Umm.. Did you really just use an asterisk and them immediately dereference it? *
* That's a little bit bizarre.
Anyway, yeah simplifying the Linux desktop would be nice, but I think it's something that's going to happen naturally, so to speak. i.e. no group/consortium would be able to govern the consolidation, it's something that the users will decide.
Strong distros will rise above the rest and eventually marginalize the competition. You can already see this happening with distros like Ubuntu. Check out the page hit ranking at distrowatch. Ubuntu is less than a year old, but already it has a massive lead over any competitor.
Hmm... I never thought of it, but I wonder if the inverse is true. Gnome was created in response to the Qt licensing, no? Perhaps it was the GNOME guys who wanted to play a little naming fun with the Trolltech guys.
Either way, it adds a bit of fun depth to the (constructive) competition between Gnome and KDE.:-)
You are "forced" to use Windows Media Player. It's there at the beginning, and you can't uninstall it or its libraries, because they're tied in with various other components in the OS. Not to mention that MS is a monopoly and does this illegally. That's the differenced between being "forced" to have it and not.
Then what would make much more sense to me, is if the EU had forced MS to release a version of Windows in which WMP could be completely uninstalled while still maintaining a functioning system... that way, MS could still bundle WMP, but anyone who wanted it removed could do so.
btw, I'm not entirely sure you can remove QT with all of its libraries and still expect to have a fully functional systme in OS X (I guess it depends on what you call fully functional)..
Yes, sounds sad, but Microsoft FORCED them not to choose in the same way.
Gee, that's funny. In the same vein as which you speak, Ubuntu "forced" me to use Totem, and OS X "forced" me to use Quicktime. How terribly awful. Let's take pitchforks to their respective HQs and demand action!
What does it matter that MS bundles Windows Media Player? I mean, seriously, for the love of god, who really cares? There are so many more things to worry about or to take a critical eye at than something as trivial as a bundled media player (as it's something that pretty much ALL OS distributors do).
Can someone provide me a sound rationale for why the EU decided that such action was necessary? Was it purely a matter of principle?
It may not be a direct threat to the OSS paradigm, but it certainly is a threat to companies that commercialize and fund many projects.
But this all depends on how strict Apple will be wrt OS X running on commodity hardware. If OS X is allowed to run on commodity, or even just non Apple hardware (such as Dell's "Lexus" line of PCs), you can bet that companies like Mandriva, SuSE, and Linspire would be hurt. Corporate adoption would be even that more difficult, as companies would probably prefer to dual-boot Leopard and Longhorn than touch Linux on the desktop.
Maybe if the community weren't so focused on practical/relative benefits of OSS (such as "speed" and "slickness"), and instead focused on the real and absolute benefits ( "open source"/"free", non-reliance on a single vendor), it would be much easier to weather these storms.
Oh well. In any case, the next two years are going to be damn interesting. Hell, the next two months are probably going to be damn interesting, as we slowly find out more details as to how Apple plans to attack the x86 platform.
The author probably wasn't using the symbiotic loader, which keeps Office in RAM at all times for the sole purpose of faster startup times.
That type of thing that needs to be specified if you want to have any semblence of a fair comparison between the two suites. Both MS Office and OpenOffice have utilities designed to improve the (apparent) launch time of the programs, and they both work well ime. Anyone that tries to do a comparison of the two suites using launch time as a metric absolutely needs to make sure both programs are equally [dis/]advantaged in the comparison.
In my experience, OpenOffice is both slower to load, and slower to use than MS Office (though v 2.0 looks to improve some of this). Anyone who tries to put up ridiculous numbers such as the author of TFA needs to have their head checked, as they are not helping the community in the slightest. As it is, the article is a joke. This type of FUD does nothing but setback the success of the OSS community and programs like OpenOffice. The OSS community absolutely loves to overstate the benefits of OS software. Calling OpenOffice faster than MS Office, and Firefox more secure than IE are perfect examples of this. Look at what's happened in the past few months with Firefox: security holes and bugs left and right and left and right, catching the community with their proverbial pants down. To add insult to injury, the system that Firefox uses to update itself probably doesn't work in 50% of the Firefox installs out there.
How about we stick to actual strengths of OpenSource software (freedom - beer and speech, non-reliance on a single vendor) than try to market them with unsubstantiated and often rather untrue claims (such as "faster", "more secure").
According to the Winhec keynote, Metro will be an integral part of Longhorn. Apparently, everything printable in Longhorn is a Metro document, or can be made one with ease... hey! Kind of like how everything printable in OS X is a PDF.
What a coincidence?
Check out the Winhec keynote for even more coincidences. Start about 1 hour and 3 minutes in to get to the Longhorn stuff.
Heh.. his roommates probably think he's having some marathon maturbation session when he's in his one of code-indenting sessions (presumably with the space bar?)
I wonder how many people's calls will go like this:
MS_Help: How may I help you? Caller: Is it true that I only get one free support call? MS_Help: Yes it is. Caller: oh... Caller:... Caller: right Caller: thanks.::click::
There seems to be a bug with Slashcode. I'm not getting the "+1, aixou agrees with him" moderation option.
Lol.. That's pretty funny.. though that wasn't the point of my post. It wasn't "I agree with him, therefore mod him up".. It was "I agree with him, here's why".
I agree with him. Honestly. What good software or media has come out of Sweden? Perhaps there is a correlation here people. Countries that have no laws protecting creative works don't foster an environment conducive to creativity.
It's easy to say "omg omg, America is teh evil", when American businesses try to protect their property. It's easy to have that approach when you have no real significant pop culture of your own and you just leech off of American pop-culture (like it or not, that's how it goes for most of the world).
The ridiculous bias is one of the things I can't stand about Slashdot, and it is perpetuated by the [meta]moderation system. It's not that there aren't valid points among the anti-American sentiment, it's that the counter-points which are often equally valid and often more cogent get moderated into oblivion.
Slashdot is NOT the place for any politically heated talk because it does not provide a proper forum for discussion. If you read over a thread after the dust has settled, all you see is the groupthink modded up, and anything opposing groupthink modded down to -1. It's interesting when you think about it: there is a form of mass censorship on Slashdot, in which people who speak out against the groupthink are silenced (in that they are modded down), and those who tote the party line cruise high at +5. The ironic part is that these heated discussions often center around complaints about the same sort of censorship by the government. Double-standards and hypocrisy abound.
The word he was looking for, he couldn't say because there were preschool toys present. Bastard.
Speaking of Toy Story, maybe this is a little like the way the Toys in the movie are able to go into their extended periods of rest while in the presence of humans.
Actually, they seem to be pretty neck-and-neck (in Japan at least). Check here for details.
Nintendo has this obsessive-compulsive desire to be original and I hope it doesn't dig them into an even larger hole this time. Time will tell, but it doesn't look to be on Nintendo's side a.t.m.
Fair enough. I have searched bugzilla.mozilla.org and have found much information on memory leaks. When I get some time I'll try to determine any particular circumstances that occur during the memory leaks that I suffer, and try to match them with some already submitted bugs.
Apologies if I was overly negative. I get frustrated with the excessive Firefox fanboism though, and the pretty much blatant hypocrisy/'double standards' towards products like Firefox in comparison to IE. I would like nothing more than to be constructive towards the open source projects I have used, but I wish more of the using community would have an objective look at it without the rampant biases that pervade places like Slashdot.
There's no reason why someone couldn't write a malicious piece of software that simply asks the user to give it escalated privileges. Users have become so accustomed to entering in their username and password that it wouldn't be much of a stretch for malicious software to do the same. Bang! back to square one.
How about the huge fucking memory leak in Firefox? On my Linux box, Firefox is a huge memory whore, and will completely overtake the system within about 2 days if I have significant number of pages open. We're talking about 1.2 gigs of memory (including my entire swap) just for Firefox. I found a potential remedy online, but its more of a hack than anything.
Is this problem being addressed? If they can't fix such a gigantic memory leak how could I expect them to fix more obscure security issues?
I've thought about it, and I think it would have been better if you'd gone for a main page story. There's still time. Next time you see a news story about Torvalds or the like, check to see if its on slashdot and if it's not, submit a summary within which is a reference to your webcomic. It could be like this: "It seems that Torvalds and McVoy are at again. With a heated exchange between the two documented on the LKML[link], many kernel hackers are wondering what the future holds concerning linux source code management. This flamewar has permeated all facets of the Open Source world, and I've even documented it in my webcomic[link]."
Cha-ching. You might want to be a little more subtle about it (and lengthen the summary with some quotes), and you'll obviously have to create a comic related to the news story you post, but you should get an order of magnitude higher click-thrus than you'll get with something on the ask.slashdot page alone.
Why mod it down? What's the point to modding it down? I hate when people mod down pointlessly. The guy asks a valid a question and ponders an interesting thought, and you want to mod it down? I guess you're one of those censorship mods, that thinks other people shouldn't see the ideas you disagree with it. That type of thinking has a striking parallel with the subject matter.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Umm.. Did you really just use an asterisk and them immediately dereference it? *
* That's a little bit bizarre.
Anyway, yeah simplifying the Linux desktop would be nice, but I think it's something that's going to happen naturally, so to speak. i.e. no group/consortium would be able to govern the consolidation, it's something that the users will decide.
Strong distros will rise above the rest and eventually marginalize the competition. You can already see this happening with distros like Ubuntu. Check out the page hit ranking at distrowatch. Ubuntu is less than a year old, but already it has a massive lead over any competitor.
The Linux katamari picked up another city. A few more and we'll be able to level up!
So they could kill GNOME.
:-)
Hmm... I never thought of it, but I wonder if the inverse is true. Gnome was created in response to the Qt licensing, no? Perhaps it was the GNOME guys who wanted to play a little naming fun with the Trolltech guys.
Either way, it adds a bit of fun depth to the (constructive) competition between Gnome and KDE.
Me too... I even had this not-so funny joke about the USPTO living in Da Nile has they keep accepting amazon'ly absurd patents..
Maybe it was better that it didn't go through...
You are "forced" to use Windows Media Player. It's there at the beginning, and you can't uninstall it or its libraries, because they're tied in with various other components in the OS. Not to mention that MS is a monopoly and does this illegally. That's the differenced between being "forced" to have it and not.
Then what would make much more sense to me, is if the EU had forced MS to release a version of Windows in which WMP could be completely uninstalled while still maintaining a functioning system... that way, MS could still bundle WMP, but anyone who wanted it removed could do so.
btw, I'm not entirely sure you can remove QT with all of its libraries and still expect to have a fully functional systme in OS X (I guess it depends on what you call fully functional)..
Yes, sounds sad, but Microsoft FORCED them not to choose in the same way.
Gee, that's funny. In the same vein as which you speak, Ubuntu "forced" me to use Totem, and OS X "forced" me to use Quicktime.
How terribly awful. Let's take pitchforks to their respective HQs and demand action!
What does it matter that MS bundles Windows Media Player? I mean, seriously, for the love of god, who really cares? There are so many more things to worry about or to take a critical eye at than something as trivial as a bundled media player (as it's something that pretty much ALL OS distributors do).
Can someone provide me a sound rationale for why the EU decided that such action was necessary? Was it purely a matter of principle?
It may not be a direct threat to the OSS paradigm, but it certainly is a threat to companies that commercialize and fund many projects.
But this all depends on how strict Apple will be wrt OS X running on commodity hardware.
If OS X is allowed to run on commodity, or even just non Apple hardware (such as Dell's "Lexus" line of PCs), you can bet that companies like Mandriva, SuSE, and Linspire would be hurt. Corporate adoption would be even that more difficult, as companies would probably prefer to dual-boot Leopard and Longhorn than touch Linux on the desktop.
Maybe if the community weren't so focused on practical/relative benefits of OSS (such as "speed" and "slickness"), and instead focused on the real and absolute benefits ( "open source"/"free", non-reliance on a single vendor), it would be much easier to weather these storms.
Oh well. In any case, the next two years are going to be damn interesting. Hell, the next two months are probably going to be damn interesting, as we slowly find out more details as to how Apple plans to attack the x86 platform.
The author probably wasn't using the symbiotic loader, which keeps Office in RAM at all times for the sole purpose of faster startup times.
That type of thing that needs to be specified if you want to have any semblence of a fair comparison between the two suites.
Both MS Office and OpenOffice have utilities designed to improve the (apparent) launch time of the programs, and they both work well ime. Anyone that tries to do a comparison of the two suites using launch time as a metric absolutely needs to make sure both programs are equally [dis/]advantaged in the comparison.
In my experience, OpenOffice is both slower to load, and slower to use than MS Office (though v 2.0 looks to improve some of this). Anyone who tries to put up ridiculous numbers such as the author of TFA needs to have their head checked, as they are not helping the community in the slightest.
As it is, the article is a joke. This type of FUD does nothing but setback the success of the OSS community and programs like OpenOffice. The OSS community absolutely loves to overstate the benefits of OS software. Calling OpenOffice faster than MS Office, and Firefox more secure than IE are perfect examples of this. Look at what's happened in the past few months with Firefox: security holes and bugs left and right and left and right, catching the community with their proverbial pants down. To add insult to injury, the system that Firefox uses to update itself probably doesn't work in 50% of the Firefox installs out there.
How about we stick to actual strengths of OpenSource software (freedom - beer and speech, non-reliance on a single vendor) than try to market them with unsubstantiated and often rather untrue claims (such as "faster", "more secure").
ok, I think we can start panicking now.
According to the Winhec keynote, Metro will be an integral part of Longhorn. Apparently, everything printable in Longhorn is a Metro document, or can be made one with ease... hey! Kind of like how everything printable in OS X is a PDF.
What a coincidence?
Check out the Winhec keynote for even more coincidences. Start about 1 hour and 3 minutes in to get to the Longhorn stuff.
Heh.. his roommates probably think he's having some marathon maturbation session when he's in his one of code-indenting sessions (presumably with the space bar?)
I wonder how many people's calls will go like this:
... ::click::
MS_Help: How may I help you?
Caller: Is it true that I only get one free support call?
MS_Help: Yes it is.
Caller: oh...
Caller:
Caller: right
Caller: thanks.
There seems to be a bug with Slashcode. I'm not getting the "+1, aixou agrees with him" moderation option.
Lol.. That's pretty funny.. though that wasn't the point of my post. It wasn't "I agree with him, therefore mod him up".. It was "I agree with him, here's why".
I agree with him. Honestly.
What good software or media has come out of Sweden? Perhaps there is a correlation here people. Countries that have no laws protecting creative works don't foster an environment conducive to creativity.
It's easy to say "omg omg, America is teh evil", when American businesses try to protect their property. It's easy to have that approach when you have no real significant pop culture of your own and you just leech off of American pop-culture (like it or not, that's how it goes for most of the world).
The ridiculous bias is one of the things I can't stand about Slashdot, and it is perpetuated by the [meta]moderation system. It's not that there aren't valid points among the anti-American sentiment, it's that the counter-points which are often equally valid and often more cogent get moderated into oblivion.
Slashdot is NOT the place for any politically heated talk because it does not provide a proper forum for discussion. If you read over a thread after the dust has settled, all you see is the groupthink modded up, and anything opposing groupthink modded down to -1. It's interesting when you think about it: there is a form of mass censorship on Slashdot, in which people who speak out against the groupthink are silenced (in that they are modded down), and those who tote the party line cruise high at +5. The ironic part is that these heated discussions often center around complaints about the same sort of censorship by the government. Double-standards and hypocrisy abound.
And what do people do now when the government sends out a defense notice? Bitch and complain and accuse the government of fear-mongering.
About what???
The word he was looking for, he couldn't say because there were preschool toys present.
Bastard.
Speaking of Toy Story, maybe this is a little like the way the Toys in the movie are able to go into their extended periods of rest while in the presence of humans.
Actually, they seem to be pretty neck-and-neck (in Japan at least). Check here for details.
Nintendo has this obsessive-compulsive desire to be original and I hope it doesn't dig them into an even larger hole this time. Time will tell, but it doesn't look to be on Nintendo's side a.t.m.
Fair enough. I have searched bugzilla.mozilla.org and have found much information on memory leaks. When I get some time I'll try to determine any particular circumstances that occur during the memory leaks that I suffer, and try to match them with some already submitted bugs.
Apologies if I was overly negative. I get frustrated with the excessive Firefox fanboism though, and the pretty much blatant hypocrisy/'double standards' towards products like Firefox in comparison to IE.
I would like nothing more than to be constructive towards the open source projects I have used, but I wish more of the using community would have an objective look at it without the rampant biases that pervade places like Slashdot.
Thanks,
Justin
There's no reason why someone couldn't write a malicious piece of software that simply asks the user to give it escalated privileges. Users have become so accustomed to entering in their username and password that it wouldn't be much of a stretch for malicious software to do the same. Bang! back to square one.
How about the huge fucking memory leak in Firefox? On my Linux box, Firefox is a huge memory whore, and will completely overtake the system within about 2 days if I have significant number of pages open. We're talking about 1.2 gigs of memory (including my entire swap) just for Firefox. I found a potential remedy online, but its more of a hack than anything.
Is this problem being addressed? If they can't fix such a gigantic memory leak how could I expect them to fix more obscure security issues?
I've thought about it, and I think it would have been better if you'd gone for a main page story. There's still time. Next time you see a news story about Torvalds or the like, check to see if its on slashdot and if it's not, submit a summary within which is a reference to your webcomic. It could be like this: "It seems that Torvalds and McVoy are at again. With a heated exchange between the two documented on the LKML[link], many kernel hackers are wondering what the future holds concerning linux source code management. This flamewar has permeated all facets of the Open Source world, and I've even documented it in my webcomic[link]."
Cha-ching. You might want to be a little more subtle about it (and lengthen the summary with some quotes), and you'll obviously have to create a comic related to the news story you post, but you should get an order of magnitude higher click-thrus than you'll get with something on the ask.slashdot page alone.
Step 1: Get it posted on Slashdot.
Step 2: ????
Step 3: Profit!!
Why mod it down? What's the point to modding it down? I hate when people mod down pointlessly. The guy asks a valid a question and ponders an interesting thought, and you want to mod it down? I guess you're one of those censorship mods, that thinks other people shouldn't see the ideas you disagree with it. That type of thinking has a striking parallel with the subject matter. :-)