Maybe I'm all alone on this one, but the reason i don't adopt Qt has nothing to do with the licensing. I have one major and one minor problem with Qt. The minor issue is that it isn't themeable. So, it looks like shit, or more to the point, like windows, on my system. The major issue is that it binds to C++, and that's it. I program in C mostly, but also Perl, Python, Tcl, bash, Smalltalk, Eiffel, and every once in a great while I get forced into using C++. Gtk+, Qt's main competition in the toolkit market, suits my needs much, much more often than Qt. And it looks nice, too. =)
Yup, I'm a fan of WindowMaker for a lot of the same reasons. I also respect the design behind it. I think a GUI should be completely self-sustaining, i.e. no editing the configuration file, you should be able to do it all within the GUI itself. Furthermore, I like the way it uses what little desktop space it does take up. No taskbar, no root menu, unless and until you summon them with a mouse click.
> While I don't think I'd ever consider using Slackware as a "desktop" OS
Well, putting aside some people's arguments that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, Slackware is as ready as any. It ships with recent KDE and Gnome builds, as well as Windowmaker, enlightenment, Afterstep, right on down to fvwm2 and the ubiquitous twm. It's no more or less suited to desktop action than any other Linux.
> Is there any to change the ec.d scripts to sysvinit style? I love slackware, and I really want to continue using it, but this bsd >style rc.d system is causing me and undue amount of headaches.
They kinda sorta have sysvinit script support since Slack 7.0. But, thank goodness, there are no plans to make the core of the system sysv style... that's one of the many reasons why Slack is my favourite system.
Groovey side note - it's easy as pie to convert them by hand. I did it in about an hour by hand. Then I realized I liked it better the old way. And you don't have to worry about breaking 6 other scripts every time you edit something, as you do in the Red Hat default init scripts.
>One of my main problems is that vmware refuses to run (and will not install without major kludges)
Really ? Because all it took for me was to grab the vmware script that it installs to init.d, rename it (and only that to make it look consistant) and from rc.local, call rc.vmware start.
Regarding #2, Sam Latinga is already involved with a pirates RPG, per his homepage. Disclaimer: I am not a Loki person, just a Linux geek from Georgia Tech.
> I'm just sick of never having anything of our own that is > so great that Win/Mac users can't wait for a port so they can get in on the action.
Well, the reason that's not likely is because all our best innovations come from Open Source. And when you're open source, there's no waiting for a port. Furthermore, look at the two biggest APIs in use for Linux gaming right now, SDL and OpenGL. Both of these libraries make ports to other platforms TRIVIAL, a matter of a few hours worth of bug chasing and recompiling. Yay-rah, I say, I'm personally liking the games that are 'simultaneously developed' for different platforms, like Parsec for instance. (BTW, if you haven't checked out that demo yet, it's well worth the download time.)
Perhaps it warrants another look then. I didn't make note of what version of the raid patches I was using, I didn't have anything to compare it to as it was my first time.;-) My controller is a Symbios Logic 53c875.
Not that this is germane to the the ATA66 controller in question, but in my experience software RAID ranges from unusable to suicide-inducing. I laid out substantial funds to get myself twin 4.5gb seagate cheetahs, planning to stripe them. Well, it was so enormously slow that I couldn't stand to use it. When opening the gimp, for instance, both processors pegged to 100%. Is there some reason that software raid shouldn't be used for SCSI ? For the record, this was in kernel 2.2.14, and when I tried it in 2.3.3x (whatever was current at the time) I couldn't even get the drives mountable.
>>(Excel, maybe? I don't think they bought/stole that off someone else...) Lotus 1-2-3. And that probably wasn't first either, but it has always been better than Excel.
Where can one find an explanation of how NDS fits into the network ? My administration duties so far have never involved more servers than I could count on both hands, so I'm not exactly clear on what NDS and Active directory provide. Somebody could splain ?
I remember an old B-movie on the sci fi channel about this topic. Some of the stuff was implausible, for all the reasons you mentioned (for example, the woman in this movie was taught how to be a world-class sniper). However, some of the stuff seems like it still might work, and be very cool, for instance, they taught her like 25 modern languages.
While physical learned skills would probably not do well to be directly dumped into the brain, things like additional languages, which is essentially just a lookup table in the human brain anyway, would probably work out pretty well.
> Why not make a standard GUI, but still keep it simple to replace the gui to the user's liking?
With GNOME and KDE, that's more or less what we have, and look what a mess it's made of things ! It's horrible. Most nice-looking GUI apps now require you to be running Gnome or KDE, and I personally don't care to run either. GnomeICU, for instance, starts up the Gnome panel when you run it ! And it won't run at all if Gnome is not installed.
Everybody's got it into their mind that we must look and work more like Windows to succeed, and they base certain design assumptions off that principal.
There must be a root menu in the lower left corner
There must be a task list along the bottom edge of the screen
There must be an X in the upper right to close the window
The list goes on and on. I personally HATE the first two items, which is why I like Windowmaker. I have my root menu on right click, my task list on middle click, and when I don't need them, they aren't there consuming precious screen resources.
I've ventured way off topic, but the point it, if we establish a standard, then designers and developers will assume that standard and you'll be SOL if you deviate from it. Think of how many apps that 'Designed for Red Hat Linux' that are a pain and a half to use in Slackware (my favorite distro). There's no need for it.
Everquest would definitely be slick, but would this thing be fast enough to keep up with Q3Arena ? What kind of refresh rates can we pull out of LCD these days ?
IANAL, but what about this: if we assume that Apple is made up of fairly decent people, and I don't see why we shouldn't at this point, then could this possibly work out for them without being a case of TM dillution ? They could grant a very limited license to use the logo to individuals who create Aqua-alike themes. That way they could still be maintaining legal control of their trademark, sorta, without stepping on the toes of developers. They could either make a webpage to sign up for the limited-use license, or they could just grant it on a case-by-case basis as it came to their attention, retroactively.
The problem with that is, I think we can assume Jon Johansen and company either don't know beans about writing an MPEG2 player, or they just didn't want to muss with it. They were working to get the file into standard MPEG2 format, so that somebody else could figure out how to play it; there's no practical way to DO that except to dump it to a disc (unless you have 10 gigs of RAM).
Now that the codebase is there, there IS work being done to make a "drop in the disc, hit play and go" player, check out XVideo on freshmeat. Sadly, it doesn't seem to work properly just yet, and more sadly it has to be binary only because of all this legal bullshit.
Nevertheless, I'm only going to say this once: DeCSS has NOTHING to do with piracy, it's USELESS to pirates, and the ONLY reason it exists is to play movies. Period. No other purpose. End of story. End of post.
> In short, though, DeCSS can be used for piracy, and has been. So can we just shut up about how this Windows program "is only useful for playing DVDs under Linux" please?
But that's just the point... it CAN'T be used for any PRACTICAL and economically viable form of piracy. You can put the file on your hard drive and you can send it across the net. If you have a clean OC-3, and are sending to someone with a clean OC-3, you can do this in a reasonable amount of time. BUT, the percentage of the population who has access to a clean OC-3 is not enough to comprise a problematic pirating network. Furthermore, even the biggest hard drives that anybody really has right now, the Maxtor 40gb jobs, can hold 9 or 10 movies. And that's a $300+ drive. It's just NOT PRACTICAL. It's cheaper to buy the movies. There's no financially viable way to pirate DVDs that in any way involves DeCSS/css-auth decryption.
I won't rehash the tired arguments along the lines of "A dual-deck VCR can be and is used to pirate movies, but that's not it's main use", etc etc, because by the manner of your speaking, you're clearly smart enough to realize that DeCSS and it's derived works have an important and legitimate use that falls completely under the protection of fair use legislation, which makes any illegal role they may play in piracy completely irrelevant.
You also seem bright enough to know that DeCSS is completely pointless in any operation to actually duplicate DVDs for distribution and public consumption, that decrypting the DVD doesn't figure into the piracy process at any stage. The astute pirate just duplicates the bits that are on the disc, and doesn't give two damns if they're encrypted or not. The ONLY reason anybody could EVER want to decrypt CSS is to view it, not to copy it. Period.
And, since you're well read, you also know that there is not now, nor is their likely in the immediate future to be, an economically viable way to duplicate DVD movies for the purpose of piracy. The files are ridiculously large to be moved over the internet, and to store and distribute them on other media (burned CDs, Jaz discs, etc) is not economically viable (costs more than the legit DVD)
This isn't aboot piracy, it's aboot maintaining a stranglehold on the industry... it's aboot a monopoly... it's aboot... it's aboot....
> This would appear, IMHO, to be DeCSS's primary use (after all, there ARE other WINDOWS DVD players).
You are in error. Johansen and company started out with DeCSS to provide a player for Linux. That was their express purpose from the getgo. The reason that DeCSS is for windows and not Linux is that when the project begun, Linux lacked support for the UDF filesystem. Read the interview with Jon for this and other clue-inspiring facts, brought to you by Slashdot.
> In my experience NS is prone to crashing far more often then IE and loves reloading pages from the server even if you so much as sneeze.
That reminds me of another thing. IE doesn't display images until it's completely finished downloading them, whereas netscape displays them as it's getting them. Where I work, I monitor a security webcam, and the software we have is a little odd... what it does is it serves off a continuous stream in the format of an animated GIF... the idea being that your web browser will display it frame by frame as it comes in. It will never move in IE.
Damn, didn't expect so many people to actually want a list =)
Well, here's just some things off the top of my head.
The FTP client is crap. With netscape, I can do ftp://user@host, it'll prompt me for a password. Up until IE5, I had to use ftp://user:password@host, or it wouldn't work. Not only that, but it would stay there, password and all, in the history bar.
As of IE5, it seems that it can prompt you for a password, but it saves the password until you end the session, which is still a might insecure (Communicator does that one also, sadly).
When downloading files, 9 times out of 10, I get "File Size: Unknown" for no apparent reason (Netscape doesn't have that trouble). So, I have no way to know when the bloody thing is going to finish unless I check the file size in some external way. Furthermore, when it does get the file size, the estimated finish time is grossly inaccurate... how many times have you seen this ? It says ETA: 15 seconds, ticks down to zero, then restarts at 20 seconds. Bah...
And it doesn't fscking close the download window when it finishes, by default >:-| And there doesn't seem to be anyway to MAKE this the automatic behaviour !
The configurations for IE are cumbersome, IMHO. Netscape has it all in one place, Edit->Preferences. In IE, it's either in the menus, or an entirely redundant control panel applet... blah... and of course you get bitchslapped by your IE Favorites in umpteen different places including the fscking root menu. All part of the integration process, I presume.
Java seems to run slower for me in the IE virtual machine, but that's just an impression. What's not just an impression is that it crashes if I look at it cross-eyed... one particularly futile task is trying to use the Java VNC viewer in Internet Explorer... it is slow as balls, doesn't refresh the virtual display properly, and crashes with such regularity as to render it utterly useless.
That's all I have for now, when I get back to work on Monday and have IE in front of me again, I'm sure I can come up with more. =)
Slashdot Mirror
Now THAT sounds like an entertaining project. And, since it's protected under the GPL, the authors would release those extensions...
Maybe I'm all alone on this one, but the reason i don't adopt Qt has nothing to do with the licensing. I have one major and one minor problem with Qt. The minor issue is that it isn't themeable. So, it looks like shit, or more to the point, like windows, on my system. The major issue is that it binds to C++, and that's it. I program in C mostly, but also Perl, Python, Tcl, bash, Smalltalk, Eiffel, and every once in a great while I get forced into using C++. Gtk+, Qt's main competition in the toolkit market, suits my needs much, much more often than Qt. And it looks nice, too. =)
Yup, I'm a fan of WindowMaker for a lot of the same reasons. I also respect the design behind it. I think a GUI should be completely self-sustaining, i.e. no editing the configuration file, you should be able to do it all within the GUI itself. Furthermore, I like the way it uses what little desktop space it does take up. No taskbar, no root menu, unless and until you summon them with a mouse click.
> While I don't think I'd ever consider using Slackware as a "desktop" OS
Well, putting aside some people's arguments that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, Slackware is as ready as any. It ships with recent KDE and Gnome builds, as well as Windowmaker, enlightenment, Afterstep, right on down to fvwm2 and the ubiquitous twm. It's no more or less suited to desktop action than any other Linux.
> Is there any to change the ec.d scripts to sysvinit style? I love slackware, and I really want to continue using it, but this bsd
>style rc.d system is causing me and undue amount of headaches.
They kinda sorta have sysvinit script support since Slack 7.0. But, thank goodness, there are no plans to make the core of the system sysv style... that's one of the many reasons why Slack is my favourite system.
Groovey side note - it's easy as pie to convert them by hand. I did it in about an hour by hand. Then I realized I liked it better the old way. And you don't have to worry about breaking 6 other scripts every time you edit something, as you do in the Red Hat default init scripts.
>One of my main problems is that vmware refuses to run (and will not install without major kludges)
Really ? Because all it took for me was to grab the vmware script that it installs to init.d, rename it (and only that to make it look consistant) and from rc.local, call rc.vmware start.
I personally want to buy a Matrox G400 that has a 2-headed tux on the box...
Regarding #2, Sam Latinga is already involved with a pirates RPG, per his homepage. Disclaimer: I am not a Loki person, just a Linux geek from Georgia Tech.
> Was anyone else disappointed when they upgraded and discovered the new DOS didn't come with nibbles.bas?
I was a big fan of gorilla.bas myself.
> I'm just sick of never having anything of our own that is
> so great that Win/Mac users can't wait for a port so they can get in on the action.
Well, the reason that's not likely is because all our best innovations come from Open Source. And when you're open source, there's no waiting for a port. Furthermore, look at the two biggest APIs in use for Linux gaming right now, SDL and OpenGL. Both of these libraries make ports to other platforms TRIVIAL, a matter of a few hours worth of bug chasing and recompiling. Yay-rah, I say, I'm personally liking the games that are 'simultaneously developed' for different platforms, like Parsec for instance. (BTW, if you haven't checked out that demo yet, it's well worth the download time.)
Whomever you are, it's you and those like you who give me reason to browse at -1. Thank you.
Perhaps it warrants another look then. I didn't make note of what version of the raid patches I was using, I didn't have anything to compare it to as it was my first time. ;-) My controller is a Symbios Logic 53c875.
Not that this is germane to the the ATA66 controller in question, but in my experience software RAID ranges from unusable to suicide-inducing. I laid out substantial funds to get myself twin 4.5gb seagate cheetahs, planning to stripe them. Well, it was so enormously slow that I couldn't stand to use it. When opening the gimp, for instance, both processors pegged to 100%. Is there some reason that software raid shouldn't be used for SCSI ? For the record, this was in kernel 2.2.14, and when I tried it in 2.3.3x (whatever was current at the time) I couldn't even get the drives mountable.
>>(Excel, maybe? I don't think they bought/stole that off someone else...) Lotus 1-2-3. And that probably wasn't first either, but it has always been better than Excel.
Where can one find an explanation of how NDS fits into the network ? My administration duties so far have never involved more servers than I could count on both hands, so I'm not exactly clear on what NDS and Active directory provide. Somebody could splain ?
I remember an old B-movie on the sci fi channel about this topic. Some of the stuff was implausible, for all the reasons you mentioned (for example, the woman in this movie was taught how to be a world-class sniper). However, some of the stuff seems like it still might work, and be very cool, for instance, they taught her like 25 modern languages.
While physical learned skills would probably not do well to be directly dumped into the brain, things like additional languages, which is essentially just a lookup table in the human brain anyway, would probably work out pretty well.
With GNOME and KDE, that's more or less what we have, and look what a mess it's made of things ! It's horrible. Most nice-looking GUI apps now require you to be running Gnome or KDE, and I personally don't care to run either. GnomeICU, for instance, starts up the Gnome panel when you run it ! And it won't run at all if Gnome is not installed.
Everybody's got it into their mind that we must look and work more like Windows to succeed, and they base certain design assumptions off that principal.
There must be a root menu in the lower left corner
There must be a task list along the bottom edge of the screen
There must be an X in the upper right to close the window
The list goes on and on. I personally HATE the first two items, which is why I like Windowmaker. I have my root menu on right click, my task list on middle click, and when I don't need them, they aren't there consuming precious screen resources.
I've ventured way off topic, but the point it, if we establish a standard, then designers and developers will assume that standard and you'll be SOL if you deviate from it. Think of how many apps that 'Designed for Red Hat Linux' that are a pain and a half to use in Slackware (my favorite distro). There's no need for it.
> And you're not getting APIC errors ??
;-)
I get those damn things constantly. I'm glad to know it's not just me.
Everquest would definitely be slick, but would this thing be fast enough to keep up with Q3Arena ? What kind of refresh rates can we pull out of LCD these days ?
IANAL, but what about this: if we assume that Apple is made up of fairly decent people, and I don't see why we shouldn't at this point, then could this possibly work out for them without being a case of TM dillution ? They could grant a very limited license to use the logo to individuals who create Aqua-alike themes. That way they could still be maintaining legal control of their trademark, sorta, without stepping on the toes of developers. They could either make a webpage to sign up for the limited-use license, or they could just grant it on a case-by-case basis as it came to their attention, retroactively.
The problem with that is, I think we can assume Jon Johansen and company either don't know beans about writing an MPEG2 player, or they just didn't want to muss with it. They were working to get the file into standard MPEG2 format, so that somebody else could figure out how to play it; there's no practical way to DO that except to dump it to a disc (unless you have 10 gigs of RAM).
Now that the codebase is there, there IS work being done to make a "drop in the disc, hit play and go" player, check out XVideo on freshmeat. Sadly, it doesn't seem to work properly just yet, and more sadly it has to be binary only because of all this legal bullshit.
Nevertheless, I'm only going to say this once: DeCSS has NOTHING to do with piracy, it's USELESS to pirates, and the ONLY reason it exists is to play movies. Period. No other purpose. End of story. End of post.
^D
EOF
> In short, though, DeCSS can be used for piracy, and has been. So can we just shut up about how this Windows program "is only useful for playing DVDs under Linux" please?
But that's just the point... it CAN'T be used for any PRACTICAL and economically viable form of piracy. You can put the file on your hard drive and you can send it across the net. If you have a clean OC-3, and are sending to someone with a clean OC-3, you can do this in a reasonable amount of time. BUT, the percentage of the population who has access to a clean OC-3 is not enough to comprise a problematic pirating network. Furthermore, even the biggest hard drives that anybody really has right now, the Maxtor 40gb jobs, can hold 9 or 10 movies. And that's a $300+ drive. It's just NOT PRACTICAL. It's cheaper to buy the movies. There's no financially viable way to pirate DVDs that in any way involves DeCSS/css-auth decryption.
I won't rehash the tired arguments along the lines of "A dual-deck VCR can be and is used to pirate movies, but that's not it's main use", etc etc, because by the manner of your speaking, you're clearly smart enough to realize that DeCSS and it's derived works have an important and legitimate use that falls completely under the protection of fair use legislation, which makes any illegal role they may play in piracy completely irrelevant.
You also seem bright enough to know that DeCSS is completely pointless in any operation to actually duplicate DVDs for distribution and public consumption, that decrypting the DVD doesn't figure into the piracy process at any stage. The astute pirate just duplicates the bits that are on the disc, and doesn't give two damns if they're encrypted or not. The ONLY reason anybody could EVER want to decrypt CSS is to view it, not to copy it. Period.
And, since you're well read, you also know that there is not now, nor is their likely in the immediate future to be, an economically viable way to duplicate DVD movies for the purpose of piracy. The files are ridiculously large to be moved over the internet, and to store and distribute them on other media (burned CDs, Jaz discs, etc) is not economically viable (costs more than the legit DVD)
This isn't aboot piracy, it's aboot maintaining a stranglehold on the industry... it's aboot a monopoly... it's aboot... it's aboot....
What's so goddamn funny ?
> This would appear, IMHO, to be DeCSS's primary use (after all, there ARE other WINDOWS DVD players).
You are in error. Johansen and company started out with DeCSS to provide a player for Linux. That was their express purpose from the getgo. The reason that DeCSS is for windows and not Linux is that when the project begun, Linux lacked support for the UDF filesystem. Read the interview with Jon for this and other clue-inspiring facts, brought to you by Slashdot.
> In my experience NS is prone to crashing far more often then IE and loves reloading pages from the server even if you so much as sneeze.
That reminds me of another thing. IE doesn't display images until it's completely finished downloading them, whereas netscape displays them as it's getting them. Where I work, I monitor a security webcam, and the software we have is a little odd... what it does is it serves off a continuous stream in the format of an animated GIF... the idea being that your web browser will display it frame by frame as it comes in. It will never move in IE.
Damn, didn't expect so many people to actually want a list =)
Well, here's just some things off the top of my head.
The FTP client is crap. With netscape, I can do
ftp://user@host, it'll prompt me for a password. Up until IE5, I had to use ftp://user:password@host, or it wouldn't work. Not only that, but it would stay there, password and all, in the history bar.
As of IE5, it seems that it can prompt you for a password, but it saves the password until you end the session, which is still a might insecure (Communicator does that one also, sadly).
When downloading files, 9 times out of 10, I get "File Size: Unknown" for no apparent reason (Netscape doesn't have that trouble). So, I have no way to know when the bloody thing is going to finish unless I check the file size in some external way. Furthermore, when it does get the file size, the estimated finish time is grossly inaccurate... how many times have you seen this ? It says ETA: 15 seconds, ticks down to zero, then restarts at 20 seconds. Bah...
And it doesn't fscking close the download window when it finishes, by default >:-| And there doesn't seem to be anyway to MAKE this the automatic behaviour !
The configurations for IE are cumbersome, IMHO. Netscape has it all in one place, Edit->Preferences. In IE, it's either in the menus, or an entirely redundant control panel applet... blah... and of course you get bitchslapped by your IE Favorites in umpteen different places including the fscking root menu. All part of the integration process, I presume.
Java seems to run slower for me in the IE virtual machine, but that's just an impression. What's not just an impression is that it crashes if I look at it cross-eyed... one particularly futile task is trying to use the Java VNC viewer in Internet Explorer... it is slow as balls, doesn't refresh the virtual display properly, and crashes with such regularity as to render it utterly useless.
That's all I have for now, when I get back to work on Monday and have IE in front of me again, I'm sure I can come up with more. =)