The most terrifying thing about all this crap going down in the US is that, living in Australia, we will inevitably get shafted with the same laws via some "free trade" agreement (aka: "We f**k you up the ass, and you thank us for the privilege"), except we don't have free use laws to start with.
In short, when the shit hits the fan over there, you get the chunks, we get the fine spray that covers everything. Oh for a prime minister with a f**king backbone...
If you're developing OSS for.NET, kudos on being open source, but you do miss the bonus points for being platform independent and don't whine about not getting the cred platform-independent projects of the same nature do. If you're an OSS user who sees this great project built on a proprietary stack and are pissed because it's not available for your platform, "port up or shut up".
It's called Mono. Funny how that can run unmodified ASP.NET applications on Linux, Solaris, MacOS... very platform specific, that is.
It's just as easy, if not easier, to write cross-platform applications using.NET as with any other language or set of compilers. Stop being a troll.
And here I thought Firefox was just the browser component of Mozilla without all the other useful components. Why would you insist on using a less-functional, cutesy program (whether it is called Pheonix, Firebird or Firefox) when Mozilla can do everything it can and a hell of a lot more?
If there is one upside to open source software is that legacy software will never die so long as some people actually want to use it and find it useful. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, they can go on improving existing, proven programs. Even then, features can be ported to those newer apps (say, oh I don't know, via Gecko).
(See, kids: there's more than one way to spin a discussion! Disclaimer: I use Firefox, but I still respect the SeaMonkey users' decision to keep using it.)
Yeah, because we all know how well Apple stuck to Windows look and feel when they ported Quicktime ov... oh yeah. Well, um, at least iTunes is... notwait, scratch that...
But at least they're consistent on their OWN platform! It's not like they wouldever make an app that doesn't fit with all the others!
Granted, Microsoft wouldn't know good UI design if it came along and beat them over the head with a stick, but Apple are just as guilty of "screw you, we'll make our apps look however we want--to hell with native widgets!" syndrome as MS.
All that it's missing is the ability to run embedded Linux, Apache, MySQL (sorry, I mean PostgreSQL) and PHP, store 16 GB of data, play MP3s and Videos, allow you to enter text using a special "nano" keypad, browse the web...
I was at university, and needed to crop and rotate some images for a 3D modelling assignment. I took a look at the programs installed and noticed The GIMP. "Well," I said to myself, "that'll do--how hard could it be?"
It took me a few minutes, but I managed to work out how to rotate and crop my image without any dramas. But then I tried to save it.
Imagine my horror when I discovered that the File menu didn't have a Save item. "Bloody GNOME developers..." I thought, and looked through the (two?) other menus on the main window. Nothing.
I hunted through the other windows to no avail. I right clicked everything I could hoping for SOMETHING to let me save, without success.
I eventually stumbled upon the image's right-click menu. This one had LOTS of submenus, so it just HAD to be there somewhere. Of course, I ignored the top "File" menu since I'd already ruled that one out.
About ten minutes of fruitless searching later, I decided that maybe I'd upset it somehow and gotten the "Save" item disabled. I was about to give up when I accidentally opened the File submenu on the image's context menu.
And there was "Save As". I wanted to scream and smash the computer into a million pieces. The GIMP wasted about 15 minutes of my time.
I honestly don't believe that the GIMP's developers could be so incredibly incompetant as to break two of the most fundamental assumptions people have about GUI apps: that "File" operations are under the "File" menu, and that if you have a menu in two places, it's the same damn menu. I can only imagine that the GIMP developers don't want people to use it.
I hope these usability guys flay the GIMP developers alive for that one alone...
All we need now is for some Taiwanese guy to come along, increase the speed of light, and con us into buying his super-fast version.
But it won't work this time... we're on to him...
I dunno about you, but to be honest, every time I see a screenshot of Longhorn, it keeps looking uglier and uglier. I think it's the whole "hey, let's make everything BLUE and other FLURO COLOURS!" mentality that seems to have taken over Redmond recently. At this rate, I won't be able to use Longhorn without needing either sunglasses or a bucket. Maybe both.
I mean, if they're going to copy Apple in so many respects, can't they at least copy their sense of style? Making the UI look like it was designed by a three year old with nothing but glitter pens is just ludicrous...
The licenses granted in Section 2.1(a) do not include any license right, power or other authority to subject Licensed Server Implementations or derivative works thereof in whole or in part to any of the terms of any other license that requires such Licensed Server Implementations or derivative works thereof to be disclosed or distributed in source code form.
That's all one sentence... I guess MS wanted the OSS guys to suffocate just by reading the license. A truly insidious plan...
Judge: So what evidence do you have? Perhaps some incriminating documents?
Prosecution: No.
Judge: Surveillence tapes?
Proescution: Er, no.
Judge: Wiretap?
Prosecution: Not today, your honor, no.
Judge: Well what *do* you have?
Prosecution: Well, it's quite simple. Barring the creation of some kind of hyper-intelligent android (which we shall call EvilHackingPirateScumBot), the man responsible for these reprehensible acts MUST be a human being...
Judge: Go on...
Prosecution: Now, I direct your attention to exhibit A--the defendant. As can be clearly seen, he is in fact a human!
Judge: My God, you're right!
Prosecution: So, from this, we can clearly see that since the man we are after is a human, and the defendant is also a human, then he must have done it!
Judge: You know, you're right! Bailiff, take this man away.
Prosecution: (haha, suckers)
Judge: But you know, I can't help but notice that you're a human as well...
Prosecution: Well, I hardly think...
Judge: I see now, this was all just a ploy! Bailiff, arrest every human in this courtroom, and then throw yourself in a cell...
...so they've started doing physical raids of ISPs to get BitTorrent users. Give the OSS community a few months, and there'll be a fully encrypted version of BitTorrent that's all but impossible to trace.
They really don't get it, do they? Every time they try to crack down on P2P, it evolves into something harder to stop.
...but aren't WHAT-WG and the W3C advocating two standards for different purposes?
I thought that Web Forms was seen more as an extension of HTML 4.0 forms to make building HTML applications easier, whilst XForms was to improve things like introspection/interoperability (at the cost of being close to impossible for mere mortals to grok)...
Encumbered? What are you smoking? The GPL is a viral license: it forces its conditions on any software that links to it, or includes GPL code.
BSD on the other hand is pretty much a free-for-all. GPL is far more "encumbered" than BSD is. The fact is that GPL is useless in some situations (especially for corporations) because of that viral component. The LGPL picks up a fair amount of slack here, but BSD is still used for many projects that have no need or desire to impose the GPL's limits on their software.
Hmm... I was always led to believe that the LH/RH thing wasn't that trivial to fix. Oh well, learn something new everyday:) That point was mostly borne out of many years of hearing "can't you just, like, so totally just use that GL thing to do DX?" on forums.
Now, for your second point <g>: I did actually mention id in my post. Regarding Epic, I was under the impression the GL backend for the Unreal engines had been pretty much replaced by a DX backend, and it was being maintained by a few guys in Epic so it would run under Linux, et al.
As for Blizzard, you got me on that one:)
In any case, my apologies for my mistakes, and thankyou for correcting me. But, on the bright side, now I know better.
Though, I still believe the best way to solve the "If you want to play games, you use Windows" would be to get the game developers to start using something other than DX.
...all you have to do is click the "Magically Change DirectX Applications To Run Under Mac OSX" button in "FairlyLand Dev Tools", and the magical porting pixies will do all the hard work...
Give me a break. This guy obviously has no concept of how to port applications.
See, the one thing (that I can immediately think of and that supports my argument:P) stopping a flood of games appearing on Linux, Mac, et al is DirectX. You get DirectX running on Mac, and Bob's your third uncle twice removed.
Of course, this would be nigh on impossible... DirectX is pretty damn huge, and you can't simply wrap a DirectX interface around OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, etc. (for example, OpenGL uses right-hand aligned polygons, DX uses left-handed... or the other way around).
No, the real trick is to get developers to stop using DirectX in the first place. If they started using OpenGL, OpenAL, and other cross platform libraries, this problem wouldn't exist (at least to a large degree). Then, it would simply be a matter of compiling the game for each platform you wanted to support.
Pretty much the only developers that still use OpenGL seem to be small independents, and id. Oh well, thank $DIETY for John Carmack for keeping GL alive and kicking...
This isn't exactly new. It sounds like this system I saw a while back. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it, but it basically has something akin to a thin pane of glass that spins around really fast.
What they do then is project a different image at each angle onto the glass. The images themselves are kinda like slices of a 3d volume (think volumetric textures). It spins just fast enough to fool the human eye into thinking it's seeing something hovering in midair.
I saw a few QuickTime VR demos of one of these a while back... they showed it with some wireframe terrain and a little purple jet thing in midair, as well as showing the sugar molecule.
Also, if I remember rightly, Nintendo had one of these puppies up a few E3s ago, with a model of that Star Fox character in it. Quite cool.
As for manipulating it by hand, I sure hope I'm wrong about the spinning glass bit...
I dunno about the new site, but last time I checked the Linux binaries, it was on the "More languages/OSes/etc." page beneath the regular binary.
IANAGE (I am not a Google Employee), but as far as I understand it, Gmail is built almost entirely on a little gem called XMLHttpRequest (it might be HttpXmlRequest or HtTpXmLREQUEST but that's beside the point...)
Basically, it allows you to send requests back to the server, and get XML (Gecko and IE allow you to recieve HTML as well) back from Javascript without having to reload the whole dang page. Gmail uses this pretty much everywhere instead of doing roundtrips.
I'm not sure if Konqueror supports XMLHttpRequest, but odds are that might be why.
This is so true. Scientists are always making stuff up because they just can't deal with reality.
Like this whole "the world is round" jazz--everyone knows the world is flat! If it was round, we'd all fall right off... well, the people on the non-up side, anyway.
And going to the moon? That was so fake. Everyone knows people can't fly.
And don't even get me started on "imaginary" numbers...
---
While our current knowledge may say it's not possible, the human race has been wrong before, and we will undoubtedly be wrong again...
...try living in Australia. Telstra (the all-mighty telco) not only price fixes and provides what one could at best describe as shitty service, but they are actively installing lines that can never support broadband.
I am in particular peeved off because it appears that instead of installing my line on the local exchange, they installed it in the middle of the city, thus precluding me from getting broadband.
Oh well. That's bureaucracy for you...
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to surfing on my 56K line...
Which one runs Half-Life 2? Or practically any high-profile games (I know there are exceptions to this)?
Which one runs Adobe Photoshop (and no, Crossover doesn't count--it'll ruin my argument:P)?
Face it, Linux may be TECHNOLOGICALLY superior, but look what happened to Betamax.
Sometimes it's not which is technically "the best", it's which one does what consumers want. I realize that "crash for no readily aparent reason" isn't what consumers want it to do, but being able to run all those "friendly" Windows-only applications is.
That said, I'm jumping ship the moment someone writes a DirectX->OpenGL wrapper for Linux.
Disclaimer: it's late, IANAL, I'm hungry, yadda yadda yadda...
Maybe I'm reading into this wrong (and you have my apologies if I am), but maybe this is just a misunderstanding of the GPL by the author.
Let's face it, there are some issues the GPL isn't crystal clear on. What a derived work is is one of them.
Since the only person who is Zed is Zed himself, we can't be 100% sure he's doing this because he's an evil source code-stealing demon, or he just wants some compensation for compiling the program for Windows and got a bit confused.
Instead of writing letters telling him he is an immoral and villanous bastard, someone who knows the GPL inside and out could just politely lay out why what he's doing is wrong, and suggest alternatives. AFAIK (but IANAL) it basically boils down to: he can charge if he wants, but he MUST provide the modified Windows source code.
As someone who wants to contribute to OSS projects, but still be able to make a living off programming, I can understand why this might arise. Let's try educating him before we burn him alive.
But seriously, to all the people saying "bleh! What are we ever going to need that kind of bandwidth for?", just remember: no one should need more than 640KB of memory.
Face it, people are constantly doing things which require more and more bandwidth. People will start wanting to stream HDTV-quality movies over the net from their favourite P2P ne...uh... I mean MPAA sanctioned distribution channel. They'll want online games with thousands and thousands of people with realistic physics, and audio chatting. They'll want...
Ah who am I kidding? This is for p0rn, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
The most terrifying thing about all this crap going down in the US is that, living in Australia, we will inevitably get shafted with the same laws via some "free trade" agreement (aka: "We f**k you up the ass, and you thank us for the privilege"), except we don't have free use laws to start with.
In short, when the shit hits the fan over there, you get the chunks, we get the fine spray that covers everything. Oh for a prime minister with a f**king backbone...
It's called Mono. Funny how that can run unmodified ASP.NET applications on Linux, Solaris, MacOS... very platform specific, that is.
It's just as easy, if not easier, to write cross-platform applications using .NET as with any other language or set of compilers. Stop being a troll.
And here I thought Firefox was just the browser component of Mozilla without all the other useful components. Why would you insist on using a less-functional, cutesy program (whether it is called Pheonix, Firebird or Firefox) when Mozilla can do everything it can and a hell of a lot more?
If there is one upside to open source software is that legacy software will never die so long as some people actually want to use it and find it useful. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, they can go on improving existing, proven programs. Even then, features can be ported to those newer apps (say, oh I don't know, via Gecko).
(See, kids: there's more than one way to spin a discussion! Disclaimer: I use Firefox, but I still respect the SeaMonkey users' decision to keep using it.)
You've obviously never heard of Mono...
Yeah, because we all know how well Apple stuck to Windows look and feel when they ported Quicktime ov... oh yeah. Well, um, at least iTunes is... notwait, scratch that...
But at least they're consistent on their OWN platform! It's not like they would ever make an app that doesn't fit with all the others!
Granted, Microsoft wouldn't know good UI design if it came along and beat them over the head with a stick, but Apple are just as guilty of "screw you, we'll make our apps look however we want--to hell with native widgets!" syndrome as MS.
All that it's missing is the ability to run embedded Linux, Apache, MySQL (sorry, I mean PostgreSQL) and PHP, store 16 GB of data, play MP3s and Videos, allow you to enter text using a special "nano" keypad, browse the web...
Ok, here's my GIMP usability horror story:
I was at university, and needed to crop and rotate some images for a 3D modelling assignment. I took a look at the programs installed and noticed The GIMP. "Well," I said to myself, "that'll do--how hard could it be?"
It took me a few minutes, but I managed to work out how to rotate and crop my image without any dramas. But then I tried to save it.
Imagine my horror when I discovered that the File menu didn't have a Save item. "Bloody GNOME developers..." I thought, and looked through the (two?) other menus on the main window. Nothing.
I hunted through the other windows to no avail. I right clicked everything I could hoping for SOMETHING to let me save, without success.
I eventually stumbled upon the image's right-click menu. This one had LOTS of submenus, so it just HAD to be there somewhere. Of course, I ignored the top "File" menu since I'd already ruled that one out.
About ten minutes of fruitless searching later, I decided that maybe I'd upset it somehow and gotten the "Save" item disabled. I was about to give up when I accidentally opened the File submenu on the image's context menu.
And there was "Save As". I wanted to scream and smash the computer into a million pieces. The GIMP wasted about 15 minutes of my time.
I honestly don't believe that the GIMP's developers could be so incredibly incompetant as to break two of the most fundamental assumptions people have about GUI apps: that "File" operations are under the "File" menu, and that if you have a menu in two places, it's the same damn menu. I can only imagine that the GIMP developers don't want people to use it.
I hope these usability guys flay the GIMP developers alive for that one alone...
All we need now is for some Taiwanese guy to come along, increase the speed of light, and con us into buying his super-fast version. But it won't work this time... we're on to him...
...who aren't actually graphic designers.
I dunno about you, but to be honest, every time I see a screenshot of Longhorn, it keeps looking uglier and uglier. I think it's the whole "hey, let's make everything BLUE and other FLURO COLOURS!" mentality that seems to have taken over Redmond recently. At this rate, I won't be able to use Longhorn without needing either sunglasses or a bucket. Maybe both.
I mean, if they're going to copy Apple in so many respects, can't they at least copy their sense of style? Making the UI look like it was designed by a three year old with nothing but glitter pens is just ludicrous...
Judge: So what evidence do you have? Perhaps some incriminating documents?
Prosecution: No.
Judge: Surveillence tapes?
Proescution: Er, no.
Judge: Wiretap?
Prosecution: Not today, your honor, no.
Judge: Well what *do* you have?
Prosecution: Well, it's quite simple. Barring the creation of some kind of hyper-intelligent android (which we shall call EvilHackingPirateScumBot), the man responsible for these reprehensible acts MUST be a human being...
Judge: Go on...
Prosecution: Now, I direct your attention to exhibit A--the defendant. As can be clearly seen, he is in fact a human!
Judge: My God, you're right!
Prosecution: So, from this, we can clearly see that since the man we are after is a human, and the defendant is also a human, then he must have done it!
Judge: You know, you're right! Bailiff, take this man away.
Prosecution: (haha, suckers)
Judge: But you know, I can't help but notice that you're a human as well...
Prosecution: Well, I hardly think...
Judge: I see now, this was all just a ploy! Bailiff, arrest every human in this courtroom, and then throw yourself in a cell...
...so they've started doing physical raids of ISPs to get BitTorrent users. Give the OSS community a few months, and there'll be a fully encrypted version of BitTorrent that's all but impossible to trace.
They really don't get it, do they? Every time they try to crack down on P2P, it evolves into something harder to stop.
...but aren't WHAT-WG and the W3C advocating two standards for different purposes?
I thought that Web Forms was seen more as an extension of HTML 4.0 forms to make building HTML applications easier, whilst XForms was to improve things like introspection/interoperability (at the cost of being close to impossible for mere mortals to grok)...
Great, another blind GPL zealot.
Encumbered? What are you smoking? The GPL is a viral license: it forces its conditions on any software that links to it, or includes GPL code.
BSD on the other hand is pretty much a free-for-all. GPL is far more "encumbered" than BSD is. The fact is that GPL is useless in some situations (especially for corporations) because of that viral component. The LGPL picks up a fair amount of slack here, but BSD is still used for many projects that have no need or desire to impose the GPL's limits on their software.
...when I say:
Hmm... I was always led to believe that the LH/RH thing wasn't that trivial to fix. Oh well, learn something new everyday :) That point was mostly borne out of many years of hearing "can't you just, like, so totally just use that GL thing to do DX?" on forums.
Now, for your second point <g>: I did actually mention id in my post. Regarding Epic, I was under the impression the GL backend for the Unreal engines had been pretty much replaced by a DX backend, and it was being maintained by a few guys in Epic so it would run under Linux, et al.
As for Blizzard, you got me on that one :)
In any case, my apologies for my mistakes, and thankyou for correcting me. But, on the bright side, now I know better.
Though, I still believe the best way to solve the "If you want to play games, you use Windows" would be to get the game developers to start using something other than DX.
<rant>
...all you have to do is click the "Magically Change DirectX Applications To Run Under Mac OSX" button in "FairlyLand Dev Tools", and the magical porting pixies will do all the hard work...
Give me a break. This guy obviously has no concept of how to port applications.
See, the one thing (that I can immediately think of and that supports my argument :P) stopping a flood of games appearing on Linux, Mac, et al is DirectX. You get DirectX running on Mac, and Bob's your third uncle twice removed.
Of course, this would be nigh on impossible... DirectX is pretty damn huge, and you can't simply wrap a DirectX interface around OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL, etc. (for example, OpenGL uses right-hand aligned polygons, DX uses left-handed... or the other way around).
No, the real trick is to get developers to stop using DirectX in the first place. If they started using OpenGL, OpenAL, and other cross platform libraries, this problem wouldn't exist (at least to a large degree). Then, it would simply be a matter of compiling the game for each platform you wanted to support.
Pretty much the only developers that still use OpenGL seem to be small independents, and id. Oh well, thank $DIETY for John Carmack for keeping GL alive and kicking...
</rant>This isn't exactly new. It sounds like this system I saw a while back. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it, but it basically has something akin to a thin pane of glass that spins around really fast.
What they do then is project a different image at each angle onto the glass. The images themselves are kinda like slices of a 3d volume (think volumetric textures). It spins just fast enough to fool the human eye into thinking it's seeing something hovering in midair.
I saw a few QuickTime VR demos of one of these a while back... they showed it with some wireframe terrain and a little purple jet thing in midair, as well as showing the sugar molecule.
Also, if I remember rightly, Nintendo had one of these puppies up a few E3s ago, with a model of that Star Fox character in it. Quite cool.
As for manipulating it by hand, I sure hope I'm wrong about the spinning glass bit...
IANAGE (I am not a Google Employee), but as far as I understand it, Gmail is built almost entirely on a little gem called XMLHttpRequest (it might be HttpXmlRequest or HtTpXmLREQUEST but that's beside the point...)
Basically, it allows you to send requests back to the server, and get XML (Gecko and IE allow you to recieve HTML as well) back from Javascript without having to reload the whole dang page. Gmail uses this pretty much everywhere instead of doing roundtrips.
I'm not sure if Konqueror supports XMLHttpRequest, but odds are that might be why.
This is so true. Scientists are always making stuff up because they just can't deal with reality.
Like this whole "the world is round" jazz--everyone knows the world is flat! If it was round, we'd all fall right off... well, the people on the non-up side, anyway.
And going to the moon? That was so fake. Everyone knows people can't fly.
And don't even get me started on "imaginary" numbers...
---
While our current knowledge may say it's not possible, the human race has been wrong before, and we will undoubtedly be wrong again...
...try living in Australia. Telstra (the all-mighty telco) not only price fixes and provides what one could at best describe as shitty service, but they are actively installing lines that can never support broadband.
I am in particular peeved off because it appears that instead of installing my line on the local exchange, they installed it in the middle of the city, thus precluding me from getting broadband.
Oh well. That's bureaucracy for you...
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to surfing on my 56K line...
Which one runs Half-Life 2? Or practically any high-profile games (I know there are exceptions to this)?
Which one runs Adobe Photoshop (and no, Crossover doesn't count--it'll ruin my argument :P)?
Face it, Linux may be TECHNOLOGICALLY superior, but look what happened to Betamax.
Sometimes it's not which is technically "the best", it's which one does what consumers want. I realize that "crash for no readily aparent reason" isn't what consumers want it to do, but being able to run all those "friendly" Windows-only applications is.
That said, I'm jumping ship the moment someone writes a DirectX->OpenGL wrapper for Linux.
Disclaimer: it's late, IANAL, I'm hungry, yadda yadda yadda...
Maybe I'm reading into this wrong (and you have my apologies if I am), but maybe this is just a misunderstanding of the GPL by the author.
Let's face it, there are some issues the GPL isn't crystal clear on. What a derived work is is one of them.
Since the only person who is Zed is Zed himself, we can't be 100% sure he's doing this because he's an evil source code-stealing demon, or he just wants some compensation for compiling the program for Windows and got a bit confused.
Instead of writing letters telling him he is an immoral and villanous bastard, someone who knows the GPL inside and out could just politely lay out why what he's doing is wrong, and suggest alternatives. AFAIK (but IANAL) it basically boils down to: he can charge if he wants, but he MUST provide the modified Windows source code.
As someone who wants to contribute to OSS projects, but still be able to make a living off programming, I can understand why this might arise. Let's try educating him before we burn him alive.
I'm still on a 56K modem, you insensitive clod!
But seriously, to all the people saying "bleh! What are we ever going to need that kind of bandwidth for?", just remember: no one should need more than 640KB of memory.
Face it, people are constantly doing things which require more and more bandwidth. People will start wanting to stream HDTV-quality movies over the net from their favourite P2P ne...uh... I mean MPAA sanctioned distribution channel. They'll want online games with thousands and thousands of people with realistic physics, and audio chatting. They'll want...
Ah who am I kidding? This is for p0rn, plain and simple.