derived works" of GNU readline. Not even a program under the BSD-ish X license, which is GPL-compatible, can link to a GPL'd library.
What the license change to Python 2.0.1 means is that GPL'd programs can link to Python and use it as an embedded interpreter. Considering that a sizeable body of GPL'd software had linked to Python before it had become GPL-incompatible, the return of GPL compatibility is a Good Thing(TM).
AFAIK, RH's gcc isn't broken anymore. It's still Red Hat's "gcc-2.96", but it's been patched to deal with the bugs in the first release of gcc-2.96 (in RH 7.0). The compiler should be fine.
They wouldn't, most likely. Open sourcing BeOS, if it *could* be done--a big if--would simply be a way of helping to ensure that BeOS wouldn't die with Be, the company.
Actually, it looks like a number of companies are trying to do option #2 (Keep track of all your individual licences), but are given the runaround by the suppliers of their software--including Microsoft--when they try to figure out what exactly the terms are and get conflicting answers from various sales reps.
You're right in a way. It "doesn't take a genius to figure out how to handle Microsoft licencing." It takes a mind reader.
Here are some desirable closed-sources apps for Linux:
WordPerfect, StarOffice (not the OpenOffice beta), Adobe Acrobat Reader, RealPlayer, Java from Blackdown or Sun.
Some people like to run these.
"Whoever thought it was only for Linux?"
From assorted remarks I've seen on Slashdot and Linux Today, it seems that a lot of people seem to think of KDE and GNOME as Linux projects rather than Unix projects. Go figure.