Right on. I've tried getting hold of PPC gear, and nobody I've talked to locally will even bother to sell it to me. You can get "development kits" from manufactures for embedded stuff if you're prepared to pay $5000 or so for 6 year old technology. I think there's a couple of $1000 PPC boards targeted at AmigaOS and Linux too, but I've never even seen a 3rd party verify they even work worth a damn.
There was a northbridge company (MAI?) that held promise to bring boards to the masses but that idea seems to have fizzled too, with their "evaluation" boards costing $3900 for 1. Nobody seem to be serious about volume sales, and setting a realistic market price for what is essentially a slow-ass PC platform. It's always developer or evaluation or sample product.
These days I don't really give a damn. x86 works fine for me, and I can get low power x86 stuff like Mini/Nano-ITX cheaply too. Any advantage of PPC is lost on me these days. PowerPC is nice, but they missed the boat. IMO, going "Open" isn't enough for IBM to reach even the geek masses. They need salable product on the shelf (or website) and they need it to be competitively priced. Anything less is just cheap talk.
Have you even been on a European rail network, or are you talking out of your arse? Milan to Rome in about 4 hours IIRC. Yes, some regional trains have a lot of stops, but they are for moving people so stop being melodramatic. I'm surprised you don't have a moan about Paris subway having stops a few hundred meters from everywhere. And who's talking about profitability? You don't spend billions on passenger train networks if you're not making money on them, and most of the rail systems are very popular.
Nice idea, but it would be abused too. I think it's safe to say that people would "find" evidence of their own prior art. And then maybe sue for copyright infringement - sorry, "IP theft" - and loss of market due to their competitor publishing "their IP". It would get ugly real fast.
No, he's doing the right thing... I dunno if I completely agree with his choice of packages, but it does mesh well with the aims of a basic but complete package. With a little polish applied to the installation, I'd imagine it would work just fine for a lot of people, and they wouldn't have to fret over which word processor they want to use today.
Fedora and Mandrake et al couldn't get away with dropping half of their packages - the user outcry would be enormous. But a new distro can. Whether many people will actually use it is something else however. Personally, I think the real solution is not rolling a new distro, but providing a reworked installer script that uses an existing distro, like say Mandrake 10. You get the clean interface and small footprint, but you also get the installation base and user support.
All your mirror are belong to us? This sounds like a VERY good reason to keep anonymous HTTP web proxies open. They can't block every site ( well, not yet... still waiting for AI packet sniffing filters:( ).
Well, you learn something new everyday. I did not know there was a legal interpretation of the parenthetical, aside from a general "some more info that's less important" English interpretation. Indeed, even the "/" could be interpreted as "and or" or "or" or "and" depending on the reader. I guess that's the problem with using common language for legal information.
I suspect we'd see similar confusion if laywers were expected to write software...;)
Yeh, it's not hard to figure shipping costs, but half the time US shops don't want to know about shipping goods abroad. Fair enough to some degree, as many won't know about filling in export entries and how to handle any taxation issues, plus the ever-present fraud paranoia, but it's still annoying to have to manually filter them out.
It depends on your interpretation of "commercial (proprietary/closed source)". If it's taken to mean "closed source" only, then fine, but it's quite possible to make commercial GPL'd software, and their website suggests this is against their terms of licensing. They should probably reword this section to clarify their position.
When Qt Free Edition is Open Source and GPL, can I use it to make commercial (proprietary/closed-source) software?
No.
You will still need to purchase the Professional or Enterprise Edition to make commercial (proprietary/closed-source) software with Qt.
Which suggests that I cannot make a GPL'ed commercial application? Perhaps that should be clarified. I also cannot make a GPL'd native (non-Cygwin) Windows application at all. QT is nice to work in, but it's a long way from being truely free software. I guess that theoretically, QT Free could be ported to Windows by a 3rd party, or that you could go to court over commercial GPL'd software, but I doubt it's worth the hassle while there's other free-er alternatives.
That was my second thought, right after WTF? Novell buys Ximian, then decides to roll with QT? Huh? Is there some back room dealing going on? Why on Earth would Novell get involved with Trolltech - with it's Canopy Group ties - when they've got an awesome desktop and Gnome knowledge pool already? Is it some crazy Utah thing, as parent suggests? This smells fishy (and doesn't taste like chicken).
Oh please. Rockets work because "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" - they don't work by pushing against the atmosphere, they work by throwing mass out the back of the rocket. Given the F=MV^2, current work is mostly about increasing the velocity of the mass output. Ion drives are a good example of this.
Go learn some physics before spouting off about bending space-time around a vehicle. Heres's a kiddies link about rocket motors to get you started: http://science.howstuffworks.com/rocket1.htm
I think marketers actually inflate the problem on purpose, making it seem that there is more choice than there actually is - since that boosts the chances that a consumer will buy your product.
They do this, and it's really bad in small countries; in some markets, you can go to every store in a town and find the same range of products, which have all come through the same two importers (two, so there's no monopoly, I guess).
But there's another insidious problem with "choice" - Most of the time, you aren't making one. I went to a local supermarket which is the only one open at 4 am, and there are signs saying "Thank you for choosing to shop at [supermarket name here]". The only choice I made ws to get food now or later, not to shop there. Or you get a Dell and it has Windows on it, and there's a little note saying "Thank you for choosing Microsoft" or similar. You didn't choose it, it just came with the computer whether you liked it or not.
People are so used to being told they are making choices when they plainly are not. When confronted with a real decision, it overwhelms them and they freak out and run back to their comfort zone. The paradox of choice is not that we have too much choice, it's that when given a real one most people don't want it anyway.
hmm. i'm using mandrake 9.2 right now, and yeh, it's lacking in some of the smoothness of the latest distros. things like flash cards and cameras mount just fine once set up, but it shouldn't be required. Mdk 10 does "just work" with this stuff, and fwiw, i read that madwifi is in the mandrakeclub list of requested rpms. i'd imagine there will be rpms out there somewhere by now.
I'm getting the impression we're being slowly eased into the concept of life on Mars. I mean, how long did it take for them to even confirm it was once wet? And although we've sent several probes to Mars, we're detecting methane by telescope from Earth? Maybe my tinfoil fat needs adjusting, but something is wrong with this picture...
Yup. He made a blanket statement with nothing to back it up, so I'm calling him on it. Show me the data on a desktop machine that is Windows specific, and needs converting to Linux.
As far as apps go, office formats are fairly well handled by OpenOffice.org already. Email and web settings are portable, or can be managed by Mozilla import filters. Databases and the like can usually be exported painlessly. But really, anything application specific has nought to do with Linux, and changing platforms when you don't have the software you need is pretty stupid.
bah. another "linux is not ready for the desktop" troll. you leave out which distro you were using. for all i know, it might have been redhat 7 or lfs. maybe it was a current distro like mepis, mandrake, or suse. and maybe there were.debs or rpms already available, so you didn't really have to compile from source. mabe if the vendor gave a shit you could "pop in a cd and hit install" too. who knows...
Maybe I'm missing the point, but the scroll wheel interface has been done plenty of times on other devices, eg car audio, av gear, so why's it so patent worthy because it's on a portable MP3 player?
Regimes can be toppled without much organization if their are enough dissidents (happened peacefully in one EU spot recently - sorry forgot the country) but regime *replacement* is what takes organisation.
You just reminded me of one of the key FUD issues. Microsoft doesn't like to mention that OpenOffice.org is parented by Sun Microsystems. Mentioning Sun gives OpenOffice.org and Star Office a little too much credibility. In fact, their PDF mentions the word "Sun" only once in context of *Star Office* support and training. Never mind that the document itself has some glaring errors - which their sales droids would have no clue about. I think it's fair to say MS is very very worried about OpenOffice.org.
It sounds like ancestor poster is someone who has never been to Europe... France is a long long long way from becoming a 3rd world country. It would take a nuclear strike on most of Europe to make that happen, although maybe that's what was being implied. OTOH, it would be funny to watch the US get wiped off the map if they tried that.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, what a horrible way to go. Death by chicken.
Right on. I've tried getting hold of PPC gear, and nobody I've talked to locally will even bother to sell it to me. You can get "development kits" from manufactures for embedded stuff if you're prepared to pay $5000 or so for 6 year old technology. I think there's a couple of $1000 PPC boards targeted at AmigaOS and Linux too, but I've never even seen a 3rd party verify they even work worth a damn.
There was a northbridge company (MAI?) that held promise to bring boards to the masses but that idea seems to have fizzled too, with their "evaluation" boards costing $3900 for 1. Nobody seem to be serious about volume sales, and setting a realistic market price for what is essentially a slow-ass PC platform. It's always developer or evaluation or sample product.
These days I don't really give a damn. x86 works fine for me, and I can get low power x86 stuff like Mini/Nano-ITX cheaply too. Any advantage of PPC is lost on me these days. PowerPC is nice, but they missed the boat. IMO, going "Open" isn't enough for IBM to reach even the geek masses. They need salable product on the shelf (or website) and they need it to be competitively priced. Anything less is just cheap talk.
Have you even been on a European rail network, or are you talking out of your arse? Milan to Rome in about 4 hours IIRC. Yes, some regional trains have a lot of stops, but they are for moving people so stop being melodramatic. I'm surprised you don't have a moan about Paris subway having stops a few hundred meters from everywhere. And who's talking about profitability? You don't spend billions on passenger train networks if you're not making money on them, and most of the rail systems are very popular.
Nice idea, but it would be abused too. I think it's safe to say that people would "find" evidence of their own prior art. And then maybe sue for copyright infringement - sorry, "IP theft" - and loss of market due to their competitor publishing "their IP". It would get ugly real fast.
I can't keep giving it away. You know, it doesn't grow on trees, and the free ride is over man. I can hook you up, but it's gonna cost $699 a hit...
No, he's doing the right thing... I dunno if I completely agree with his choice of packages, but it does mesh well with the aims of a basic but complete package. With a little polish applied to the installation, I'd imagine it would work just fine for a lot of people, and they wouldn't have to fret over which word processor they want to use today.
Fedora and Mandrake et al couldn't get away with dropping half of their packages - the user outcry would be enormous. But a new distro can. Whether many people will actually use it is something else however. Personally, I think the real solution is not rolling a new distro, but providing a reworked installer script that uses an existing distro, like say Mandrake 10. You get the clean interface and small footprint, but you also get the installation base and user support.
All your mirror are belong to us? This sounds like a VERY good reason to keep anonymous HTTP web proxies open. They can't block every site ( well, not yet... still waiting for AI packet sniffing filters :( ).
Well, you learn something new everyday. I did not know there was a legal interpretation of the parenthetical, aside from a general "some more info that's less important" English interpretation. Indeed, even the "/" could be interpreted as "and or" or "or" or "and" depending on the reader. I guess that's the problem with using common language for legal information.
;)
I suspect we'd see similar confusion if laywers were expected to write software...
Yeh, it's not hard to figure shipping costs, but half the time US shops don't want to know about shipping goods abroad. Fair enough to some degree, as many won't know about filling in export entries and how to handle any taxation issues, plus the ever-present fraud paranoia, but it's still annoying to have to manually filter them out.
It depends on your interpretation of "commercial (proprietary/closed source)". If it's taken to mean "closed source" only, then fine, but it's quite possible to make commercial GPL'd software, and their website suggests this is against their terms of licensing. They should probably reword this section to clarify their position.
Don't you be dissing The Carpenters!
From the Trolltech website:
When Qt Free Edition is Open Source and GPL, can I use it to make commercial (proprietary/closed-source) software?
No.
You will still need to purchase the Professional or Enterprise Edition to make commercial (proprietary/closed-source) software with Qt.
Which suggests that I cannot make a GPL'ed commercial application? Perhaps that should be clarified. I also cannot make a GPL'd native (non-Cygwin) Windows application at all. QT is nice to work in, but it's a long way from being truely free software. I guess that theoretically, QT Free could be ported to Windows by a 3rd party, or that you could go to court over commercial GPL'd software, but I doubt it's worth the hassle while there's other free-er alternatives.
That was my second thought, right after WTF? Novell buys Ximian, then decides to roll with QT? Huh? Is there some back room dealing going on? Why on Earth would Novell get involved with Trolltech - with it's Canopy Group ties - when they've got an awesome desktop and Gnome knowledge pool already? Is it some crazy Utah thing, as parent suggests? This smells fishy (and doesn't taste like chicken).
Oh please. Rockets work because "every action has an equal and opposite reaction" - they don't work by pushing against the atmosphere, they work by throwing mass out the back of the rocket. Given the F=MV^2, current work is mostly about increasing the velocity of the mass output. Ion drives are a good example of this.
Go learn some physics before spouting off about bending space-time around a vehicle. Heres's a kiddies link about rocket motors to get you started: http://science.howstuffworks.com/rocket1.htmI think marketers actually inflate the problem on purpose, making it seem that there is more choice than there actually is - since that boosts the chances that a consumer will buy your product.
They do this, and it's really bad in small countries; in some markets, you can go to every store in a town and find the same range of products, which have all come through the same two importers (two, so there's no monopoly, I guess).
But there's another insidious problem with "choice" - Most of the time, you aren't making one. I went to a local supermarket which is the only one open at 4 am, and there are signs saying "Thank you for choosing to shop at [supermarket name here]". The only choice I made ws to get food now or later, not to shop there. Or you get a Dell and it has Windows on it, and there's a little note saying "Thank you for choosing Microsoft" or similar. You didn't choose it, it just came with the computer whether you liked it or not.
People are so used to being told they are making choices when they plainly are not. When confronted with a real decision, it overwhelms them and they freak out and run back to their comfort zone. The paradox of choice is not that we have too much choice, it's that when given a real one most people don't want it anyway.That's not a risk i'm willing to take.
hmm. i'm using mandrake 9.2 right now, and yeh, it's lacking in some of the smoothness of the latest distros. things like flash cards and cameras mount just fine once set up, but it shouldn't be required. Mdk 10 does "just work" with this stuff, and fwiw, i read that madwifi is in the mandrakeclub list of requested rpms. i'd imagine there will be rpms out there somewhere by now.
I'm getting the impression we're being slowly eased into the concept of life on Mars. I mean, how long did it take for them to even confirm it was once wet? And although we've sent several probes to Mars, we're detecting methane by telescope from Earth? Maybe my tinfoil fat needs adjusting, but something is wrong with this picture...
Yup. He made a blanket statement with nothing to back it up, so I'm calling him on it. Show me the data on a desktop machine that is Windows specific, and needs converting to Linux.
As far as apps go, office formats are fairly well handled by OpenOffice.org already. Email and web settings are portable, or can be managed by Mozilla import filters. Databases and the like can usually be exported painlessly. But really, anything application specific has nought to do with Linux, and changing platforms when you don't have the software you need is pretty stupid.
bah. another "linux is not ready for the desktop" troll. you leave out which distro you were using. for all i know, it might have been redhat 7 or lfs. maybe it was a current distro like mepis, mandrake, or suse. and maybe there were .debs or rpms already available, so you didn't really have to compile from source. mabe if the vendor gave a shit you could "pop in a cd and hit install" too. who knows...
Which data in particular?
Maybe I'm missing the point, but the scroll wheel interface has been done plenty of times on other devices, eg car audio, av gear, so why's it so patent worthy because it's on a portable MP3 player?
Regimes can be toppled without much organization if their are enough dissidents (happened peacefully in one EU spot recently - sorry forgot the country) but regime *replacement* is what takes organisation.
You just reminded me of one of the key FUD issues. Microsoft doesn't like to mention that OpenOffice.org is parented by Sun Microsystems. Mentioning Sun gives OpenOffice.org and Star Office a little too much credibility. In fact, their PDF mentions the word "Sun" only once in context of *Star Office* support and training. Never mind that the document itself has some glaring errors - which their sales droids would have no clue about. I think it's fair to say MS is very very worried about OpenOffice.org.
It sounds like ancestor poster is someone who has never been to Europe... France is a long long long way from becoming a 3rd world country. It would take a nuclear strike on most of Europe to make that happen, although maybe that's what was being implied. OTOH, it would be funny to watch the US get wiped off the map if they tried that.