MacOS X has a right-to-left button order -> people praise MacOS X for being usable.
People do not praise OSX because of the button order. That's just silly stupid. The order could be reversed and there would be no difference in usability.
Software is complex. Horribly complex. According to Fred Brooks, software is the most complex thing mankind has ever created.
Yet people still demand that this complexity be simple. IT CAN'T BE DONE! Microwave ovens are easy to use because microwave ovens are simple. In comparison to software, automobiles are easy to use simplistic devices.
Simplifying the interface only frustrates those users who want the power and complexity of the underlying software. It rewards the ignorance at the expense of experience.
You can make software usable, but you don't go about it by slashing away at the functionality, or hiding away the controls in an undocumented morass of registry entries. You do it organizing, adjusting and streamlining the interface according to the common workflows (plural) of the user.
While the GPL certainly does not require merging stuff, there is certainly that tendency in the long term.
And it's certainly a tendency under the BSD license as well. FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD Darwin. My point is, using forking in any way to promote or discourage a particular license is ignorant of the true state of reality, as well as silly.
Why not? My mom took a class at the senior center on Windows, bought a Reader's Digest book on Windows, and a couple of different DVDs on how to use Windows. Of course, none of it did a bit of good, but she still attempted to aquire the necessary knowledge.
A) If TCP/IP were under the GPL, then yes, you are very correct that Microsoft would have struck out on their own to create a separate internet. Why you think this would have been better than them using the BSD TCP/IP is beyond my comprehension.
B) The BSD TCP/IP stack predates the term "Open Source", heck it predates the term "Free Software" as well! So when I say "open" I mean it in the dictionary sense. Microsoft is not hiding the TCP/IP protocol from anyone. They have not changed it in their implementation. Thus, someone who uses Windows is able to network with Unix, Linux, OSX, and all other TCP/IP-using systems. There is nothing closed about the standard or the protocol. Their implementation may be a black box, but the behavior of that black box meets the TCP/IP specifications.
C) The TCP/IP "ball" was not yours to take and go home with. It belonged to Berkeley's CSRG, and it was solely up to them to dicate the rules of using that "ball". If they wanted to be free-wheeling freedom-loving anarchists wishing to impose virtually no rules on their gifts, it's not your business to bitch about it. Freedom isn't something you dole out in precise measurements, "this much and no more!"
Here's a couple of links to the different displays. It's quite easy to tell which one is the "30 times brighter" display and which is the "10 times darker" display...
For those of you too busy to real of the puerile comments on Slashdot today, here's the GPL versus BSD debate in a nutshell:
A) People who do not code, or whose code consists of a single buggy PHP module done last weekend, claim that the BSD license is a "license to rape, pillage, and steal."
B) People who actually code for a living will say "use the license you want, and I'll use the license I want."
How is the GPL "greedy"? It sounds to me like you're the greedy one, because you want to take someone else's work and dictate to them how it will be used. If you don't like the terms under which someone else distributes their work, you can write your own version.
That's all well and good... UNTIL you slap the GPL on a library. Then you enter a situation where you start whacking people over the head with your license for merely using your library. The authors shouldn't have to rewrite your library because they aren't copying, modifying or distributing it. In this situation the GPL is a license to "take someone else's work and dictate to them how it will be used."
The BSD forks occured for two reasons, and two reasons only. The first was a lack of communication. NetBSD and FreeBSD both independently forked off of the unmaintained 386BSD, because neither was aware of the other until it was too late. The second reason was a difference in vision. OpenBSD forked off of NetBSD (and DragonFly from FreeBSD) for differences in opinion about major architectural designs.
THERE IS A FORK THAT WILL NEVER BE ALLOWED TO MERGE BACK
BIG FAT HAIRY DEAL!
A major point of Free software is to reduce the amount of wheel reinvention.
Bullshit. If you're going to be a GNU sycophant, you could at least do us the courtesy of reading the GNU literature. The purpose of Free Software is freedom. Now maybe RMS has defined that "freedom" differently than the dictionary has, but he never intended it to be something as banal as stopping people from reinventing the wheel.
They already did that with the TCP stack from what I understand
Here's the question of the day to all your GPL advocates: would you rather have had a world in which Microsoft would have created their own incompatible network stack for use on 90% of the world's computers? Or would you rather have had them use the existing standard?
They incorporated the BSD stack in their code and their use of it is not open at all.
Microsoft's use of the TCP/IP stack is very open. If it weren't you would not be able to communicate with a Microsoft system using a different TCP/IP stack.
Stop spreading this GPL FUD. It's childish and makes you look no better than the proprietary whiners you claim to be better than. UC Berkeley and DARPA give the world a robust networking standard with no strings attached and all you can do is bitch that its too free.
The "Unix Wars" scenario is a result of everybody finding some way, any way, to make their product distinctive and different.
You mean like all the Linux distributions that obsess about some tiny differentiator so people will buy their shrink-wrap box instead of their competitors? Stop kidding yourselves, the Unix Wars didn't happen because RMS attended MIT instead of UCB.
If the GPL prevents forking, then what about Emacs/Xemacs, gcc/egcs, etc. Stop trying to claim that forks are bad and stop trying to claim they don't happen under the GPL.
I'm not arguing against throwing away a good design, I'm arguing against throwing away a currently working design. Add in all the eye candy you want, but keep the present X11 protocol, libraries and server in place because a lot of people will still need it.
If you look at the new Enlightenment and related libraries, you'll see that they've managed to support hardware rendering without screwing over the guy that still needs software rendering. But I never hear about proposals like this when it comes to X. Everyone is screaming that all of X11 needs to be thrown out and replaced wholesale with a PC-centric design.
How many fucking library dependancies do you need for a modern windowing system? Have you ever run 'ldd' on a modern GNOME or KDE app? It's enough to make you vomit.
You're talking about windowing systems, not application frameworks. There's a difference. Using ldd on this currently running Konqueror process, I see the following "windowing system" dependencies: KDE, Qt and X11. That's it. And most of KDE and Qt are NOT part of the "windowing system".
Most of the libraries you see in the ldd are part of X11. Don't consider them extra dependencies just because X11 has been split. The dependency is still just one X11 package (not counting fonts).
Don't place stuff like expat, jpeg, fam, libc and the like under the "windowing system" category. And leave off the app framework libraries of KDE. They're going to be used by your application no matter what the underlying windowing system is.
If OpenGL is going to be used for everything, then it's going to be used for everyone's everyday 2D applications. If we're mapping an OpenOffice window (as an example) onto a 2D OpenGL plane, then isn't it essential a texture? And if we send the textures as pixel data, aren't we back at square one?
The trouble with doing everything over OpenGL is that you're subjugating X11 to the video chip manufacturers. While I understand that gamers could care less about closed versus open drivers, I for one don't want to mess with proprietary drivers just to use a 2D desktop. I could be using Windows if I wanted that.
Right now the Open Source nv and ati drivers in X.org are more than adequate for normal 2D display, but they suck for OpenGL.
I'm not idly ranting about ideology, I'm talking practical problems. When I bought my new computer I put an GeForce in it because everyone said NVidia drivers were the best for FreeBSD. But NVidia never bothered update their driver for -CURRENT for six months. Six freaking months! I should be the one deciding what branch, OS and kernel to use, and *not* NVidia.
I fully understand that NVidia and ATI have proprietary intellectual property tied up in their drivers, and can't open them. But that's their problem, not mine. I'm not going to cry for them, because I don't have this problem with my ethernet card, hard drives or CPU.
After the boxing matches at the Seoul Olympics®, I realized that the Olympic® were no more genuine than the WWF®, but with only half the drama.
Re:Many projects don't fail, they rust in place
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 1
Yes here is where you can make a plug for XP or agile development
No please don't! Otherwise they just might say yes, but without understanding the new methodology, making you work within some bastardized pseudo-process that's worse than the orginal.
Remember, extreme and agile methodologies require a change to the traditional structure of dvelopment teams, and you're not going to be able to push something that "radical" up to the VP level for approval
The real reality
on
IT Myths
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Reality: Don't pay extra for upgradability; you'll never need it - "When was the last time you swapped out the processors on a production server? Have you ever ripped out a working system's RAID controller and substituted one with bigger cache? How about pulling out a machine's mirrored 18GB Ultra160 SCSI boot drives just to replace them with some 36GB Ultra360 spindles?">/em>
Come to think of it, we replace and upgrade the drives in our servers all the time. I'm not talking about the disposable 1U racks the mom-and-pop IT house calls "servers", but the very expensive Sun enterprise servers. When a harddrive goes out (and they do, they do) you don't replace the whole fricking server. That's stupidity of the highest magnitude.
You might not ever need to upgrade the CPU, but you do want to keep that expensive server operational and in use as long as possible. That means additional storage on occasion and replacing the parts that go bad.
How do you price software? The same way you price any other product. Duh!
This isn't rocket science, people. If your total revenue drops when you raise/lower your price, then lower/raise your price. Do a bit of market research to narrow in on the correct price. If sales don't work, don't have sales.
Software is a product just like any other, so don't go throwing our all of your sales and marketing knowledge because your not selling forks and spoons. Some of the details will be different, but most of it will be the same. If your product is Open Source, you're probably going to have to sell it at a low price. If it's proprietary software for a niche market with no competition then you can charge a lot more.
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I couldn't agree with you more. So, why not support ROX-Desktop, GNUStep and XFCE?
Clones! Every last one of them! Instead of a broken Windows clone you want us to use a broken NeXT or CDE clone!
MacOS X has a right-to-left button order -> people praise MacOS X for being usable.
People do not praise OSX because of the button order. That's just silly stupid. The order could be reversed and there would be no difference in usability.
Software is complex. Horribly complex. According to Fred Brooks, software is the most complex thing mankind has ever created.
Yet people still demand that this complexity be simple. IT CAN'T BE DONE! Microwave ovens are easy to use because microwave ovens are simple. In comparison to software, automobiles are easy to use simplistic devices.
Simplifying the interface only frustrates those users who want the power and complexity of the underlying software. It rewards the ignorance at the expense of experience.
You can make software usable, but you don't go about it by slashing away at the functionality, or hiding away the controls in an undocumented morass of registry entries. You do it organizing, adjusting and streamlining the interface according to the common workflows (plural) of the user.
While the GPL certainly does not require merging stuff, there is certainly that tendency in the long term.
And it's certainly a tendency under the BSD license as well. FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD Darwin. My point is, using forking in any way to promote or discourage a particular license is ignorant of the true state of reality, as well as silly.
Why not? My mom took a class at the senior center on Windows, bought a Reader's Digest book on Windows, and a couple of different DVDs on how to use Windows. Of course, none of it did a bit of good, but she still attempted to aquire the necessary knowledge.
A) If TCP/IP were under the GPL, then yes, you are very correct that Microsoft would have struck out on their own to create a separate internet. Why you think this would have been better than them using the BSD TCP/IP is beyond my comprehension.
B) The BSD TCP/IP stack predates the term "Open Source", heck it predates the term "Free Software" as well! So when I say "open" I mean it in the dictionary sense. Microsoft is not hiding the TCP/IP protocol from anyone. They have not changed it in their implementation. Thus, someone who uses Windows is able to network with Unix, Linux, OSX, and all other TCP/IP-using systems. There is nothing closed about the standard or the protocol. Their implementation may be a black box, but the behavior of that black box meets the TCP/IP specifications.
C) The TCP/IP "ball" was not yours to take and go home with. It belonged to Berkeley's CSRG, and it was solely up to them to dicate the rules of using that "ball". If they wanted to be free-wheeling freedom-loving anarchists wishing to impose virtually no rules on their gifts, it's not your business to bitch about it. Freedom isn't something you dole out in precise measurements, "this much and no more!"
So you do believe it's a conspiracy, you just think his particular name for it is stupid?
Here's a couple of links to the different displays. It's quite easy to tell which one is the "30 times brighter" display and which is the "10 times darker" display...
For those of you too busy to real of the puerile comments on Slashdot today, here's the GPL versus BSD debate in a nutshell:
A) People who do not code, or whose code consists of a single buggy PHP module done last weekend, claim that the BSD license is a "license to rape, pillage, and steal."
B) People who actually code for a living will say "use the license you want, and I'll use the license I want."
How is the GPL "greedy"? It sounds to me like you're the greedy one, because you want to take someone else's work and dictate to them how it will be used. If you don't like the terms under which someone else distributes their work, you can write your own version.
That's all well and good... UNTIL you slap the GPL on a library. Then you enter a situation where you start whacking people over the head with your license for merely using your library. The authors shouldn't have to rewrite your library because they aren't copying, modifying or distributing it. In this situation the GPL is a license to "take someone else's work and dictate to them how it will be used."
The BSD forks occured for two reasons, and two reasons only. The first was a lack of communication. NetBSD and FreeBSD both independently forked off of the unmaintained 386BSD, because neither was aware of the other until it was too late. The second reason was a difference in vision. OpenBSD forked off of NetBSD (and DragonFly from FreeBSD) for differences in opinion about major architectural designs.
Not one fork was cause by "too much freedom".
THERE IS A FORK THAT WILL NEVER BE ALLOWED TO MERGE BACK
BIG FAT HAIRY DEAL!
A major point of Free software is to reduce the amount of wheel reinvention.
Bullshit. If you're going to be a GNU sycophant, you could at least do us the courtesy of reading the GNU literature. The purpose of Free Software is freedom. Now maybe RMS has defined that "freedom" differently than the dictionary has, but he never intended it to be something as banal as stopping people from reinventing the wheel.
They already did that with the TCP stack from what I understand
Here's the question of the day to all your GPL advocates: would you rather have had a world in which Microsoft would have created their own incompatible network stack for use on 90% of the world's computers? Or would you rather have had them use the existing standard?
They incorporated the BSD stack in their code and their use of it is not open at all.
Microsoft's use of the TCP/IP stack is very open. If it weren't you would not be able to communicate with a Microsoft system using a different TCP/IP stack.
Stop spreading this GPL FUD. It's childish and makes you look no better than the proprietary whiners you claim to be better than. UC Berkeley and DARPA give the world a robust networking standard with no strings attached and all you can do is bitch that its too free.
The "Unix Wars" scenario is a result of everybody finding some way, any way, to make their product distinctive and different.
You mean like all the Linux distributions that obsess about some tiny differentiator so people will buy their shrink-wrap box instead of their competitors? Stop kidding yourselves, the Unix Wars didn't happen because RMS attended MIT instead of UCB.
If the GPL prevents forking, then what about Emacs/Xemacs, gcc/egcs, etc. Stop trying to claim that forks are bad and stop trying to claim they don't happen under the GPL.
I'm not arguing against throwing away a good design, I'm arguing against throwing away a currently working design. Add in all the eye candy you want, but keep the present X11 protocol, libraries and server in place because a lot of people will still need it.
If you look at the new Enlightenment and related libraries, you'll see that they've managed to support hardware rendering without screwing over the guy that still needs software rendering. But I never hear about proposals like this when it comes to X. Everyone is screaming that all of X11 needs to be thrown out and replaced wholesale with a PC-centric design.
How many fucking library dependancies do you need for a modern windowing system? Have you ever run 'ldd' on a modern GNOME or KDE app? It's enough to make you vomit.
You're talking about windowing systems, not application frameworks. There's a difference. Using ldd on this currently running Konqueror process, I see the following "windowing system" dependencies: KDE, Qt and X11. That's it. And most of KDE and Qt are NOT part of the "windowing system".
Most of the libraries you see in the ldd are part of X11. Don't consider them extra dependencies just because X11 has been split. The dependency is still just one X11 package (not counting fonts).
Don't place stuff like expat, jpeg, fam, libc and the like under the "windowing system" category. And leave off the app framework libraries of KDE. They're going to be used by your application no matter what the underlying windowing system is.
If OpenGL is going to be used for everything, then it's going to be used for everyone's everyday 2D applications. If we're mapping an OpenOffice window (as an example) onto a 2D OpenGL plane, then isn't it essential a texture? And if we send the textures as pixel data, aren't we back at square one?
The trouble with doing everything over OpenGL is that you're subjugating X11 to the video chip manufacturers. While I understand that gamers could care less about closed versus open drivers, I for one don't want to mess with proprietary drivers just to use a 2D desktop. I could be using Windows if I wanted that.
Right now the Open Source nv and ati drivers in X.org are more than adequate for normal 2D display, but they suck for OpenGL.
I'm not idly ranting about ideology, I'm talking practical problems. When I bought my new computer I put an GeForce in it because everyone said NVidia drivers were the best for FreeBSD. But NVidia never bothered update their driver for -CURRENT for six months. Six freaking months! I should be the one deciding what branch, OS and kernel to use, and *not* NVidia.
I fully understand that NVidia and ATI have proprietary intellectual property tied up in their drivers, and can't open them. But that's their problem, not mine. I'm not going to cry for them, because I don't have this problem with my ethernet card, hard drives or CPU.
After the boxing matches at the Seoul Olympics®, I realized that the Olympic® were no more genuine than the WWF®, but with only half the drama.
Yes here is where you can make a plug for XP or agile development
No please don't! Otherwise they just might say yes, but without understanding the new methodology, making you work within some bastardized pseudo-process that's worse than the orginal.
Remember, extreme and agile methodologies require a change to the traditional structure of dvelopment teams, and you're not going to be able to push something that "radical" up to the VP level for approval
Reality: Don't pay extra for upgradability; you'll never need it - "When was the last time you swapped out the processors on a production server? Have you ever ripped out a working system's RAID controller and substituted one with bigger cache? How about pulling out a machine's mirrored 18GB Ultra160 SCSI boot drives just to replace them with some 36GB Ultra360 spindles?">/em>
Come to think of it, we replace and upgrade the drives in our servers all the time. I'm not talking about the disposable 1U racks the mom-and-pop IT house calls "servers", but the very expensive Sun enterprise servers. When a harddrive goes out (and they do, they do) you don't replace the whole fricking server. That's stupidity of the highest magnitude.
You might not ever need to upgrade the CPU, but you do want to keep that expensive server operational and in use as long as possible. That means additional storage on occasion and replacing the parts that go bad.
How do you price software? The same way you price any other product. Duh!
This isn't rocket science, people. If your total revenue drops when you raise/lower your price, then lower/raise your price. Do a bit of market research to narrow in on the correct price. If sales don't work, don't have sales.
Software is a product just like any other, so don't go throwing our all of your sales and marketing knowledge because your not selling forks and spoons. Some of the details will be different, but most of it will be the same. If your product is Open Source, you're probably going to have to sell it at a low price. If it's proprietary software for a niche market with no competition then you can charge a lot more.
Can konq render the /. profiles pages in 3.3 with some semblance of sanity?
Dude, it's Slashdot. Neither Konqueror nor any other browser is doing to render it sanely until Taco decides to take a class in HTML.
It's not so much the insertion that's uncomfortable, it's the removal. Imagine passing an eight inch kidney stone. Gaaaah!
Lydia, oh Lydia, have you seen Lydia? Lydia the tatoo'ed lady!