I can see why everybody is so excityed about the success of the SpaceShipOne team, the X-Prize/Cup, and the promising future of commercial space flight. I've been dreaming to see this happening ever since I was a kid.
Now let's try to cool down a bit and have a look at the whole picture.
Someone noticed the X-Prize/Cup isn't about orbital flights. Of course it isn't -- which country would want private aerospace companies to develop "affordable" spacecrafts that can fly around the Earth and, God forbid, drop unpleasant packages from outer space in another nation's backyard? None. So here is what I think will happen next: First, an international law will be issued to extend national territories to a height of, say, 200 Km; any trespassing spacecraft will suffer "the severest consequences". Second, nations such as the U.S., Rusia, China, India, and potentially the EU will develop interceptor spacecraft/space platforms to defend their air... err.. outer space (now there's a huge market up for grabs). Commercial spaceflight will be limited to suborbital flights within one nation's sovereign outer space. Third, orbital commercial spaceflight will be actively discouraged; after all, it is in everyone's best interest to prevent rogue nations from acquiring "affordable" orbital spaceflight technology.
IMO, we might have to wait a while before we get to see Kubricks space hotel become reality.
I can see why everybody is so excityed about the success of the SpaceShipOne team, the X-Prize Cup, and the promising future of commercial space flight. I've been dreaming to see this happening ever since I was a kid.:)
Now let's try to cool down a bit and have a look at the whole picture.
Someone noticed the X-Prize Cup isn't about orbital flights. Of course it isn't -- which country would want private aerospace companies to develop "affordable" spacecrafts that can fly around the Earth and, God forbid, drop unpleasant packages from outer space in another nation's backyard? None. So here is what I think will happen next: First, an international law will be issued to extend national territories to a height of, say, 200 Km; any trespassing spacecraft will suffer "the severest consequences". Second, nations such as the U.S., Rusia, China, India, and potentially the EU will develop interceptor spacecraft/space platforms to defend their air... err.. outerspace. Commercial spaceflight will be limited to suborbital flights within one nation's sovereign outerspace. Third, orbital commercial spaceflight will be actively discouraged; after all, it is in everyone's best interest to prevent rogue nations from acquiring "affordable" orbital spaceflight technology.
IMO, we might have to wait a while before we see Kubricks space hotel become reality.
Many problems with Linux desktop distributions stem, IMHO, from the deep core phylosophy of open source software projects: "release early, release often". I am totally for open source software, I wouldn't have a business w/o open source software, but I still believe it's a mistake to build a Linux desktop on it. Because open source software changes so fast you need to spend a lot of time keeping up with updates rather than being productive; even that doesn't mean your mission critical application is stable most of the time. When finally you think you have a stable system it's no longer supported.
You see Linux desktop distros that are incomplete and never get to be completed because the developers decide to "move on" and the next release is not backwards compatible. Take, for example, Gnome 2.2 and RH 9. The menu editing system was buggy when they released RH 9 so they disabled it; then Gnome moved to release 2.4 then 2.6 then 2.8, which require libraries unavailable under RH 9. Also, the mime-type editing system in RH 9 remained buggy. Now, if you're brave enough to run `apt-get distupgrade' you may be surprised to find out that your desktop cannot run a number of programs anymore and you have to reinstall everything from scratch.
Another annoying thing is the lack of a number of plug-ins for your Web browser. For example, there isn't a 100% compatible VRML plug-in for Mozilla/FF on Linux; there is no Cult3D plug-in for Mozilla so you cannot visit all of those NASA Mars exploration sites. Adobe Reader has no support for the mousewheel (so you need to click to scroll the page) or DRM (so you can't subscribe to some technical newsletters). And the list goes on.
IMO, FF on Linux is currently just not up to the job. Not only some Windows-only functionality is missing but it's also less stable than under Win2K Pro as tested on the exact same hardware. Mozilla is more stable than FF but also a bit slower and is missing some "gadgets" available with FF.
Be advised that Gnome desktop is 50%-100% slower than Windows while KDE is about twice as slow as Gnome. However, you might not notice either slowdown with a CPU > 1.5GHz and 512MB or more of RAM.
I have been using Linux ever since RH 4.2, that's more than 10 years now, and wouldn't use anything but Linux as a server. As a desktop though, rather than pay ~350 USD to Redhat for their enterprise Desktop, I'd opt for Windows XP Pro. What you'll be missing on Linux is software and functionality that you're taking for granted under Windows. On the other hand, if all you need is to browse the Web (w/o catchy plug-ins), use email, and type text documents, than any major Linux distro will suffice (e.g., SuSE Linux).
FF 0.9.3 I had installed was w/ GTK2 & Xft, latest release from mozilla.org/firefox.
Updates are not the problem (I update my Linux box with apt-get). If you do a Google searck on "firefox unexpectedly quit" you'll get quite a few hits. On the other hand, I never had such problems w/ FF under Windows 2000 Pro.
I also tried installing FF 0.10. Guess what -- some of the plug-ins did't work anymore, and also some extensions were not compatible w/ this new release, so they were disabled by the installer. Needless to mention, no updates for those extensions are available so I uninstalled FF 0.10 and went back to mozilla.
Generally, whenever I go to mozilla/ff forums and ask questions related to these problems I get answers such as "upgrade to Fedora". Interestingly, that was also the case when I had RH 7.3: "Upgrade to RH 8. Upgarde to RH 9." Releases 8 and 9 were at least supposed to be stable, Fedora isn't supposed to be. One day you'll upgrade your Fedora and something will stop working, because that's a development platform. And even if there were a new stable release, how come OOo can be stable and compatible w/ any Linux distro/release, while most other open-source cannot?
What I wrote about backward compatibility doesn't apply to OpenOffice.org, or Sun Microsystem's Java. That software successfully installs irrespective of the Linux distro or release.
Well, last time I checked the RedHat site, Fedora was still an experimental project, meaning that it's a testing ground for RHEL builds. I refuse to be a guinea pig for Redhat. Besides, I need to focus on productivity so I need a stable release, not a platform "in motion". When you buy a new car it may not have the latest GPS navigational system but you still expect to be able to drive it wherever you need for the next ten years without needing to "upgrade".
But that's not all. Linux desktop software are just products that seem to have been developed using the 80/20 rule: the missing 20% features would have taken 80% of the time so they just dropped them. They say it's the little "extra" that turns "ordinary" into "extraordinary". When I use my Linux desktop for a long time I just feel that I'm missing out. I miss the right-click Copy Image function in IE. When I use Mozilla I miss the Clone Window extension available in FF. When I use OpenOffice.org I miss the simplicity of applying different languages to paragraphs in MS Word. I endlessly seek solutions on Google for these "little" things and why am I not surprised to find out I'm not the only one needing them! But would the developers listen? No way.
A couple of days ago I wanted to burn an audio CD. Great, I installed X-CD-Roaster. Turns out it cannot convert and burn mp3 files on-the-fly like Nero does, I need to convert them to wav first, like I used to do seven years ago on Windows. Okay, I installed glame. Then I converted three mp3s. You know what? The process ate up 500MB on my hard drive! Because, along with the space required by the actual generated wav files, glame would keep a cache of roughly the same size. And despite my efforts I have been unable to figure out a way to delete that cache, unless I quit the program, found the hidden file harbouring the cache tree, and manually deteled it. Now you will understand why I didn't convert the remaining 15 mp3 files.
Finally, open-source totally ignores backward compatibility. Maybe I don't have a good understanding of the phylosophy behind this movement because I am not one of those young (or not so young) developers who stay late through the night in front of a 19 inch monitor, on a super-fast PC, with a dark desktop background, typing code in a termnal window. But how many of us, Users, are like that?
I find Linux fantastic in terms of server functionality and stability. I have been running Linux servers for several years now and I can't complain. I guess one cannot have everything.:)
Do you guys EVER post anything politically incorrect on open source? I gotta tell you right away that my home/business computer runs on RH Linux with OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. The office suite cannot open all M$ Word files, unfortunatelly the de facto standard (most business related documents really are in MS Word format and I can't change the world; the remaining text documents are in WordPerfect and there is no import filter for that in OOo). I used to have Firefox installed but it kept quitting unexpectedly so I dumped it for Mozilla. Yes, the FF folks don't seem to care so much about us, Linux users, as they care about Windows users, probably a side-effect of their crusade against IE. And how about both FF and Moz needing, every once in a while, a reboot in order to launch, as opposed to segfault? Wouldn't it be great if open source developers just came up with better software instead of wasting their effort on marketing? Wouldn't it be better if they focused on fixing the bugs instead of adding new bells and whisles? I forgot, it's free so I cannot ask for anything; moreover, istead of "whining" why don't I contribute a patch, right?
Blade Runner _is_ the best movie I have ever watched. It's such a masterpiece that I watch the DVD again and again. Too bad the original version is no longer available. IMHO, Ridley Scott was wrong in releasing the Director's Cut w/o the voiceovers; it's the voiceovers that tell you that Deckard is a human tormented over whether or not he should "retire" (read: execute) human beings, however artificially created. His questions at the end make a lot more sense in this context. This movie is a classic, like Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, albeit in the film noir/sci-fi genre. Scott is perfectly aware of it's value and impact, that's why he has always refused to do a sequel. Run a Google search on "Off-world: 2019" for more info on the BR world.
> apt-get update
Yes, provided someone has been kind enough to build and provide a RPM/DEB for your distro/release.
> apt-get upgrade
I run Gnome 2.2. RH 9 users have tried upgrading to Gnome 2.4 using apt-get and their desktop was broken. There is no easy way to undo the changes.
You're lucky your distro is more functional. Then again, I hear Debian is not the most friendly distribution. No offense.:)
The real issue here is, Linux is not backwards compatible. No even from release x.1 to x.2. Which means, basically, that what you see is what you('ll ever) get, unless, like someone else wrote above, you reinstall everything.
I have been using Linux, as a server, ever since RH 4.2; as a desktop since RH 7.3. Fedora is, by definition, a _development_ platform, so I would never use Fedora for productivity purposes. I refuse to be RedHat's guinea pig, it reminds me too much of the Win 95/98 era. When I wake up tommorow my Fedora machine might be unusable. Unless, of course, I reinstall everything.
I did an experiment: I swiched 100% to Shrike (RH 9) desktop (Gnome 2.2) for a month. OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, GMPlayer, Gimp, the whole package. Productivity, web browsing, and email tools are okay, I can't complain. As for anything related to multimedia, instant messaging, P2P, webcam, USB scanner support, what a frustration! But the greatest surprise came to me from the instability of this desktop. Firefox would sometimes stop responding and only a reboot would fix the problem. The gnome-panel would sometimes hang and only a CTRL-Backspace & reboot would fix the problem. Unknown proceses would occasionally use 100% CPU for dozens of minutes which would eventually overheat the CPU (AMD K6-2 500MHz, 256MB RAM) and hang the machine, requiring a reboot. Also, RH 9/Gnome 2.2 is about twice as slow as Windows 2000 PRO SP4 on the same machine; and Gnome, I hear, is faster than KDE. What gives?
I asked the MPlayer people how can I set up the prefs to play a videoclip "forever", like in WMP or RP. The reply came: "gmplayer -loop 0". No comments.
Well, I assume that, if I upgraded to a more recent Linux distro, such as Suse 9.1, I might have access to better desktop tools (and maybe better performance, too?). But then again, I would have to reinstall everything.
Bottom line, market gain for the Linux Desktop requires shere functionality more than unwarranted enthusiasm.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least closely monitored (think NORAD) and strictly regulated. :)
Now let's try to cool down a bit and have a look at the whole picture.
Someone noticed the X-Prize/Cup isn't about orbital flights. Of course it isn't -- which country would want private aerospace companies to develop "affordable" spacecrafts that can fly around the Earth and, God forbid, drop unpleasant packages from outer space in another nation's backyard? None. So here is what I think will happen next: First, an international law will be issued to extend national territories to a height of, say, 200 Km; any trespassing spacecraft will suffer "the severest consequences". Second, nations such as the U.S., Rusia, China, India, and potentially the EU will develop interceptor spacecraft/space platforms to defend their air... err.. outer space (now there's a huge market up for grabs). Commercial spaceflight will be limited to suborbital flights within one nation's sovereign outer space. Third, orbital commercial spaceflight will be actively discouraged; after all, it is in everyone's best interest to prevent rogue nations from acquiring "affordable" orbital spaceflight technology.
IMO, we might have to wait a while before we get to see Kubricks space hotel become reality.
You didn't mention whether their were right in their claim. :)
Now let's try to cool down a bit and have a look at the whole picture.
Someone noticed the X-Prize Cup isn't about orbital flights. Of course it isn't -- which country would want private aerospace companies to develop "affordable" spacecrafts that can fly around the Earth and, God forbid, drop unpleasant packages from outer space in another nation's backyard? None. So here is what I think will happen next: First, an international law will be issued to extend national territories to a height of, say, 200 Km; any trespassing spacecraft will suffer "the severest consequences". Second, nations such as the U.S., Rusia, China, India, and potentially the EU will develop interceptor spacecraft/space platforms to defend their air... err.. outerspace. Commercial spaceflight will be limited to suborbital flights within one nation's sovereign outerspace. Third, orbital commercial spaceflight will be actively discouraged; after all, it is in everyone's best interest to prevent rogue nations from acquiring "affordable" orbital spaceflight technology.
IMO, we might have to wait a while before we see Kubricks space hotel become reality.
You see Linux desktop distros that are incomplete and never get to be completed because the developers decide to "move on" and the next release is not backwards compatible. Take, for example, Gnome 2.2 and RH 9. The menu editing system was buggy when they released RH 9 so they disabled it; then Gnome moved to release 2.4 then 2.6 then 2.8, which require libraries unavailable under RH 9. Also, the mime-type editing system in RH 9 remained buggy. Now, if you're brave enough to run `apt-get distupgrade' you may be surprised to find out that your desktop cannot run a number of programs anymore and you have to reinstall everything from scratch.
Another annoying thing is the lack of a number of plug-ins for your Web browser. For example, there isn't a 100% compatible VRML plug-in for Mozilla/FF on Linux; there is no Cult3D plug-in for Mozilla so you cannot visit all of those NASA Mars exploration sites. Adobe Reader has no support for the mousewheel (so you need to click to scroll the page) or DRM (so you can't subscribe to some technical newsletters). And the list goes on.
Be advised that Gnome desktop is 50%-100% slower than Windows while KDE is about twice as slow as Gnome. However, you might not notice either slowdown with a CPU > 1.5GHz and 512MB or more of RAM.
I have been using Linux ever since RH 4.2, that's more than 10 years now, and wouldn't use anything but Linux as a server. As a desktop though, rather than pay ~350 USD to Redhat for their enterprise Desktop, I'd opt for Windows XP Pro. What you'll be missing on Linux is software and functionality that you're taking for granted under Windows. On the other hand, if all you need is to browse the Web (w/o catchy plug-ins), use email, and type text documents, than any major Linux distro will suffice (e.g., SuSE Linux).
freetype-2.1.3-6
XFree86-4.3.0-2.90.55
FF 0.9.3 I had installed was w/ GTK2 & Xft, latest release from mozilla.org/firefox.
Updates are not the problem (I update my Linux box with apt-get). If you do a Google searck on "firefox unexpectedly quit" you'll get quite a few hits. On the other hand, I never had such problems w/ FF under Windows 2000 Pro.
I also tried installing FF 0.10. Guess what -- some of the plug-ins did't work anymore, and also some extensions were not compatible w/ this new release, so they were disabled by the installer. Needless to mention, no updates for those extensions are available so I uninstalled FF 0.10 and went back to mozilla.
Generally, whenever I go to mozilla/ff forums and ask questions related to these problems I get answers such as "upgrade to Fedora". Interestingly, that was also the case when I had RH 7.3: "Upgrade to RH 8. Upgarde to RH 9." Releases 8 and 9 were at least supposed to be stable, Fedora isn't supposed to be. One day you'll upgrade your Fedora and something will stop working, because that's a development platform. And even if there were a new stable release, how come OOo can be stable and compatible w/ any Linux distro/release, while most other open-source cannot?
What I wrote about backward compatibility doesn't apply to OpenOffice.org, or Sun Microsystem's Java. That software successfully installs irrespective of the Linux distro or release.
But that's not all. Linux desktop software are just products that seem to have been developed using the 80/20 rule: the missing 20% features would have taken 80% of the time so they just dropped them. They say it's the little "extra" that turns "ordinary" into "extraordinary". When I use my Linux desktop for a long time I just feel that I'm missing out. I miss the right-click Copy Image function in IE. When I use Mozilla I miss the Clone Window extension available in FF. When I use OpenOffice.org I miss the simplicity of applying different languages to paragraphs in MS Word. I endlessly seek solutions on Google for these "little" things and why am I not surprised to find out I'm not the only one needing them! But would the developers listen? No way.
A couple of days ago I wanted to burn an audio CD. Great, I installed X-CD-Roaster. Turns out it cannot convert and burn mp3 files on-the-fly like Nero does, I need to convert them to wav first, like I used to do seven years ago on Windows. Okay, I installed glame. Then I converted three mp3s. You know what? The process ate up 500MB on my hard drive! Because, along with the space required by the actual generated wav files, glame would keep a cache of roughly the same size. And despite my efforts I have been unable to figure out a way to delete that cache, unless I quit the program, found the hidden file harbouring the cache tree, and manually deteled it. Now you will understand why I didn't convert the remaining 15 mp3 files.
Finally, open-source totally ignores backward compatibility. Maybe I don't have a good understanding of the phylosophy behind this movement because I am not one of those young (or not so young) developers who stay late through the night in front of a 19 inch monitor, on a super-fast PC, with a dark desktop background, typing code in a termnal window. But how many of us, Users, are like that?
I find Linux fantastic in terms of server functionality and stability. I have been running Linux servers for several years now and I can't complain. I guess one cannot have everything. :)
Do you guys EVER post anything politically incorrect on open source? I gotta tell you right away that my home/business computer runs on RH Linux with OpenOffice.org and Mozilla. The office suite cannot open all M$ Word files, unfortunatelly the de facto standard (most business related documents really are in MS Word format and I can't change the world; the remaining text documents are in WordPerfect and there is no import filter for that in OOo). I used to have Firefox installed but it kept quitting unexpectedly so I dumped it for Mozilla. Yes, the FF folks don't seem to care so much about us, Linux users, as they care about Windows users, probably a side-effect of their crusade against IE. And how about both FF and Moz needing, every once in a while, a reboot in order to launch, as opposed to segfault? Wouldn't it be great if open source developers just came up with better software instead of wasting their effort on marketing? Wouldn't it be better if they focused on fixing the bugs instead of adding new bells and whisles? I forgot, it's free so I cannot ask for anything; moreover, istead of "whining" why don't I contribute a patch, right?
Blade Runner _is_ the best movie I have ever watched. It's such a masterpiece that I watch the DVD again and again. Too bad the original version is no longer available. IMHO, Ridley Scott was wrong in releasing the Director's Cut w/o the voiceovers; it's the voiceovers that tell you that Deckard is a human tormented over whether or not he should "retire" (read: execute) human beings, however artificially created. His questions at the end make a lot more sense in this context. This movie is a classic, like Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, albeit in the film noir/sci-fi genre. Scott is perfectly aware of it's value and impact, that's why he has always refused to do a sequel. Run a Google search on "Off-world: 2019" for more info on the BR world.
Funny, the CR characters seem to be ignored in my postings, so all the text I type is one paragraph. Using Firefox 0.9.3.
> apt-get update Yes, provided someone has been kind enough to build and provide a RPM/DEB for your distro/release. > apt-get upgrade I run Gnome 2.2. RH 9 users have tried upgrading to Gnome 2.4 using apt-get and their desktop was broken. There is no easy way to undo the changes. You're lucky your distro is more functional. Then again, I hear Debian is not the most friendly distribution. No offense. :)
The real issue here is, Linux is not backwards compatible. No even from release x.1 to x.2. Which means, basically, that what you see is what you('ll ever) get, unless, like someone else wrote above, you reinstall everything. I have been using Linux, as a server, ever since RH 4.2; as a desktop since RH 7.3. Fedora is, by definition, a _development_ platform, so I would never use Fedora for productivity purposes. I refuse to be RedHat's guinea pig, it reminds me too much of the Win 95/98 era. When I wake up tommorow my Fedora machine might be unusable. Unless, of course, I reinstall everything. I did an experiment: I swiched 100% to Shrike (RH 9) desktop (Gnome 2.2) for a month. OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, GMPlayer, Gimp, the whole package. Productivity, web browsing, and email tools are okay, I can't complain. As for anything related to multimedia, instant messaging, P2P, webcam, USB scanner support, what a frustration! But the greatest surprise came to me from the instability of this desktop. Firefox would sometimes stop responding and only a reboot would fix the problem. The gnome-panel would sometimes hang and only a CTRL-Backspace & reboot would fix the problem. Unknown proceses would occasionally use 100% CPU for dozens of minutes which would eventually overheat the CPU (AMD K6-2 500MHz, 256MB RAM) and hang the machine, requiring a reboot. Also, RH 9/Gnome 2.2 is about twice as slow as Windows 2000 PRO SP4 on the same machine; and Gnome, I hear, is faster than KDE. What gives? I asked the MPlayer people how can I set up the prefs to play a videoclip "forever", like in WMP or RP. The reply came: "gmplayer -loop 0". No comments. Well, I assume that, if I upgraded to a more recent Linux distro, such as Suse 9.1, I might have access to better desktop tools (and maybe better performance, too?). But then again, I would have to reinstall everything. Bottom line, market gain for the Linux Desktop requires shere functionality more than unwarranted enthusiasm.