I totally agree. But it shouldn't just contain Firefox.
I think Netscape 8.0 should give you the option to install several components, just like always. I think it should have Netscape Navigator, based on Firefox 1.0, Netscape Mail based on Thunderbird, and Netscape Composer based on Nvu. I think they should scrap the AIM addition -- most people that use AIM use it already, and wouldn't be willing to switch to a half-baked Netscape-integrated version. Then again, maybe they could give the option to install regular AIM in the Netscape installer? Who knows, the possibilities are endless!
(referring to spatial Nautilus:) "it was a step backwards."
I disagree. The navigational Nautilus found in versions 1.4 - 2.4 looked too much like a web browser. It was confusing for both Windows users, and KDE users. When a program has a navigational toolbar along with a location field, I for one would not think it would be unreasonable to assume that it has web-browsing capabilities.
Re:Linux easier than Windows? Unpossible.
on
Linux Users Are Spoiled
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· Score: 5, Interesting
My favourite thing about installation in APT-based distributions such as Debian, and even those which are RPM based and are set up with APT-RPM, is the consistency. Just add in a graphical frontend (Synaptic or Kynaptic) for those who are terminal-shy, and you've got yourself an extremely consistent way of installing software.
While it may seem easier to install applications in Windows, you have to think about it from both sides --- you have to take complete beginners into account as well. If you're presenting a computer to Grandma, what would be easier to explain?
In Windows, it goes something like this: "if you want to install software, you must purchase a boxed set and put the CD in the drive. It may or may not start automatically, if it doesn't, you'll have to click on My Computer, D:, and double click on the Setup executable. If you want to install from the Internet, you must download it to your computer, and then double click on Setup.exe or Install.exe or whatever shows up." Can you see Grandma's head spinning yet?
But in a (well-configured) APT-based Linux environment with Synaptic, it's as simple as "OK Grandma, click on this icon here, and this is Synaptic, and you will use this to upgrade your system as well as installing and removing every single program you will ever need."
If I were a beginner, I'd appreciate the Synaptic method more. Just thought I'd add in my two cents.
Honest to God... no one likes a troll.
I think it's a great idea. My cousin sure could use it -- he got screwed with all kinds of pr0n ads (including all kinda of programs that installed and took over his desktop)
While this whole thing sounds just great on paper, I truly think it will suffer the exact same fate as NetZero --- placing ads simply does not bring in enough revenue to cover the costs of such a service and to break even, let alone to make a profit.
I'll bet that after a year or two, they'll start charging money, somehow.
This article has left several lingering questions in my head. First and foremost (while I may just be restating the obvious here), what _is_ David, what does is it do, and how does it work?
The summary states that David will "enable all major Microsoft Windows applications to run on the free and open source Linux OS" --- but isn't that already what Wine does? I mean, installing MS Office (what I would consider to be a "major Microsoft Windows application) really isn't too difficult --- all one has to do is install Wine, set it up, and run it on the installer executable. Then, considering everything has gone well, *boom* I've got it installed.
So what does David do exactly, and what problem does it attempt to solve?
I should probably take my Playstation 2 into one of those geeky bending festivals -- maybe they could get that darned DVD tray to open and shut faster!
I have always thought of my University as MS-centric, until this morning, most of which was spent in utter capitulation, realizing that I was wrong.
It started when I saw a sign up in the main computer lab: "Some computers in this lab are now Linux Ready. Please ask your adviser for details." I rebooted the PC, and sure enough, [Shrike] was there. I have no idea why they chose Shrike over Severn, but it's better than nothing. Heck, I couldn't even log in, as I'm not a CS student, and I guess only the CS students have access.
I then realized that all of the CS students had previously done their work on Windows machines, using a PuTTY terminal SSH'd into a Sun mainframe.
Although this is far from desirable for me (I want to run Linux too!) it's a step ahead both for the school and the CS students.
On the other hand, all the "other" students are extremlely MS-centric -- they ALL run vanilla XP desktops with MS Office, MSIE, etc. -- I think I've only run into one other person in the whole campus that runs Linux.
For Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, a web browser/file manager, is tightly integrated with the system kernel itself. That is a big no-no pretty much any way you look at it, but it gave Microsoft a good (well, maybe s/good/working) solution to their monopoly accusations, permitting them to say that if they were to remove Explorer, Windows would lose most of its functionality.
I'll tell you one thing: Konqueror will _not_ be "tightly integrated" with the Linux kernel any time soon!
As a desktop, and only a desktop, I find that KDE beats GNOME quite brutally in most domains. The thing I love so much about KDE, is that it forces things to be kept consistent. All you GNOME fans out there will probably flame me for that, talking about GNOME's written standards, etc.
When I'm running a KDE app, I know it's a KDE app for several reasons. For one thing, right clicking almost _always_ gives a "Configure XYZ" option, so if a newbie or even an advanced user would like to configure their desktop, they would be delighted to find that it's always done in almost exactly the same way.
KDEprint is also much more developed and much more mature than anything GNOME has to offer in that domain. I come back to consistency; KDE offers a common print dialog, kprinter, for all of its applications. This makes it extremely handy, especially when dealing with multiple printers. It also has a print-preview function built in, eliminating the need for KDE app developers to include one in their actual program.
GNOME, on the other hand, certainly is not catering to end-users in that respect. To print, for example, in epiphany, one must manually enter a print command. That may be a great feature for advanced users, but Aunt Tillie does not appreciate such things! I have found myself (a) making a symbolic link from '/usr/bin/lpr' to '/usr/bin/kprinter' simply to eliminate printing frustration for GNOME apps. Another option would be to manually change the print command to kprinter. Either way.
So, I think that Novell should do the same with their desktop -- use KDE's unified printing system and apply it to any and all GNOME apps that are used in the desktop. Making the symbolic link as I have described would work, but it would be nice if it were a little smoother than that, so that the end-user does not have to wade through 2 dialogs (again, confusion for Aunt Tillie) just to print something out.
Mozilla, Mozilla, Mozilla... Don't get me wrong, it's a great web browser, but it just doesn't blend in with the desktop very well. Konqueror, Konqueror, Konqueror... it blends in with the desktop (well, KDE) very well, but it doesn't display web sites quite as well as Gecko. Still, I think that SuSE should continue to ship Konqueror as the default web browser, and allow the user to install Epiphany/Galeon/Mozilla/Firefox later if wanted.
I know I'm sounding like a KDE fanatic here, but there are some GNOME applications that I think should be unified with Novell's KDE desktop. As for the E-mail client... DEFINITELY Evolution. End of story. Finance? GNUcash, but OpenOffice.org for the rest of the office stuff.
There are many open standards out there for multimedia (think MPEG), and if it were up to me, all there would be on the web would be streaming MPEGs specifically designed for mplayerplug-in.
However, we have companies like Real and Microsoft that force their closed standards on the market, and unfortunately most people follow them.
This is just a complete indication on how lazy people have become. I don't know about you, but I enjoy going out to vote, and I find it fun! There are some tedious tasks out there, like banking, that are better suited to the web, but voting? It just seems too dangerous to me, not to mention the laziness factor.
Above 100%? Ugh. I guess their system could have benefited from some good, old-fashioned testing.
Well, how about "this is the K menu. Click on it, then click on Synaptic. This is Synaptic, and this is how you will install _all_ the software on this machine."
That sounds very simple, straightforward, and consistent to me.
Well, I meant that it failed as a search engine...
if you go back to the year 1995 or so, Yahoo was _the_ search engine, and then around 1997 it became Altavista, and now it's Google.
Yahoo has not failed as a portal -- they've got one of the best portals out there. But when they became a portal, they became less and less of a search engine in my opinion.
Well, I know that Google runs on what is, I believe, the world's largest Linux cluster.
For those of you who don't know, a cluster is (as far as my understanding takes me) when you take several ordinary computers and link them together, providing a cheaper way to get a "fake" supercomputer.
Well that's all well and good, but how many people would know to type that in?
Has anyone looked at altavista lately? They've certainly taken the Google route, and their home page looks a lot like Google now, as does search.yahoo.com. However, in search.yahoo.com _and_ altavista, I noticed that "sponsored results" show up before the real ones, but they appear in the list just the same. That could confuse newbies, and I prefer the approach Google has taken to advertising (shoving the ads to a separate entity on the right, and keeping them text-based).
...they'll have to get rid of all that junk on their home page. Much of the reason for my using Google is that its home page is simple, it loads quickly, and it is just so easy to _search_, which is what a search engine should be.
Yahoo failed when it became a "portal" and tried to do too much by itself. If they could somehow reduce the size of Yahoo's page down to that of Google (that would mean getting rid of those ads, guys) then maybe I'd consider trying it.
Slashdot Mirror
The most important follow-up question, of course, is this: do the computers run Linux?
I totally agree. But it shouldn't just contain Firefox. I think Netscape 8.0 should give you the option to install several components, just like always. I think it should have Netscape Navigator, based on Firefox 1.0, Netscape Mail based on Thunderbird, and Netscape Composer based on Nvu. I think they should scrap the AIM addition -- most people that use AIM use it already, and wouldn't be willing to switch to a half-baked Netscape-integrated version. Then again, maybe they could give the option to install regular AIM in the Netscape installer? Who knows, the possibilities are endless!
(referring to spatial Nautilus:) "it was a step backwards."
I disagree. The navigational Nautilus found in versions 1.4 - 2.4 looked too much like a web browser. It was confusing for both Windows users, and KDE users. When a program has a navigational toolbar along with a location field, I for one would not think it would be unreasonable to assume that it has web-browsing capabilities.
My favourite thing about installation in APT-based distributions such as Debian, and even those which are RPM based and are set up with APT-RPM, is the consistency. Just add in a graphical frontend (Synaptic or Kynaptic) for those who are terminal-shy, and you've got yourself an extremely consistent way of installing software.
While it may seem easier to install applications in Windows, you have to think about it from both sides --- you have to take complete beginners into account as well. If you're presenting a computer to Grandma, what would be easier to explain?
In Windows, it goes something like this: "if you want to install software, you must purchase a boxed set and put the CD in the drive. It may or may not start automatically, if it doesn't, you'll have to click on My Computer, D:, and double click on the Setup executable. If you want to install from the Internet, you must download it to your computer, and then double click on Setup.exe or Install.exe or whatever shows up." Can you see Grandma's head spinning yet?
But in a (well-configured) APT-based Linux environment with Synaptic, it's as simple as "OK Grandma, click on this icon here, and this is Synaptic, and you will use this to upgrade your system as well as installing and removing every single program you will ever need."
If I were a beginner, I'd appreciate the Synaptic method more. Just thought I'd add in my two cents.
sorry, couldn't resist.
Honest to God... no one likes a troll. I think it's a great idea. My cousin sure could use it -- he got screwed with all kinds of pr0n ads (including all kinda of programs that installed and took over his desktop)
While this whole thing sounds just great on paper, I truly think it will suffer the exact same fate as NetZero --- placing ads simply does not bring in enough revenue to cover the costs of such a service and to break even, let alone to make a profit.
I'll bet that after a year or two, they'll start charging money, somehow.
This article has left several lingering questions in my head. First and foremost (while I may just be restating the obvious here), what _is_ David, what does is it do, and how does it work?
The summary states that David will "enable all major Microsoft Windows applications to run on the free and open source Linux OS" --- but isn't that already what Wine does? I mean, installing MS Office (what I would consider to be a "major Microsoft Windows application) really isn't too difficult --- all one has to do is install Wine, set it up, and run it on the installer executable. Then, considering everything has gone well, *boom* I've got it installed.
So what does David do exactly, and what problem does it attempt to solve?
I should probably take my Playstation 2 into one of those geeky bending festivals -- maybe they could get that darned DVD tray to open and shut faster!
I have always thought of my University as MS-centric, until this morning, most of which was spent in utter capitulation, realizing that I was wrong.
It started when I saw a sign up in the main computer lab: "Some computers in this lab are now Linux Ready. Please ask your adviser for details." I rebooted the PC, and sure enough, [Shrike] was there. I have no idea why they chose Shrike over Severn, but it's better than nothing. Heck, I couldn't even log in, as I'm not a CS student, and I guess only the CS students have access.
I then realized that all of the CS students had previously done their work on Windows machines, using a PuTTY terminal SSH'd into a Sun mainframe.
Although this is far from desirable for me (I want to run Linux too!) it's a step ahead both for the school and the CS students.
On the other hand, all the "other" students are extremlely MS-centric -- they ALL run vanilla XP desktops with MS Office, MSIE, etc. -- I think I've only run into one other person in the whole campus that runs Linux.
Well, it depends on how you look at integration.
For Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, a web browser/file manager, is tightly integrated with the system kernel itself. That is a big no-no pretty much any way you look at it, but it gave Microsoft a good (well, maybe s/good/working) solution to their monopoly accusations, permitting them to say that if they were to remove Explorer, Windows would lose most of its functionality.
I'll tell you one thing: Konqueror will _not_ be "tightly integrated" with the Linux kernel any time soon!
As a desktop, and only a desktop, I find that KDE beats GNOME quite brutally in most domains. The thing I love so much about KDE, is that it forces things to be kept consistent. All you GNOME fans out there will probably flame me for that, talking about GNOME's written standards, etc. When I'm running a KDE app, I know it's a KDE app for several reasons. For one thing, right clicking almost _always_ gives a "Configure XYZ" option, so if a newbie or even an advanced user would like to configure their desktop, they would be delighted to find that it's always done in almost exactly the same way. KDEprint is also much more developed and much more mature than anything GNOME has to offer in that domain. I come back to consistency; KDE offers a common print dialog, kprinter, for all of its applications. This makes it extremely handy, especially when dealing with multiple printers. It also has a print-preview function built in, eliminating the need for KDE app developers to include one in their actual program. GNOME, on the other hand, certainly is not catering to end-users in that respect. To print, for example, in epiphany, one must manually enter a print command. That may be a great feature for advanced users, but Aunt Tillie does not appreciate such things! I have found myself (a) making a symbolic link from '/usr/bin/lpr' to '/usr/bin/kprinter' simply to eliminate printing frustration for GNOME apps. Another option would be to manually change the print command to kprinter. Either way. So, I think that Novell should do the same with their desktop -- use KDE's unified printing system and apply it to any and all GNOME apps that are used in the desktop. Making the symbolic link as I have described would work, but it would be nice if it were a little smoother than that, so that the end-user does not have to wade through 2 dialogs (again, confusion for Aunt Tillie) just to print something out. Mozilla, Mozilla, Mozilla... Don't get me wrong, it's a great web browser, but it just doesn't blend in with the desktop very well. Konqueror, Konqueror, Konqueror... it blends in with the desktop (well, KDE) very well, but it doesn't display web sites quite as well as Gecko. Still, I think that SuSE should continue to ship Konqueror as the default web browser, and allow the user to install Epiphany/Galeon/Mozilla/Firefox later if wanted. I know I'm sounding like a KDE fanatic here, but there are some GNOME applications that I think should be unified with Novell's KDE desktop. As for the E-mail client... DEFINITELY Evolution. End of story. Finance? GNUcash, but OpenOffice.org for the rest of the office stuff.
Are you kiddin' me?
There are many open standards out there for multimedia (think MPEG), and if it were up to me, all there would be on the web would be streaming MPEGs specifically designed for mplayerplug-in.
However, we have companies like Real and Microsoft that force their closed standards on the market, and unfortunately most people follow them.
This is just a complete indication on how lazy people have become. I don't know about you, but I enjoy going out to vote, and I find it fun! There are some tedious tasks out there, like banking, that are better suited to the web, but voting? It just seems too dangerous to me, not to mention the laziness factor.
Above 100%? Ugh. I guess their system could have benefited from some good, old-fashioned testing.
Damn, I'm Canadian. Does that mean I'll have to wait to explode my money?
CTRL+TAB is the shortcut for switching between tabs, and I feel that that shortcut is completely intuitive and easy to use.
Well, how about "this is the K menu. Click on it, then click on Synaptic. This is Synaptic, and this is how you will install _all_ the software on this machine."
That sounds very simple, straightforward, and consistent to me.
Well, I meant that it failed as a search engine... if you go back to the year 1995 or so, Yahoo was _the_ search engine, and then around 1997 it became Altavista, and now it's Google. Yahoo has not failed as a portal -- they've got one of the best portals out there. But when they became a portal, they became less and less of a search engine in my opinion.
Well, I know that Google runs on what is, I believe, the world's largest Linux cluster.
For those of you who don't know, a cluster is (as far as my understanding takes me) when you take several ordinary computers and link them together, providing a cheaper way to get a "fake" supercomputer.
Heh...
Well that's all well and good, but how many people would know to type that in?
Has anyone looked at altavista lately? They've certainly taken the Google route, and their home page looks a lot like Google now, as does search.yahoo.com. However, in search.yahoo.com _and_ altavista, I noticed that "sponsored results" show up before the real ones, but they appear in the list just the same. That could confuse newbies, and I prefer the approach Google has taken to advertising (shoving the ads to a separate entity on the right, and keeping them text-based).
...they'll have to get rid of all that junk on their home page. Much of the reason for my using Google is that its home page is simple, it loads quickly, and it is just so easy to _search_, which is what a search engine should be. Yahoo failed when it became a "portal" and tried to do too much by itself. If they could somehow reduce the size of Yahoo's page down to that of Google (that would mean getting rid of those ads, guys) then maybe I'd consider trying it.