So here I am in the software test lab at work. I'm talking to Juan, who has found an interesting bug in my code. During the discussion I said, "let me show you what I mean at Google." I then opened up a browser and attempted to get to Google. Unfortunately I mistyped Google, and typed www.googlde.com instead.
Aaack! Quick close the window. Another! Close the window. Two more. Click, click. Suddenly we hear footsteps coming our way. It's the freaking CEO! Aaaaah!
Now that I think about it, I didn't bake those cookies from scratch last weekend, like I told all my friends. After all, I used a cookie sheet, cookie cutter, bowl, spoon and mixer. Neither did I mill my own flour or churn my own butter.
Shame on me for telling my friends "I baked some cookies!"
You're going to have to clarify what you mean by "GNOME."... And then when you say 'Windows,' what are you talking about?
I'm talking about the default installs for both. For GNOME, this is everything under "GNOME 2.6 Installation Order" on the GNOME installation page. For Windows, it's also the default install, choosing "full" instead of "minimal" of "custom" when given a choice.
Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from.
Mr. Brown is deliberately playing his audience for fools. Of course Linus didn't create Linux from tabula rasa. He didn't start with a blank harddrive and manually toggle in hex until he managed to get it booted up to an editor to start typing in Linux source! Duh!
When Linus "used" Minix and GCC, he used them as tools. Is this so hard for Mr. Brown to get through his skull? Apparently so.
Is it likely that a student (Linus Torvalds) with no operating systems experience, a non-Unix licensee, without any use of Minix or Unix source code, could build a functioning kernel in six months
Mr. Brown seems to be making the argument later than Linus couldn't of possibly have written Linux 2.6 in six months. Of course! He came up with version 0.1 instead. Although it was functional, it wasn't terribly useful.
People would take Ken Brown more seriously if he didn't write a book that was nothing more than his attempt to discredit his own erroneous assumtions.
It's not whining, it's not an overreaction, it's not adolescent petulance. It's merely a boycott. Maybe if we were all standing in front of Linux Today headquarters with cheap signs you might have a point. But this is just a boycott. We're merely deciding not to go to a site that supports a firm we don't want to support.
Frankly, I don't notice the advertisements anymore. It's a failing of mass market advertising, in that too much and it becomes invisible.
But now that my attention has been drawn to it, I can start boycotting. I don't use Linux, but I do routinely go to Linux-Today for general Open Source news.
Re:Go OS X route a finally ditch X11
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 1
You do know that XFCE with Rox filer uses X11, don't you?
X11 is not going to die, because X11 is too damned useful. It may evolve, but it will never go away. Despite uninformed trolls to the contrary, X11 is fast and efficient. Some toolkits on top of it might not be, but X11 itself is lean and mean.
Re:GNOME is becoming more like KDE every day...
on
The GNOME Roadmap
·
· Score: 1
You don't have to install everything GNOME offers. I know several KDE users who only install kdebase, and never bother with the "swiss army knife" of kdeadmin, kdeartwork, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdepim, kdeutils and kdeaddons. All of those are *optional* packages.
No they are not. They are environments. If you want to quibble about the term "desktop", be my guest, but a window manager is a much different thing than an environment.
KDE and GNOME come with file managers. They come with browsers. They come with email clients. They come with a lot of stuff that's unnecessary for window managers, but useful in working graphical environments.
They both also come with standard libraries and APIs. So they're also development environments. Write a KDE program and it integrates into the environment in a way a pure Qt program never could. Write a GNOME program and it integrates into the environment in a way no GTK+ program every could.
And that is already or will soon be supported in KDE.
I don't believe that this has been decided yet. KDE development is not dictated by what proposals GNOME posts at fd.org. If D-BUS is better than dcop, and doesn't require a dependency upon gdk, then it will probably be adopted. Otherwise it won't.
The best standards are those where both sides work together to create, and NOT those where one side dictates to the other.
Beyond that, he also needs to take into account that GNOME+Mozilla has ten times the functionality of Windows. It might not necessarily be as intuitive for Windows users as Windows is, but it certainly has more features and functionality.
How will you ever have a seamless, professional, sane desktop environment that doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API? The very idea is so backwards and laughable, I fully expect Linux to take another 10 years to reach the level XP and OS X are at now.
XP and OSX get around the problem but mandating the operating system. Only an idiot developer would think that a binary OSX package should be able to install on XP, or vice versa. Yet people expect this of Unix!
KDE and Gnome support more than one Linux distro. And to clue you in, they support more than just Linux. Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, Cygwin, OSX+X, OpenBSD, IRIX, NetBSD, etc, etc, etc. Expecting the desktop to provide a common binary package format is beyond ludicrous.
That's why it's up to the OS. Just like it is with XP and OSX.
A better explanation is that trendy people like to believe in trendy diseases, so that they can medicate their children instead of parenting properly. It also demeans and discounts real problems, such as real genuine life-disabling autism.
Every time I read about some trendy syndrome (Asperger, ADHD, etc) I think back to my childhood and am glad they didn't have that shit when I was groing up. Or I probably wouldn't be able to function today without taking sixty prescriptions each morning.
You kid is unusual. So is everyone else's kid. That's known as "individuality". Get over it.
Why.NET and its clones? Why C# and all of its brethren? I want to know why people are getting nail-pounding erections over them. Non-religious answers please!
Looking back on twenty five years of computing, I cannot recall any language that has EVER had this much hype behind it. Not even Java. It suddenly appeared out of nowhere and five hours later there are job listings specifying ten years experience.
Reviews should be done by a peer of the target community. If you're of the opinion that only total newbies should use Linux, then of course reviews like this should be done by total newbies.
But this is "Linux for Dummies", so the only people who are going to touch this are total newbies.
It's not FreeBSD 5.2-RC1, it's FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. As in "RELEASE". Officially, NVidia supports FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE, so they should fix it instead of waiting for the next release. Isn't that what I paid them for?
Let me give you an analogy, okay? Everyone knows that a Linux x.y.0 release is going to be buggy. You might have to wait as long as x.y.5 or x.y.10 for something stable enough for mission critical production use. So imagine NVidia saying "we support Linux 2.6, but we won't fix this bug until they release Linux 2.6.10."
You're expecting them to fix the problems for something that occurs on an unstable release?
Which is why I didn't actually blame them. On the other hand I'm not going to sit around for six months with a broken driver. If there weren't an full functional open source radeon driver, I would have stuck with nvidia and used the lackluster XFree86 nv driver instead.
But wait a minute! I paid for that NVidia card! And at the time I bought it NVidia claimed their driver worked for FreeBSD 5.x! And they still do! So why shouldn't I blame them?
p.s. You also have to consider that FreeBSD 5.x is still very stable despite the lack of that name. It's not like I'm running some crashfest and blaming NVidia for it. It's more like Debian, where the "testing" branch is more stable and robust than most commercial distros.
I *DID* ask on the boards. NVidia isn't tracking FreeBSD 5.x. They're waiting for the next stable branch to fork off. In the meantime, it crashes about once every three startups or shutdowns in 5.2. They KNOW what the problem is (something about LDTs) but are refusing to fix it until 5.3 is released.
Whether this is NVidia's fault for not tracking a "technology preview" release, or my fault for being an "early adopter", is completely irrelevant. It's causing me considerable problems so I switched to ATI and open source drivers.
...open-source drivers that can actually compile on things other than Linux/x86?
Sure. Last month I got tired of the crash-fest known as NVidia, and went out and bought a Radeon 9200. It's an older chipset, but you can still find it new on the shelves if you look around. It's like trying to find a 1.5GHz Pentium. They're still being made, but you can't find them at the mass market outlets.
Anyway, my system is FreeBSD, so you don't have to worry about Linux-only. It's an Open Source 3D accelerated DRI kernel driver. It should build on non-x86 archs. It supports all radeons up to the 9200.
A similar DRI driver for Linux is also available. As for Open Source drivers for Solaris or IRIX, I couldn't say. But I doubt it...
Slashdot Mirror
So here I am in the software test lab at work. I'm talking to Juan, who has found an interesting bug in my code. During the discussion I said, "let me show you what I mean at Google." I then opened up a browser and attempted to get to Google. Unfortunately I mistyped Google, and typed www.googlde.com instead.
Aaack! Quick close the window. Another! Close the window. Two more. Click, click. Suddenly we hear footsteps coming our way. It's the freaking CEO! Aaaaah!
Just don't vote in the Kerry clowns at the same time! It doesn't do any good to replace Bozo with Krusty.
Now that I think about it, I didn't bake those cookies from scratch last weekend, like I told all my friends. After all, I used a cookie sheet, cookie cutter, bowl, spoon and mixer. Neither did I mill my own flour or churn my own butter.
Shame on me for telling my friends "I baked some cookies!"
You're going to have to clarify what you mean by "GNOME." ... And then when you say 'Windows,' what are you talking about?
I'm talking about the default installs for both. For GNOME, this is everything under "GNOME 2.6 Installation Order" on the GNOME installation page. For Windows, it's also the default install, choosing "full" instead of "minimal" of "custom" when given a choice.
Various parts are already complete, a la X.
I'm sorry, but that should be "GNU/X". If X is a part of "The GNU System", then we have to give credit to GNU by calling it "GNU/X".
Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from.
Mr. Brown is deliberately playing his audience for fools. Of course Linus didn't create Linux from tabula rasa. He didn't start with a blank harddrive and manually toggle in hex until he managed to get it booted up to an editor to start typing in Linux source! Duh!
When Linus "used" Minix and GCC, he used them as tools. Is this so hard for Mr. Brown to get through his skull? Apparently so.
Is it likely that a student (Linus Torvalds) with no operating systems experience, a non-Unix licensee, without any use of Minix or Unix source code, could build a functioning kernel in six months
Mr. Brown seems to be making the argument later than Linus couldn't of possibly have written Linux 2.6 in six months. Of course! He came up with version 0.1 instead. Although it was functional, it wasn't terribly useful.
People would take Ken Brown more seriously if he didn't write a book that was nothing more than his attempt to discredit his own erroneous assumtions.
Isn't this discrimination to multi-lingual people living in the targeted market?
Yes.
Lesson learned: Don't buy Sony.
Next...
It's not whining, it's not an overreaction, it's not adolescent petulance. It's merely a boycott. Maybe if we were all standing in front of Linux Today headquarters with cheap signs you might have a point. But this is just a boycott. We're merely deciding not to go to a site that supports a firm we don't want to support.
Frankly, I don't notice the advertisements anymore. It's a failing of mass market advertising, in that too much and it becomes invisible.
But now that my attention has been drawn to it, I can start boycotting. I don't use Linux, but I do routinely go to Linux-Today for general Open Source news.
You do know that XFCE with Rox filer uses X11, don't you?
X11 is not going to die, because X11 is too damned useful. It may evolve, but it will never go away. Despite uninformed trolls to the contrary, X11 is fast and efficient. Some toolkits on top of it might not be, but X11 itself is lean and mean.
You don't have to install everything GNOME offers. I know several KDE users who only install kdebase, and never bother with the "swiss army knife" of kdeadmin, kdeartwork, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdepim, kdeutils and kdeaddons. All of those are *optional* packages.
gnome and kde are very much window managers
No they are not. They are environments. If you want to quibble about the term "desktop", be my guest, but a window manager is a much different thing than an environment.
KDE and GNOME come with file managers. They come with browsers. They come with email clients. They come with a lot of stuff that's unnecessary for window managers, but useful in working graphical environments.
They both also come with standard libraries and APIs. So they're also development environments. Write a KDE program and it integrates into the environment in a way a pure Qt program never could. Write a GNOME program and it integrates into the environment in a way no GTK+ program every could.
And that is already or will soon be supported in KDE.
I don't believe that this has been decided yet. KDE development is not dictated by what proposals GNOME posts at fd.org. If D-BUS is better than dcop, and doesn't require a dependency upon gdk, then it will probably be adopted. Otherwise it won't.
The best standards are those where both sides work together to create, and NOT those where one side dictates to the other.
Beyond that, he also needs to take into account that GNOME+Mozilla has ten times the functionality of Windows. It might not necessarily be as intuitive for Windows users as Windows is, but it certainly has more features and functionality.
How will you ever have a seamless, professional, sane desktop environment that doesn't even have an installation/uninstallation API? The very idea is so backwards and laughable, I fully expect Linux to take another 10 years to reach the level XP and OS X are at now.
XP and OSX get around the problem but mandating the operating system. Only an idiot developer would think that a binary OSX package should be able to install on XP, or vice versa. Yet people expect this of Unix!
KDE and Gnome support more than one Linux distro. And to clue you in, they support more than just Linux. Solaris, AIX, FreeBSD, Cygwin, OSX+X, OpenBSD, IRIX, NetBSD, etc, etc, etc. Expecting the desktop to provide a common binary package format is beyond ludicrous.
That's why it's up to the OS. Just like it is with XP and OSX.
You could write a library with both C and C++ interfaces. They're not unusual, except in the GNU community which is historically hostile to C++.
XFree86, X.org, fd.org, etc, are merely low level libraries. X is not inherently ugly, as X is nothing more than drawing and windowing primitives.
A better explanation is that trendy people like to believe in trendy diseases, so that they can medicate their children instead of parenting properly. It also demeans and discounts real problems, such as real genuine life-disabling autism.
Every time I read about some trendy syndrome (Asperger, ADHD, etc) I think back to my childhood and am glad they didn't have that shit when I was groing up. Or I probably wouldn't be able to function today without taking sixty prescriptions each morning.
You kid is unusual. So is everyone else's kid. That's known as "individuality". Get over it.
Why .NET and its clones? Why C# and all of its brethren? I want to know why people are getting nail-pounding erections over them. Non-religious answers please!
Looking back on twenty five years of computing, I cannot recall any language that has EVER had this much hype behind it. Not even Java. It suddenly appeared out of nowhere and five hours later there are job listings specifying ten years experience.
Reviews should be done by a peer of the target community. If you're of the opinion that only total newbies should use Linux, then of course reviews like this should be done by total newbies.
But this is "Linux for Dummies", so the only people who are going to touch this are total newbies.
It's not FreeBSD 5.2-RC1, it's FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. As in "RELEASE". Officially, NVidia supports FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE, so they should fix it instead of waiting for the next release. Isn't that what I paid them for?
Let me give you an analogy, okay? Everyone knows that a Linux x.y.0 release is going to be buggy. You might have to wait as long as x.y.5 or x.y.10 for something stable enough for mission critical production use. So imagine NVidia saying "we support Linux 2.6, but we won't fix this bug until they release Linux 2.6.10."
You're expecting them to fix the problems for something that occurs on an unstable release?
Which is why I didn't actually blame them. On the other hand I'm not going to sit around for six months with a broken driver. If there weren't an full functional open source radeon driver, I would have stuck with nvidia and used the lackluster XFree86 nv driver instead.
But wait a minute! I paid for that NVidia card! And at the time I bought it NVidia claimed their driver worked for FreeBSD 5.x! And they still do! So why shouldn't I blame them?
p.s. You also have to consider that FreeBSD 5.x is still very stable despite the lack of that name. It's not like I'm running some crashfest and blaming NVidia for it. It's more like Debian, where the "testing" branch is more stable and robust than most commercial distros.
I *DID* ask on the boards. NVidia isn't tracking FreeBSD 5.x. They're waiting for the next stable branch to fork off. In the meantime, it crashes about once every three startups or shutdowns in 5.2. They KNOW what the problem is (something about LDTs) but are refusing to fix it until 5.3 is released.
Whether this is NVidia's fault for not tracking a "technology preview" release, or my fault for being an "early adopter", is completely irrelevant. It's causing me considerable problems so I switched to ATI and open source drivers.
...open-source drivers that can actually compile on things other than Linux/x86?
Sure. Last month I got tired of the crash-fest known as NVidia, and went out and bought a Radeon 9200. It's an older chipset, but you can still find it new on the shelves if you look around. It's like trying to find a 1.5GHz Pentium. They're still being made, but you can't find them at the mass market outlets.
Anyway, my system is FreeBSD, so you don't have to worry about Linux-only. It's an Open Source 3D accelerated DRI kernel driver. It should build on non-x86 archs. It supports all radeons up to the 9200.
A similar DRI driver for Linux is also available. As for Open Source drivers for Solaris or IRIX, I couldn't say. But I doubt it...
And any mention of a possible solution brings down the wrath of nerds who want to keep unix as unintuitive and awkward as possible.
And any mention of a possible solution brings down the wrath of jerks who would rather stopper their ears and complain than fix the problem.