The sole reason I bought Nvidia was that it had native drivers for FreeBSD. My first instinct was to go with a card that has a fully open driver in XFree86. But very few "modern" cards do. So I went with the company that actually supports my OS.
That reminds me. I need to go purchase Opera to let them know I appreciate them as well...
Hey, that's my mouse! Well, almost. It's the Trackman, not the Trackman+, so there's a real middle button instead of a scrollwheel. I got a few at eBay to use as backups.
I do wish Logitech would go back to that style. The best ergonomic pointing devices ever made, with or without the poofy scrollwheel.
My favorite "mouse" is the original Logitech Trackman Marble. Three real buttons with no poofy scrollwheel. It's shallower than the newer trackmans, so you just rest your hand on it, instead of feeling like your's supposed to grip it. Your thumb rests on the ball, and only the thumb controls it, so nothing else on hand moves.
When I built a new computer a couple of years ago, I looked around for a replacement. There were none. The new Trackman just isn't the same. The new Microsoft trackball is close, very close, but not quite it. Realizing that they would never come back, I purchased three new or "opened-never-used" units on eBay. I use my original at work, a new one at home, and am keeping two for spares. I couldn't be happier.
Besides Tolkien's trivial use of it in a hastily drawn map of the Shire, it also happens to mean "badger holes". It makes a great name for a Hobbit village. But it's also the name for several real world locations.
I don't care if Linux only gains a miniscule desktop market share. As a FreeBSD user, I realize that my OS will probably get even less. But I don't care.
You see, if I was concerned about marketshare I would be using Windows. If I was concerned about running the same software my neighbors do, I would be using Windows. But I don't choose my systems that way. I choose to run what I choose to run. It's up to you to deal with it, because I'm happy right where I'm at.
There's this saying that goes "people who hate Windows use Linux; people who love UNIX use BSD". I don't think it's accurate at all. I think it's completely wrong. But every once in a while along comes a post like yours, and I start to wonder. Are you using Linux because you like Linux, or just because you hate Windows?
Many reasons why not, but one really big reason why. And you even mention it.
Real time. It's why companies put up with crappy systems like LynxOS and vxWorks, and spend the big bucks for excellent systems like QNX. Linux isn't real time.
Frankly I never fully understood why Wind River picked it up in the first place.
Look at the timing. It was at the height of the dot.craze. You're an embedded OS company. Embedded companies don't especially like the GPL (some do, but most don't). So here's this OS that's every bit as good as Linux, if not better by some accounts. But it's under a license that doesn't scare away embedded developers. And a million investors throwing their money away like there was no tomorrow. It looked like a win-win situation at the time.
Heck, it still looks like a win-win situation. But I guess WinDriver just isn't interested in promoting the world's most respected OS. No wonder it's not selling for them.
BSD/OS is an awesome product. The netcraft survey proves it. With WinDriver no longer interested in it though, I wonder if they'll consider opening it up completely. Post the complete sources of BSD/OS under the BSD license. That would be awesome!
It seems like the worst of all worlds - a kludgely file manager, web browser, viewer, etc.
Don't tell Apple that! They're using KHTML as the core of Safari. You need to take a closer look at Konqueror. I don't see it as kludgy at all, but doing exactly what you say it should do: not reinventing the wheel. It's based on kpart components, so any kpart component will work with it. That includes kview, kpdf, kmplayer, kate, and every other KDE kpart based application.
There are better options, but KDE seems rather stuck on KOffice, for some reason.
Then I guess you haven't heard about the OpenOffice KDE kpart component. It's going to be dog slow, just because OOo is dog slow, but it's happening, and it will probably be a standard KDE component once it stabilizes.
I get KDE crashes, if not frequently, at least too often.
In KDE 3.0 I got a few core KDE apps to crash. But I've never seen one later than kde-3.1. That's not counting any non-core applications. I've had mplayer crash and take down kmplayer with it, but that's not a core kde application. I have seen Mozilla crash though. And Firebird. Perhaps I will stick with Konqueror after all.
It would be a tremendous boon for KDE to develop a discrete shell for KHTML that did *just* web browsing...
I can create a discrete shell of KHTML in twenty minutes. I've done it.
But it's totally pointless. A web browser needs to be able to handle more than just html, css and javascript. It needs to be able to handle all common document formats on the web as well. That includes plain text, pdf, quicktime, etc. It also needs to be able to handle all common protocols, such as ftp. These formats and protocols are handled by KDE kioslaves. It doesn't make sense to write a kioslave and then forbid its use in certain kinds of applications.
Architecturally, Konqueror is nothing more than a simple shell with a browsing interface. Browsing the web is just icing on the cake. It might help if you stopped looking at it as a webbrowser and started looking at it as a universal document browser.
I have to both agree and disagree. A desktop shouldn't be the provider of every application a user would ever want.
But a web browser is a slightly different thing. I hate to give kudos to Microsoft, but integrating the browser into the desktop is a damned good idea. Konqueror is the single most important component of KDE to me. It's my file manager, web browser, ftp client, and document viewer. It can only do this because it's integrated into the desktop. Frankly, I think Nautilus and Epiphany should be merged, but that's a different matter.
p.s. KOffice is not a part of the KDE desktop. It's a separate project.
What are you talking about? I don't have a single GTK 1 application on my desktop...
Well I guess I must be way behind the times, because that's the opposite of my experience. Currently I have Gnome 2.2.2 installed. The dependencies for this release include gnomelibs-1.4.2 and gtk-1.2.10.
I really, really want to dump one of the superflous gtk libraries, but right now I can't because some app or another depend on them.
What's up with all these silling gnames starting with G and Gn? "Gnopernicus"? Gnood gnrief! Are these gnuys in gnindergarten or something? Yet it's always KDE that gnets gnawed on alliterative gnames, gnever gnome.
Hey, I use "do-it-for-me" FreeBSD, and installing Gnome is still a pain in the butt. And from what I've heard from some long time Gnome users, installing Gnome under FreeBSD is a piece of cake.
The problem is that are simply too many dependencies that easily get out of sync. If you're not installing a x.y.0 release of Gnome, it's all too common to find version conflicts between dependencies. I'm amazed the FreeBSD Gnome porters have kept their sanity as long as they have.
Will this finally end the argument that Gnome doesn't have any usability issues.
Well, Gnome *DOES* have usability issues. So does KDE. So does OSX. And most especially, so does that usability nightmare called Windows XP.
No desktop is perfect. No desktop ever will be. To suggest that Gnome has it all solved just because they focused on it for one release is ridiculous. You probably also believe that Windows is bug-free because Microsoft focused on bug fixing for a month a while back.
If you repeat a lie long enough, people will believe you. Apparently even Ars believes the lie that the Windows desktop is consistant across applications.
Take off your blinders and actually LOOK at Windows. Does Quicktime look like Media Player? Does they have even the remotely similarity in UI? Of course not! This isn't just non-MS applications..NET applications have a different look and feel than MFC/Win32 applications.
Then take a look at the Macintosh. Funny how Apple can't make up their minds whether they want an Aquafresh toothpaste look or a scratched brassplate look. But I don't see people bailing on the platform because of it.
I never claimed it did. But I do feel that greater firepower, not less, will make it easier to keep your freedom.
You also might want to look up your history, specifically the American revolution. USA defeated the #1 military power at that time, Britain. A bunch of colonial states with very little power defeated a massive colonial power (with a little help from France but that wasn't much)...
Well, the rebels did have a weapon the British didn't. Guerilla warfare.
But that's beside the point. The rebels would have loved to have weapons superior to the British. They would have loved to have had rifled barrels or cartridge amunition. Although many (if not most) of the revolutionary soldiers would disagree with *government* funded military research, I dare say not one of them would be opposed to innovation in military technology in general.
Just to see if I'm wrong, watch what happens in USA in the future. I'll bet that there will be more terrorist attacks. Having the largest military in the history of the world won't stop it...
Of course a huge military won't stop it. That's why we need military research. An ultra precise flexible delivery mechanism for a small charge will do more to combat terrorism than any number of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder on a battlefield. Ditto for accurate, fast and reliable communications. Ditto for CBN detection technology. Military research isn't about bullets and bombs, it's about neutralizing (physically or otherwise) the enemy.
The nature of warfare itself changed between the American Revolutionary War and the US Civil War. It changed in large part due to military technology. The weapons were too powerful to afford soldier lines of soldiers standing upright in a line shooting at each other. The nature of warfare is changing again today, due to military technology. Masses of soldiers are becoming obsolete, being replaced by relatively few soldiers armed with information and smart weaponry. It will change again in the future.
But I know for a fact that not even the terrorists would opt for the spear and shield of old. Even they recognize the value of technology.
p.s. Don't mistake me for a warmongerer. There would be nothing more I would like than to see worldwide peace. But it's not going to happen through disarmament.
A reporter looking into the SCO story who knows little about open source wouldn't trust a tool made by one side of the disagreement.
Then why would a reporter trust the press releases that SCO puts out on an daily basis?
The unfortunate reality is that they DO trust them. We may all think this is a joke here in our insular community, but the great majority of reporters report the press releases "as is". Then the analysts come along and refine those press releases into easily digestible chunks. Then the pundits come along with preconceptions based on those chunks. Ever wonder why the SCO stock keeps going up and up and up? It's because the only thing the general public knows about this issue has come from SCO.
Anything that can help get the truth before the public eye is a Good Thing(tm). A tool that can mathematically "prove" that SCO is lying is valuable, even if most reporters suspect a bias.
This isn't about defense contracts... this is about developing technology that will be used to kill people.
Life itself rests upon the foundation of death. It's horrible, disgusting, politically incorrect, but oh so true.
The sad fact of the matter is that there are some very evil people out there that want to kill you, your family and your friends. It doesn't matter how "right" they think their convictions are, they still want to kill you. Murderers will not go away just because you voted not to arm your local policemen. The tyrants won't go away just because you voted not to arm your local soldiers.
Your life and freedom depend upon you or your local protector having greater firepower than your enemies. This doesn't mean that you must shoot first. But it does mean that you should be prepared to shoot back if someone else does. I want my local policemen to be armed. I want my nation's soldiers to be armed.
We can certainly argue over a nation's military policy, but to suggest that the nations should not have militaries is ludicrous. I want my nation to have arms more advanced and deadly than any enemy's or potential enemy's arms.
They should know better......than to disagree with TwistedGreen...than to disobey the marching orders of the far left...than to hold their own political opinions
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The sole reason I bought Nvidia was that it had native drivers for FreeBSD. My first instinct was to go with a card that has a fully open driver in XFree86. But very few "modern" cards do. So I went with the company that actually supports my OS.
That reminds me. I need to go purchase Opera to let them know I appreciate them as well...
Hey, that's my mouse! Well, almost. It's the Trackman, not the Trackman+, so there's a real middle button instead of a scrollwheel. I got a few at eBay to use as backups.
I do wish Logitech would go back to that style. The best ergonomic pointing devices ever made, with or without the poofy scrollwheel.
Try pixelusa.com
Only $8.00 and they have lots in stock.
My favorite "mouse" is the original Logitech Trackman Marble. Three real buttons with no poofy scrollwheel. It's shallower than the newer trackmans, so you just rest your hand on it, instead of feeling like your's supposed to grip it. Your thumb rests on the ball, and only the thumb controls it, so nothing else on hand moves.
When I built a new computer a couple of years ago, I looked around for a replacement. There were none. The new Trackman just isn't the same. The new Microsoft trackball is close, very close, but not quite it. Realizing that they would never come back, I purchased three new or "opened-never-used" units on eBay. I use my original at work, a new one at home, and am keeping two for spares. I couldn't be happier.
Besides Tolkien's trivial use of it in a hastily drawn map of the Shire, it also happens to mean "badger holes". It makes a great name for a Hobbit village. But it's also the name for several real world locations.
I don't care if Linux only gains a miniscule desktop market share. As a FreeBSD user, I realize that my OS will probably get even less. But I don't care.
You see, if I was concerned about marketshare I would be using Windows. If I was concerned about running the same software my neighbors do, I would be using Windows. But I don't choose my systems that way. I choose to run what I choose to run. It's up to you to deal with it, because I'm happy right where I'm at.
There's this saying that goes "people who hate Windows use Linux; people who love UNIX use BSD". I don't think it's accurate at all. I think it's completely wrong. But every once in a while along comes a post like yours, and I start to wonder. Are you using Linux because you like Linux, or just because you hate Windows?
Or even better: "Linux is for people who feel they have to prove something; BSD is for people who don't need to."
Many reasons why not, but one really big reason why. And you even mention it.
Real time. It's why companies put up with crappy systems like LynxOS and vxWorks, and spend the big bucks for excellent systems like QNX. Linux isn't real time.
Frankly I never fully understood why Wind River picked it up in the first place.
Look at the timing. It was at the height of the dot.craze. You're an embedded OS company. Embedded companies don't especially like the GPL (some do, but most don't). So here's this OS that's every bit as good as Linux, if not better by some accounts. But it's under a license that doesn't scare away embedded developers. And a million investors throwing their money away like there was no tomorrow. It looked like a win-win situation at the time.
Heck, it still looks like a win-win situation. But I guess WinDriver just isn't interested in promoting the world's most respected OS. No wonder it's not selling for them.
BSD/OS is an awesome product. The netcraft survey proves it. With WinDriver no longer interested in it though, I wonder if they'll consider opening it up completely. Post the complete sources of BSD/OS under the BSD license. That would be awesome!
It seems like the worst of all worlds - a kludgely file manager, web browser, viewer, etc.
Don't tell Apple that! They're using KHTML as the core of Safari. You need to take a closer look at Konqueror. I don't see it as kludgy at all, but doing exactly what you say it should do: not reinventing the wheel. It's based on kpart components, so any kpart component will work with it. That includes kview, kpdf, kmplayer, kate, and every other KDE kpart based application.
There are better options, but KDE seems rather stuck on KOffice, for some reason.
Then I guess you haven't heard about the OpenOffice KDE kpart component. It's going to be dog slow, just because OOo is dog slow, but it's happening, and it will probably be a standard KDE component once it stabilizes.
I get KDE crashes, if not frequently, at least too often.
In KDE 3.0 I got a few core KDE apps to crash. But I've never seen one later than kde-3.1. That's not counting any non-core applications. I've had mplayer crash and take down kmplayer with it, but that's not a core kde application. I have seen Mozilla crash though. And Firebird. Perhaps I will stick with Konqueror after all.
It would be a tremendous boon for KDE to develop a discrete shell for KHTML that did *just* web browsing...
I can create a discrete shell of KHTML in twenty minutes. I've done it.
But it's totally pointless. A web browser needs to be able to handle more than just html, css and javascript. It needs to be able to handle all common document formats on the web as well. That includes plain text, pdf, quicktime, etc. It also needs to be able to handle all common protocols, such as ftp. These formats and protocols are handled by KDE kioslaves. It doesn't make sense to write a kioslave and then forbid its use in certain kinds of applications.
Architecturally, Konqueror is nothing more than a simple shell with a browsing interface. Browsing the web is just icing on the cake. It might help if you stopped looking at it as a webbrowser and started looking at it as a universal document browser.
You are not the user Gnome is looking for. You are not recent Windows convert desperately seeking someone to tell them where to go today. Move along.
I have to both agree and disagree. A desktop shouldn't be the provider of every application a user would ever want.
But a web browser is a slightly different thing. I hate to give kudos to Microsoft, but integrating the browser into the desktop is a damned good idea. Konqueror is the single most important component of KDE to me. It's my file manager, web browser, ftp client, and document viewer. It can only do this because it's integrated into the desktop. Frankly, I think Nautilus and Epiphany should be merged, but that's a different matter.
p.s. KOffice is not a part of the KDE desktop. It's a separate project.
p.p.s. The KDE environment is rock solid.
My apologies for reading your post incorrectly.
What are you talking about? I don't have a single GTK 1 application on my desktop...
Well I guess I must be way behind the times, because that's the opposite of my experience. Currently I have Gnome 2.2.2 installed. The dependencies for this release include gnomelibs-1.4.2 and gtk-1.2.10.
I really, really want to dump one of the superflous gtk libraries, but right now I can't because some app or another depend on them.
What's up with all these silling gnames starting with G and Gn? "Gnopernicus"? Gnood gnrief! Are these gnuys in gnindergarten or something? Yet it's always KDE that gnets gnawed on alliterative gnames, gnever gnome.
Hey, I use "do-it-for-me" FreeBSD, and installing Gnome is still a pain in the butt. And from what I've heard from some long time Gnome users, installing Gnome under FreeBSD is a piece of cake.
The problem is that are simply too many dependencies that easily get out of sync. If you're not installing a x.y.0 release of Gnome, it's all too common to find version conflicts between dependencies. I'm amazed the FreeBSD Gnome porters have kept their sanity as long as they have.
Will this finally end the argument that Gnome doesn't have any usability issues.
Well, Gnome *DOES* have usability issues. So does KDE. So does OSX. And most especially, so does that usability nightmare called Windows XP.
No desktop is perfect. No desktop ever will be. To suggest that Gnome has it all solved just because they focused on it for one release is ridiculous. You probably also believe that Windows is bug-free because Microsoft focused on bug fixing for a month a while back.
If you repeat a lie long enough, people will believe you. Apparently even Ars believes the lie that the Windows desktop is consistant across applications.
.NET applications have a different look and feel than MFC/Win32 applications.
Take off your blinders and actually LOOK at Windows. Does Quicktime look like Media Player? Does they have even the remotely similarity in UI? Of course not! This isn't just non-MS applications.
Then take a look at the Macintosh. Funny how Apple can't make up their minds whether they want an Aquafresh toothpaste look or a scratched brassplate look. But I don't see people bailing on the platform because of it.
Greater firepower will NOT give you freedom.
I never claimed it did. But I do feel that greater firepower, not less, will make it easier to keep your freedom.
You also might want to look up your history, specifically the American revolution. USA defeated the #1 military power at that time, Britain. A bunch of colonial states with very little power defeated a massive colonial power (with a little help from France but that wasn't much)...
Well, the rebels did have a weapon the British didn't. Guerilla warfare.
But that's beside the point. The rebels would have loved to have weapons superior to the British. They would have loved to have had rifled barrels or cartridge amunition. Although many (if not most) of the revolutionary soldiers would disagree with *government* funded military research, I dare say not one of them would be opposed to innovation in military technology in general.
Just to see if I'm wrong, watch what happens in USA in the future. I'll bet that there will be more terrorist attacks. Having the largest military in the history of the world won't stop it...
Of course a huge military won't stop it. That's why we need military research. An ultra precise flexible delivery mechanism for a small charge will do more to combat terrorism than any number of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder on a battlefield. Ditto for accurate, fast and reliable communications. Ditto for CBN detection technology. Military research isn't about bullets and bombs, it's about neutralizing (physically or otherwise) the enemy.
The nature of warfare itself changed between the American Revolutionary War and the US Civil War. It changed in large part due to military technology. The weapons were too powerful to afford soldier lines of soldiers standing upright in a line shooting at each other. The nature of warfare is changing again today, due to military technology. Masses of soldiers are becoming obsolete, being replaced by relatively few soldiers armed with information and smart weaponry. It will change again in the future.
But I know for a fact that not even the terrorists would opt for the spear and shield of old. Even they recognize the value of technology.
p.s. Don't mistake me for a warmongerer. There would be nothing more I would like than to see worldwide peace. But it's not going to happen through disarmament.
Troll troll troll. But I still agree with you 100%. Does everything have to be a web application?
A reporter looking into the SCO story who knows little about open source wouldn't trust a tool made by one side of the disagreement.
Then why would a reporter trust the press releases that SCO puts out on an daily basis?
The unfortunate reality is that they DO trust them. We may all think this is a joke here in our insular community, but the great majority of reporters report the press releases "as is". Then the analysts come along and refine those press releases into easily digestible chunks. Then the pundits come along with preconceptions based on those chunks. Ever wonder why the SCO stock keeps going up and up and up? It's because the only thing the general public knows about this issue has come from SCO.
Anything that can help get the truth before the public eye is a Good Thing(tm). A tool that can mathematically "prove" that SCO is lying is valuable, even if most reporters suspect a bias.
This isn't about defense contracts... this is about developing technology that will be used to kill people.
Life itself rests upon the foundation of death. It's horrible, disgusting, politically incorrect, but oh so true.
The sad fact of the matter is that there are some very evil people out there that want to kill you, your family and your friends. It doesn't matter how "right" they think their convictions are, they still want to kill you. Murderers will not go away just because you voted not to arm your local policemen. The tyrants won't go away just because you voted not to arm your local soldiers.
Your life and freedom depend upon you or your local protector having greater firepower than your enemies. This doesn't mean that you must shoot first. But it does mean that you should be prepared to shoot back if someone else does. I want my local policemen to be armed. I want my nation's soldiers to be armed.
We can certainly argue over a nation's military policy, but to suggest that the nations should not have militaries is ludicrous. I want my nation to have arms more advanced and deadly than any enemy's or potential enemy's arms.
They should know better... ...than to disagree with TwistedGreen ...than to disobey the marching orders of the far left ...than to hold their own political opinions