IIRC, Miguel played a part in convincing the Mexico (or maybe just Mexico City) school system to standardize on Linux w/ GNOME system-wide. I remember seeing that on Slashdot a year or two ago, prior to the release of GNOME 1.0, but I don't know what the outcome was. Does anyone know what happened?
The school he goes to (Paideia) is actually quite cool. It is kinda a free form private school. From what I remember they really don't have many grades or announced tests. Kids are encouraged to learn at their own rate, and many gifted kids go their when they out pace their regular classes. It is kind of a neat place. They actually encourage creative thinking instead of kicking you out or arresting you!
The schools are run as a democracy, with students, parents and staff voting in the weekly school meeting on things including hiring and firing of staff. Students of all ages are able to mix freely, and there is no mandated curriculum. Never been to one, but they do seem to have more than a few good ideas.
While I'll stop short of saying I support vouchers, I do support school choice - the idea that schools should compete for students, and that parents and students should have some say in which school they go to.
The current situation is that the gov't essentially has a monopoly on education. You might think that U.S. public schools are 'making great strides' but I don't. Speaking both as a product of public schools and as a parent of a public school student, I think they are an almost total failure, especially in the higher grades.
There are many trying to work within the system to improve public schools, and I do recognize their efforts and genuine concern. The system is in my opinion fundamentally and permanently flawed, though, and nothing short of overturning it will bring any meaningful change to the state of education in the U.S. We need competition in the education marketplace, and we need it yesterday.
I'm a crusty old greenscreener who lived through the Unix fragmentation of the 80's and I fear this is happening all over again with Linux.
Yup, I remember all that too, cept I had an amber screen. It was not a pretty scene at all.
The key difference between Unix and Linux with regards to forking is that with Linux, forked projects can merge back together much more easily than with Unix.
Forking is good, and it generally only happens for good reason, i.e. when a project leader is taking the project in a direction that some of the users don't want it to go.
Try Konqueror. It was fairly flaky in KDE 2.0, but has become remarkably mature, speedy and stable as of KDE 2.1. It renders output that is very close to that of Internet Explorer, and has a lot of cool features to boot. I have had good luck using it to approximate what sites are going to look like in IE. NS 4.7, which has served me well over the years, is now hopelessly obsolete.
I've tried a number of web development environments for Linux, and have finally settled on Quanta for KDE.
v2.0 is supposed to have some IDE features, as opposed to v1.0 which is basically just an HTML editor very much like Cold Fusion Studio. Although v2.0 is in the release candidate stages, I haven't had had time to try it yet. I dunno if it will include any Javascript debugging features.
I doubt it can be made to work with RDS... but I have used it successfully in the past to work on Cold Fusion sites hosted on NT servers, by using the smbmount utility included with Samba to mount a share on the remote NT server.
I handle a lot of office type stuff in StarOffice... business correspondence, proposals, invoices and budgets. It actually gets the job done, but it is annoying, clunky and slow. I haven't found anything else for Linux that even comes close in stability and features though.
I had AA fonts working for a while with KDE 2.0 and X4.0.2. Worked great when my card's DRI module was loaded, but without the hardware acceleration it was super slow.
I eventually reverted to my standard setup, cause all the different alpha/beta/gamma/dela libraries and such were causing my machine to freak out. I'll try it again when its stable.
On a related note, I upgraded to KDE 2.1 yesterday, and got-DAMN does it whoop ass. Faster, more polished, more solid, better looking, and has lots of cool new gizmos to play with. Konqueror has made great strides. It's on par with Internet Explorer 4.x right now, and if it keeps up the momentum, will catch up to IE 5.5 in no time. No need to complain any longer about Linux not having a world class browser. It's here now, or at least very, very close. Kmail 1.2 is also a really nice email client.
Can't wait to see the final GNOME 1.4. I keep waffling between the two environments. It's nice to see both of them progressing so well.
That was a long-ass, train-of-consciousness ramble, for which I make no apologies.
I just bought a Fellowes articulating keyboard/mouse tray. It was like $70 at Staples, and bolted onto the bottom of my desk with about 30 mins of work.
Basically, you loosen a knob and you can control the height and tilt of the tray, and you can also pull it forward and back. I got it so I could position my keyboard in a more ergonomic fashion, and type with my wrists held properly. So far it's worked out really well. Definitely has made things easier on my hands.
Well, the original poster did mention they were migrating up from Filemaker, which suggests to me that MySQL would be a good next step, unless their growth patterns compare to those of, say, AmIHotOrNot.com...
Simply put, ask for a deposit, plus hook in the date of delivery to be legally binding for both parties.
Bingo. I've dealt with enough clients who are slow to get me the materials I need, or slow to sign off on a finished site, or slow to send me a check, that I now require 50% up front. If its a really large project I'll accept 1/3 up front, 1/3 halfway through, and 1/3 on completion.
Guru.com has a lot of good advice on client management and contracts.
There have been several checkins in the last couple weeks that improve performance considerably. I believe one of them resulted in a 22% increase. It's definitely noticeable, and actually pretty darned quick now.
I know people are constantly saying 'the nightly builds are getting better' but in this case it's actually true.
There are times when a dynamic web site needs to do stuff in the background, or on a regular schedule, or without worrying about a browser timeout, independent of whether the site is being accessed.
For example, on an auction site you might want to have a script that runs once every minute to close out auctions that just ended, and email announcements to the seller and highest bidder.
Or you might want to update the weather forecast on your home page every hour by downloading a page from National Weather Service, parsing it, and inserting the info into a database.
Running PHP shell scripts from cron is great for that sort of thing. It allows one to develop the whole site in the same language, instead of switching to Perl or bash for the background stuff.
Not that any of this has anything to do with PHP-GTK...
The only way Indrema could succeed in such a highly capitalized, competitive marketplace, would be to cause a paradigm shift in the gaming industry - in other words, to come up with something revolutionary, and then execute flawlessly, catching the big boys off guard. Risky and difficult.
I've always thought it would be cool to have a console system for which users could develop and share their own games. The problem with consoles is that the games are so damned expensive. It'd be cool if Indrema built a community around their platform, and set up a SourceForge type site for open development of games. I'd think that would be sufficiently revolutionary.
--
Re:Someone slap Carly Fiorenta with a clue stick
on
HP Ending OpenMail
·
· Score: 1
Is it just her, or are all woman CEO's like this, afraid of a little competition?
That was an uncool, sexist, fucked up thing to say. Just so you know.
Re:One mirror already got it ...
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
SourceForge, frigging slashdotted.
Next mirror, please.
--
Re:I have had a fearful thought....
on
KDE 2.1 Is Out
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I know people say this all the time, but this time its really true:)
The Mozilla nightly builds are actually getting pretty impressive.
Someone checked in a fix the other day that improves XUL performance by 22%, and several others checked in smaller performance improvements. Taken together, they're quite noticeable.
It still crashes on me and leaves artifacts on the screen when loading certain pages, but at least it takes longer now and runs much faster.
* IT satisfies dependencies by downloading and installing them (if you want). This removes the endless headache of hunting, downloading, and installing that it currently takes to update a single package (Gimp needs newer GTK, GTK needs newer glibc, etc)
And herein lies the value proposition.
The traditional method of keeping your RPM packages updated:
a) keep track of new release announcements
b) find the RPMs for your architecture and distro
c) download all of them, one by one.
d) try to install them
e) find out that the RPMs you just downloaded require package foolib0.6.8, when you only have foolib0.6.7, and have no idea what foolib even is.
f) do an rpmfind search for foolib, finding 0.6.8 RPMs for every distro but yours
g) track down foolib on freshmeat, but find that its info hasn't been updated in 6 months, and the homepage link to some scary URL like http://students.rthu.ru:73473/~bruno/sw/foolib.htm l is 404 outta order.
h) completely kick yourself in the ass for wasting all that time when you type in http://www.foolib.org/ and the RPMs are right there waiting for you.
i) download and install foolib
j) install the other RPMs - the ones you were trying to install in the first place.
The Red Carpet way:
a) select the newly available packages you'd like to install
b) click 'install packages'
Hell yes, that would save me eons of time and endless amounts of frustration.
And yes, I'd pay something like $25/year for such a service.
* Note to Debian evangelists: why yes, I've heard about the wonders of apt-get:) I'm even building a Debian box here so I can see for myself. In the meantime, I have RPM-based systems to deal with.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, Miguel played a part in convincing the Mexico (or maybe just Mexico City) school system to standardize on Linux w/ GNOME system-wide. I remember seeing that on Slashdot a year or two ago, prior to the release of GNOME 1.0, but I don't know what the outcome was. Does anyone know what happened?
--
The school he goes to (Paideia) is actually quite cool. It is kinda a free form private school. From what I remember they really don't have many grades or announced tests. Kids are encouraged to learn at their own rate, and many gifted kids go their when they out pace their regular classes. It is kind of a neat place. They actually encourage creative thinking instead of kicking you out or arresting you!
You might be interested in Sudbury Schools, which are modeled more or less after the original Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts.
The schools are run as a democracy, with students, parents and staff voting in the weekly school meeting on things including hiring and firing of staff. Students of all ages are able to mix freely, and there is no mandated curriculum. Never been to one, but they do seem to have more than a few good ideas.
--
While I'll stop short of saying I support vouchers, I do support school choice - the idea that schools should compete for students, and that parents and students should have some say in which school they go to.
The current situation is that the gov't essentially has a monopoly on education. You might think that U.S. public schools are 'making great strides' but I don't. Speaking both as a product of public schools and as a parent of a public school student, I think they are an almost total failure, especially in the higher grades.
There are many trying to work within the system to improve public schools, and I do recognize their efforts and genuine concern. The system is in my opinion fundamentally and permanently flawed, though, and nothing short of overturning it will bring any meaningful change to the state of education in the U.S. We need competition in the education marketplace, and we need it yesterday.
--
I'm a crusty old greenscreener who lived through the Unix fragmentation of the 80's and I fear this is happening all over again with Linux.
Yup, I remember all that too, cept I had an amber screen. It was not a pretty scene at all.
The key difference between Unix and Linux with regards to forking is that with Linux, forked projects can merge back together much more easily than with Unix.
Forking is good, and it generally only happens for good reason, i.e. when a project leader is taking the project in a direction that some of the users don't want it to go.
--
I can easily see Eazel and Ximian merging
Yup, I can definitely see that, and think it would be a Good Thing. They could create some kickin software and services with their combined resources.
--
Open Source and the GPL may be able to stop Capitalism
What traits, exactly, do Open Source and/or the GPL have that are incompatible with capitalism?
--
Try Konqueror. It was fairly flaky in KDE 2.0, but has become remarkably mature, speedy and stable as of KDE 2.1. It renders output that is very close to that of Internet Explorer, and has a lot of cool features to boot. I have had good luck using it to approximate what sites are going to look like in IE. NS 4.7, which has served me well over the years, is now hopelessly obsolete.
--
I've tried a number of web development environments for Linux, and have finally settled on Quanta for KDE.
v2.0 is supposed to have some IDE features, as opposed to v1.0 which is basically just an HTML editor very much like Cold Fusion Studio. Although v2.0 is in the release candidate stages, I haven't had had time to try it yet. I dunno if it will include any Javascript debugging features.
I doubt it can be made to work with RDS... but I have used it successfully in the past to work on Cold Fusion sites hosted on NT servers, by using the smbmount utility included with Samba to mount a share on the remote NT server.
I highly recommend that you check it out.
--
I handle a lot of office type stuff in StarOffice... business correspondence, proposals, invoices and budgets. It actually gets the job done, but it is annoying, clunky and slow. I haven't found anything else for Linux that even comes close in stability and features though.
--
I had AA fonts working for a while with KDE 2.0 and X4.0.2. Worked great when my card's DRI module was loaded, but without the hardware acceleration it was super slow.
I eventually reverted to my standard setup, cause all the different alpha/beta/gamma/dela libraries and such were causing my machine to freak out. I'll try it again when its stable.
On a related note, I upgraded to KDE 2.1 yesterday, and got-DAMN does it whoop ass. Faster, more polished, more solid, better looking, and has lots of cool new gizmos to play with. Konqueror has made great strides. It's on par with Internet Explorer 4.x right now, and if it keeps up the momentum, will catch up to IE 5.5 in no time. No need to complain any longer about Linux not having a world class browser. It's here now, or at least very, very close. Kmail 1.2 is also a really nice email client.
Can't wait to see the final GNOME 1.4. I keep waffling between the two environments. It's nice to see both of them progressing so well.
That was a long-ass, train-of-consciousness ramble, for which I make no apologies.
--
I just bought a Fellowes articulating keyboard/mouse tray. It was like $70 at Staples, and bolted onto the bottom of my desk with about 30 mins of work.
Basically, you loosen a knob and you can control the height and tilt of the tray, and you can also pull it forward and back. I got it so I could position my keyboard in a more ergonomic fashion, and type with my wrists held properly. So far it's worked out really well. Definitely has made things easier on my hands.
--
Well, the original poster did mention they were migrating up from Filemaker, which suggests to me that MySQL would be a good next step, unless their growth patterns compare to those of, say, AmIHotOrNot.com...
--
Simply put, ask for a deposit, plus hook in the date of delivery to be legally binding for both parties.
Bingo. I've dealt with enough clients who are slow to get me the materials I need, or slow to sign off on a finished site, or slow to send me a check, that I now require 50% up front. If its a really large project I'll accept 1/3 up front, 1/3 halfway through, and 1/3 on completion.
Guru.com has a lot of good advice on client management and contracts.
--
There have been several checkins in the last couple weeks that improve performance considerably. I believe one of them resulted in a 22% increase. It's definitely noticeable, and actually pretty darned quick now.
I know people are constantly saying 'the nightly builds are getting better' but in this case it's actually true.
--
Hmm. I can't get it to work. (using NS4.76 in KDE 2.0)
--
There are times when a dynamic web site needs to do stuff in the background, or on a regular schedule, or without worrying about a browser timeout, independent of whether the site is being accessed.
For example, on an auction site you might want to have a script that runs once every minute to close out auctions that just ended, and email announcements to the seller and highest bidder.
Or you might want to update the weather forecast on your home page every hour by downloading a page from National Weather Service, parsing it, and inserting the info into a database.
Running PHP shell scripts from cron is great for that sort of thing. It allows one to develop the whole site in the same language, instead of switching to Perl or bash for the background stuff.
Not that any of this has anything to do with PHP-GTK...
--
and the only organisation big enough to take on an abusive monopoly is a government.
So, pray tell, which organization is there to take on an abusive government?
Talk about your monopolies...
--
Most artists get most of their money from performances anyway. Giving the music away is just a way to drive people to performances.
Dunno if this is true or not, but from day one I have thought this will end up to be the new business model for online music.
Grateful Dead.... bootleg tape trading... widespread, deep popularity... shows selling out in 30 minutes
--
The only way Indrema could succeed in such a highly capitalized, competitive marketplace, would be to cause a paradigm shift in the gaming industry - in other words, to come up with something revolutionary, and then execute flawlessly, catching the big boys off guard. Risky and difficult.
I've always thought it would be cool to have a console system for which users could develop and share their own games. The problem with consoles is that the games are so damned expensive. It'd be cool if Indrema built a community around their platform, and set up a SourceForge type site for open development of games. I'd think that would be sufficiently revolutionary.
--
Is it just her, or are all woman CEO's like this, afraid of a little competition?
That was an uncool, sexist, fucked up thing to say. Just so you know.
--
Why you throw chip?!
Fuckin' come on then!
--
SourceForge, frigging slashdotted.
Next mirror, please.
--
Actually, I know people say this all the time, but this time its really true :)
The Mozilla nightly builds are actually getting pretty impressive.
Someone checked in a fix the other day that improves XUL performance by 22%, and several others checked in smaller performance improvements. Taken together, they're quite noticeable.
It still crashes on me and leaves artifacts on the screen when loading certain pages, but at least it takes longer now and runs much faster.
Waiting to see how 0.9 turns out...
--
you forgot xmps
--
* IT satisfies dependencies by downloading and installing them (if you want). This removes the endless headache of hunting, downloading, and installing that it currently takes to update a single package (Gimp needs newer GTK, GTK needs newer glibc, etc)
m l is 404 outta order.
:) I'm even building a Debian box here so I can see for myself. In the meantime, I have RPM-based systems to deal with.
And herein lies the value proposition.
The traditional method of keeping your RPM packages updated:
a) keep track of new release announcements
b) find the RPMs for your architecture and distro
c) download all of them, one by one.
d) try to install them
e) find out that the RPMs you just downloaded require package foolib0.6.8, when you only have foolib0.6.7, and have no idea what foolib even is.
f) do an rpmfind search for foolib, finding 0.6.8 RPMs for every distro but yours
g) track down foolib on freshmeat, but find that its info hasn't been updated in 6 months, and the homepage link to some scary URL like http://students.rthu.ru:73473/~bruno/sw/foolib.ht
h) completely kick yourself in the ass for wasting all that time when you type in http://www.foolib.org/ and the RPMs are right there waiting for you.
i) download and install foolib
j) install the other RPMs - the ones you were trying to install in the first place.
The Red Carpet way:
a) select the newly available packages you'd like to install
b) click 'install packages'
Hell yes, that would save me eons of time and endless amounts of frustration.
And yes, I'd pay something like $25/year for such a service.
* Note to Debian evangelists: why yes, I've heard about the wonders of apt-get
--