That's the short-term fix. In the long-term, 5 to 10 years, you will find that Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers will team up to create an audio standard which requires you to know a secret key to put data to your computer's speakers. If you don't apply to Microsoft for a special license, your program will be unable to make noise -- without going through Microsoft's API, of course, which will make only noises guaranteed not to infringe copyright, like boops, beeps, or files stored in whatever format Microsoft makes it easy to use.
It's here already. It's called Secure Audio Path. Windows ME can do it, and XP will ship with it built in. See this, among other items.
The idea is that with compliant audio hardware--presumably all audio hardware within a year or two--an encrypted stream will be handed to "smart" audio hardware. If it's a secured media format, it needs to be decrypted, upon authorization, by the hardware. If it's unencrypted, it will only play if it's not watermarked. Similar work has been done on video hardware that would refuse to display cracked, watermarked video streams.
Even if you have Linux drivers for this hardware, and even if you can get to your BIOS settings, which Microsoft now demands be undocumented onscreen as a condition to granting hardware certification, and somehow manage to install Linux on this new hardware, the audio hardware is doing rights management for you.
It';s not being removed from the product. It's just going to be shut off by default. Hell, I like it. I think te problem with Office Assistant is that nobody knew what it was for. When I show regular end-users how you can "ask" it plain-English help questions and get a correct response most of the time, they usually decide they like Clippy after all.
Maybe a lot of pople still run MS office on 640x480 displays.
Have any USB 2 devices been introduced yet? USB 2 add-on cards for current PCs? I'd say that until it's clear that the drivers won't run into the same interoperabilitry nonsense Bluetooth has right now, this is a safe and sensible decision.
Meanwhile, IEEE-1394/Firewire/iLink works just fine, is scheduled to get a speed boost of its own soon, and is already a well-established standard for all sorts of scanners, storage devices.
The whole brouhaha over the per-device royalty Apple and the other partners demanded is a lousy argument for USB 2.0; It simply offers vendors a choice between paying an extra buck to Apple or paying an extra buck to Intel.
I used the example of Slashdot-split-into-3-tiers-with-SOAP to explain to young Timothy what SOAP and XML-RPC are and what they're used for, since he seemed to think they were some kind of useless buzzwords with no application in the real world... because he didn't know what they were.
I'm quite aware that Slashdot's real bottleneck is in the database, and that this pretty unsolvable as long as (1) their code is MySQL-specific and (2) there still isn't a Free Software RDBMS that supports advanced replication and load balancing that's also Free and open. But since the only tiered web application Timothy's ever seen is Slashdot, I had to use it as the example.
As was finally said by someone else, SOAP and XML-RPC are the distributed-object scheme that will probably make the concept ubiquitous, since they provide a simple, elegant way to encapsulate requests and objects (XML) and any number of ways of transporting them over existing protocols (HTTP, SMTP/POP, FTP, whatever).
Slashdot could benefit from it right now. One of Slash's weak points is its two-tier architecture. At present, there's a database layer without much logic, and a bunch of Perl executing on the webserver.
One of many easy ways SOAP can make the Slash engine more scalable would be to move the heavier Perl functions to another server, and leave the outward-facing webserver free to spit out pages without thinking too hard. I suggest the SOAP::Lite Perl module. It's got an elegant API that's so simple to use, you'd barely have to change any of the existing codebase. Throw your heavier logic on a non-public HTTP server, point your shell code on the main HTTP server at it with a couple of lines to tell it where the SOAP server is, and voila! You're three-tiered, and your public webserver no longer needs a direct connection to your database server, so it can be safer too.
Want to move one particularly nasty piece of logic to its own hardware? Easy. Want to handle some things like moderation asynchronously? Just make some of your SOAP calls via SMTP, and have a cron job pick them up and process them via cron. Again, without changing your existing code much at all.
RPC and distributed objects aren't really new. You could have done this with CORBA, DCOM, EJB, or any number of other technologies.. but this time around it's especially easy to use, easy to work across languages, and has the added advantage of being easy to make available across the Internet without a fight over exotic firewall rules. You don't have to work to tunnel it over HTTP.. it can be HTTP.
First of all, as others here have noted, there have been ads in games for years now. The Red Bull ads in the second Wipeout game were among the more clever, but look at sports titles too. When you see Coke, Panasoinc, Valvoline and Reebok logos in racing games, those are paid ads. There has also been product placement in RPG games for a while.
Michael, Michael, Michael. Do you have any idea how much it costs to create a new game these days? It's millions of dollars, often tens of millions. You want RPGs with giant worlds with realistic streets and buildings full of furniture,and knickknacks, and dozens of voice actors saying lines for a hundred or more animated characters? You want sports games where hundreds of motion-captured athletes are simulated down to physical tics, and cars are simulated from their oversteer and gear ratios to the pitch of their exhaust noise? Fine.
Now bear in mind that the publisher is selling the game to retailers for less than half the suggested retail price--often much less, because they're also paying for shelf space and local advertising even beyond their own national ads. And that's the publisher. The developer, unless they're a one-stop shop like EA or Sega, gets a small fraction of that.
You whine whine whine every time a game development shop you like gets bought out or goes out of business, and you whine whine whine when they try to sell ads to offset those insane development costs.
Okay, so it's yet another software registry, with yet another proprietary interface for posting package information (XML DTD, anyone?), that intends to do exactly the same thing as Freshmeat, except that they won't allow entries for software under non-OSD licenses, and they won't allow entries for unstable packages.
Freshmeat isn't so great. The filtering and search interface is terrible--but it is there and the data is categorized properly. A site with a more flexible way of getting at it would be a major improvement. This new site doesn't improve on Freshmeat, though. Indeed, its interface for filtering a browse is identical.
All they're doing differently from Freshmeat, in fact, is not allowing entries for non-OSD-compliant software.
So let me get this straight: they're hoping to raise awareness of open-source software by publishing a directory that's just like Freshmeat, except that it's less useful thanks to a dogmatic editorial policy.
Wind River's products aren't all good. They're also responsible for WinPOET, the horrid PPP-over-Ethernet client most residential DSL customers live with. It's got memory leaks--bad ones--and has had them for a few versions straight. Use it, and you'd be led to think PPPoE is a terrible technology with a lot of overhead. The installer is pretty big and involved, too.
What's even stranger is that this comes from an embedded-systems software company. You'd think they'd be well-positioned to pull off a PPPoE implementation at least as small and stable as some of the (downright tiny) Linux ones. Setting aside the kernel modules now available, there are things like rt-pppoe, a userspace client that manages to chug along merrily in a few dozen kilobytes of RAM.
The nice thing about it is that the "lzip" and "lunzip" utilities work on all modern platforms. I've tested them on Linux, Win32, MacOS and a WebTV so far.
Be's fate was sealed a few years ago, when Apple decided to make NeXTstep the basis of their new MacOS instead of BeOS. I can imagine Steve Jobs in talks with Be and suddenly realizing that if they went with BeOS, he'd have Jean-Louis Gasse--a very bright man who makes major design decisions on the basis of personal animosity or dislike of a piece of hardware--back at Apple. And the horror of that probably clinched it.
It's a better "new MacOS" than OS X in a number of ways, since it was written from the ground up to be a modern OS geared toward single-user operation, but the world can't support two "MacOS"es. So Be tried to do what it could: they reinvented themselves as an appliance OS company. And again, it's a pretty nice appliance OS with very good multimedia guts. But there are a lot of other appliance OSes out there, and most of them allow for more existing application code and development tools (and development skills) to be reused than BeOS does.
The faint smell of desperation that emanated from Be as they kept changing their business plan couldn't have helped them get OEM customers for the embedded version either. They went from trying to be a shiny new OS for cheap hardware, to trying to be a "better" riff on the MacOS concept, to trying to be a niche OS for content creators. And all of that was before they put out a stable 1.0 version. After that, they shifted focus to embedded systems, which left the developers who had been working on traditional desktop applications with no future, and put Be in the position of recruiting a developer base all over again essentially from scratch.
Stallman has stipulated that his interview must be able to be seen by GNU/Linux systems (i.e. just RealVideo is a no-no).
Sounds like you're free to use Real as well as Windows Media Player, and Quicktime too if you really want. Of those, Real can be used by x86 Linux users and some others.. pretty much any x86 Unix.
Stallman, however, appears to be asking that it be viewable also by someone using a "pure" Free Software/GNU system, thus ruling out all of the above, including Real. I believe Apple's RTSP server is open source. Your problem will be in finding a player.
But as long as he didn't stipulate that the GNU-compliant solution be as good as the others or that it must be streamed, I guess you could just post an MPEG-1 video clip and let him download it. (I'm assuming here that Stallman will be the only person who will insist on watching it this way, so don't worry about bandwidth for a horde of people downloading the MPEG.)
This is a fair and thought-provoking thing for Stallman to ask for. I'm just not sure what his intended point is, since the GNU community is certainly free to write a streaming server, codec, and playback system under the GPL.
Okay, I'm looking at the latest version of Abiword.
It now has rudimentary header and footer support coming in. But it can't do tables, footnotes, endnotes, indexes, tables of contents, custom named styles, label printing, envelopes, or mail merging.
Couldn't the DOS versions of Word and WordPerfect do this ten years ago? Heck, didn't most word processors (with the exception of graphical ones on the Amiga) do nearly all of those things in 1987?
What exactly is AbiWord usable for right now? One-off letters to grandma? Have any the people here "impressed" with AbiWord ever written an academic paper? I remember needing to have footnotes and include tables (at least as attachments) in papers I wrote 13 years ago in my first year of college.
Even someone whose business is mowing lawns expects their word processor to be able to do a mail merge. Sure, I guess you can take AbiWord's XML document files, insert some custom tags with some other editor, and write a Perl program to perform a mail merge for you, but if you consider that a "solution", you probably don't believe in WYSIWYG word processors in the first place. Ditto making all tables externally in a spreadsheet--with mediocre formatting control--and embedding them.
Hey, it's Free Software. I know. It's noble, pure, whatever. But after two years, it's closer in functionality to Wordpad than to a 1991-vintage word processor. It's not really fair to compare it to the now-free OpenOffice, since that had a decade as a commercial product to get where it is. But KWord is much farther along--and a younger project.
The feature matrix on Abisource's site is revealing. You'll notice that with the exception of tables, the inventory of features implemented or planned only includes what's essentially already there. There's no evidence of a serious project roadmap, or any awareness of what features a modern word processor has. I know AbiWord isn't intended to do everything the so-called "bloated" word processors do. But being able to write a paper for an introductory Biology class or send a personalized form letter to twenty people aren't exactly "frills" these days.
I can only speculate that the core AbiWord developers don't use word processors in their daily lives and never have. Maybe they wrote their college papers with LaTeX in emacs.
AIM isn't just a "protocol", kids. It's a bunch of servers owned, run and paid for by AOL. AOL spends millions of dollars on Sybase licenses and support contracts alone to run AIM. Do you think it's peer-to-peer? That they track connection status in real time for millions of concurrent users without big, expensive databases running on big, expensive hardware?
Even if the Jabber team ever comes out with a stable, robust release, it's not going to be able to support even half as many users as Yahoo instant messaging without someone footing the bill for millions of dollars in servers and fiber-channel storage arrays, commercial database software, and tens of thousands of dollars a month in hosting and connectivity services.
Do you really think a multi-million concurrent-user instant messaging system can run on one rack of Postgres servers on a T1? Phooey.
You want free communication without ads or service charges? Buy a CB radio and talk to your neighbors. That's peer-to-peer.
I'd like to see a show of hands: how many of the people here calling for free access to AIM servers aren't (a) MSN and Yahoo employees or (b) people who have never had a job besides maybe cleaning trays in a dorm cafeteria?
Not sure why your "only" solution involves rigging up an old laptop. Maybe that's because you only have an old laptop lying around. You can buy used X terminals on eBay by the dozen, and several companies still make new ones (see IBM and NCD for starters), which you might have found if you took a minute to do a simple web search. X Terminals have waned somewhat in popularity since it's become so easy to make them out of old PCs. If you have a batch of old 486s or Pentiums with the same video and network hardware, it shouldn't take a decent admin more than a day or two to put together a workable kickstart installer that'll burn all the necessary packages and configs onto a blank machine.
You could also take any PC, say, a 486 or better with, say, a 300MB hard drive or a BIOS that supports booting from CD, and throw a Linux or BSD image on it that just boots with DHCP and XDM running.
Or you could buy one of Oracle's $199 New Internet Computers (see thinknic.com) and burn a modified disk image CD that comes up with XDM in broadcast mode instead of doing a local login. Others seem to have done it. You may want to spend a minute or two searching, say, Google or the old Deja archives before asking Slashdot when something is this easy to find.
Seeing as several of the large, full-service web hosting companies are doing more with the *BSDs, this makes enough sense. ASP support lets them reach a lot of would-be Windows hosting customers with a Unix-y solution that's easier and cheaper to offer than Win2K hosting. And it lets them offer customers something they can run UltraDev with without nearly as much system overhead as dozens of servlet/JSP engines on a virtual server box would need.
Crikeys! Red Hat's not blocking access to updates. They're not preventing anyone from running AutoRPM or any of the other half dozen or so Red Hat-compatible updaters, either. They're charging for their own version of the service, with bandwidth and uptime guarantees, automated distribution to multiple machines on a network, and their pretty GUI tool, as opposed to Eazel's, Ximian's, or whoever's.
If you want to get your updates straight from Red Hat, off a Red Hat-run server, and want to have an easy time connecting and have good speed when you do connect for those updates, this is your friend. If you're happy getting updates from a mirror site not maintained by Red Hat, using a tool that Red Hat's paid tech support people won't help you much with, as plenty of us are, that's fine, too.
Ah, the mirror image of WINE. It would be useful for places where an in-house end-user app or commandline utility runs on Linux and they don't want to go through the trouble and expense of porting to Win32 with the MKS or Cygwin tools, especially when it's a command-line utility that needs to do I/O redirection with a Win32 app. Obviously, for more heavy-duty needs, at least when something doesn't have to integrate tightly with WIn32 apps themselves, something like VMWare makes more sense.
I do wonder how practical and successful this will be for running many applications, though. How will it deal with Win32's lack of a POSIX base? How will programs that rely on filename case-sensitivity and Unix-style file permissions and setuid issues, for starters, cope? Not many easy answers, especially if they're targeting Win98/ME and not just NT/Win2K.
Uh, there was a commercial FastCGI module available for the Netscape servers. Does the same thing most people use mod_perl for: it allows slightly-modified CGI code to be compiled and cached by a persistent Perl interpreter.
The only problem is that it was sold to another company, which was in turn acquired, and it was taken off the market. You may want to contact Adero to see if they'd be so kind as to point you in the right direction.
If you're running the Netscape/iPlanet webserver on NT or Win2K, you can also use ActiveState's PerlEx, which is another similar persistent-Perl engine.
There also appears to be a reasonably modern Perl NSAPI module, which is philosophically the closest thing to mod_perl in that it lets you get close to the metal and write true server modules in Perl. It's here.
Velocigen, another commercial product, isn't exclusively a Perl engine. It's a logic and content caching engine that uses XML tags that can hook to cached and embedded code--including Perl. It's probably a different development experience from these other systems, but if persistent Perl is your goal, this should do it too.
The Indrema people don't have a competent marketing operation. Have their developer relations people secured any commitments from Namco, EA or Square? Or for that matter, with Tecmo, Capcom, Eidos, or any other established development shop?
Do they have a developer relations team?
Do they have good hardware partners with a solid consumer electronics background? Do they have a sourcing and production team that can reasonably ensure a steady supply of parts and enforce good build quality?
Do they have a sales and marketing operation that has experience selling into the major retailers in this space? Do they have the marketing dollars to buy floor and shelf space so their product is visible?
Their current marketing, evidenced by their web site, is all about Linux, Linux, Linux. Why do consumers care about Linux? Why do retailers care about Linux? Why do professional development shops with the dozens of programmers and multimedia production people necessary fior making a modern console game care about Linux? Why do they think consumers want yet another second-rate WebTV-style web appliance when not many want WebTV?
They claim it will play DVDs and act as a TiVO-ish video recorder. Do they have partners for the DVD decoding component and the online TV listings? Are they revising the hardware spec upward now that a 10GB hard drive on a PVR is considered low end?
It doesn't help that the prototype case design looks like it was done by the accountant's brother-in-law. This doesn't come across as a company that understands the market for game consoles, much less how to create a product that can compete in that space.
Perl's footprint would be one problem. Its architecture would be another.
PalmOS devices use a 16-20 MHz 68000-family CPU, similar to a Mac of almost 15 years ago. Perl isn't an interpreter. It's a compiler. And it's a much more complex language, even without any modules, than the Tiny C and Forth compilers out there for the Palm.
So even if you somehow give a Palm enough RAM to work with (say, 16MB at minimum), you're still running it on something with less than half the horsepower of a 1988-vintage 386-based PC, what with the slow RAM and the CPU's roles in driving the LCD and polling the input devices. In other words, even if you did it, you'd probably be able to brew a pot of coffee while a 20-line script ran.
Just today, I was putting in for a quote on some IBM Thinkpad A21s from CDW, and noticed that CDW is now carrying Thinkpads in a wide variety of configurations preloaded with Caldera instead of Windows.
For a while now, Dell has been selling certain models direct as a special order this way, but this is the first I've seen of national distribution of Linux laptops through major resellers. And IBM makes mighty fine laptops with very nice tech, like bright screens, passthru ethernet and modem (indeed, passthru everything) on the docks and port replicators, reinforced door hinges and so on.
There's still some (rapidly dwindling) value to a company that makes tweaked, optimized Linux servers and workstations. But if you can get Linux fully supported from the major vendors on their best hardware at prices that beat the specialty vendors (who are just rebadging no-name Chinese laptops anyway), what's the point?
I'll bet IBM's return and repair services are better than the little guys', too.
On modern Windows systems, the simple WYSIWYG HTML editor that makes up FrontPage Express and the editor in Outlook Express should be embeddable as an ActiveX control.
And if your website is built with Lotus Domino (yeah, right), Domino's web interface includes an equally nice richtext-as-HTML editing widget implemented in Java.
You haven't said what audience you need this for or how complex the HTML needs to be. Tables? Forms? Styles? Is it for public use, paid customer use, or for an intranet? If it's an intranet, obviously you can go to a commercial or single-platform solution. For general public use, probably not.
Another interesting approach if this is for an serious content-management system is to use DDE (or its equivalent) through a plugin or a signed applet to launch a full-fledged HTML editor or word processor, pipe the content to it, and pipe the content back via the DDE/etc. link upon a "save" or "close" action in the editor.
Obviously, the KDE camp can't require use of another desktop environment to maintain its own. However, a KDE installer using the same backend "guts" as Red Carpet or Eazel's updater for its rpm and deb database maintenance and inventorying would be productive, such that the Qt/KDE and GTK+/GNOME/Ximian or Eazel installation systems are interchangeable.
I imagine this would mostly be focused on the login/authentication and subscription management sides of things, since once you're past that, it is mostly leaving things to RPM and dpkg.
I'd guess that SSH Corp. has a problem on its hands if the version of ssh that they released to the open-source community with no strings attached to form the basis of OpenSSH compiles to a binary called "ssh", and if the source tarball itself is called "ssh".
When Netscape and Sun released major products in open source form, they took some time to change the program's name. Netscape released "Mozilla" to the community, not "Netscape Communicator". Sun released "OpenOffice", not "StarOffice'. The trademark holders retained their "product" and opened up the source to an identical thing with a different name.
That the IETF RFCs authored by Mr. Ylonen specifiy protocols called "ssh" doesn't help his company's belated case.
Slashdot Mirror
It's here already. It's called Secure Audio Path. Windows ME can do it, and XP will ship with it built in. See this, among other items.
The idea is that with compliant audio hardware--presumably all audio hardware within a year or two--an encrypted stream will be handed to "smart" audio hardware. If it's a secured media format, it needs to be decrypted, upon authorization, by the hardware. If it's unencrypted, it will only play if it's not watermarked. Similar work has been done on video hardware that would refuse to display cracked, watermarked video streams.
Even if you have Linux drivers for this hardware, and even if you can get to your BIOS settings, which Microsoft now demands be undocumented onscreen as a condition to granting hardware certification, and somehow manage to install Linux on this new hardware, the audio hardware is doing rights management for you.
Air supply thus cut off. Checkmate.
It';s not being removed from the product. It's just going to be shut off by default. Hell, I like it. I think te problem with Office Assistant is that nobody knew what it was for. When I show regular end-users how you can "ask" it plain-English help questions and get a correct response most of the time, they usually decide they like Clippy after all.
Maybe a lot of pople still run MS office on 640x480 displays.
Have any USB 2 devices been introduced yet? USB 2 add-on cards for current PCs? I'd say that until it's clear that the drivers won't run into the same interoperabilitry nonsense Bluetooth has right now, this is a safe and sensible decision.
Meanwhile, IEEE-1394/Firewire/iLink works just fine, is scheduled to get a speed boost of its own soon, and is already a well-established standard for all sorts of scanners, storage devices.
The whole brouhaha over the per-device royalty Apple and the other partners demanded is a lousy argument for USB 2.0; It simply offers vendors a choice between paying an extra buck to Apple or paying an extra buck to Intel.
I used the example of Slashdot-split-into-3-tiers-with-SOAP to explain to young Timothy what SOAP and XML-RPC are and what they're used for, since he seemed to think they were some kind of useless buzzwords with no application in the real world... because he didn't know what they were.
I'm quite aware that Slashdot's real bottleneck is in the database, and that this pretty unsolvable as long as (1) their code is MySQL-specific and (2) there still isn't a Free Software RDBMS that supports advanced replication and load balancing that's also Free and open. But since the only tiered web application Timothy's ever seen is Slashdot, I had to use it as the example.
As was finally said by someone else, SOAP and XML-RPC are the distributed-object scheme that will probably make the concept ubiquitous, since they provide a simple, elegant way to encapsulate requests and objects (XML) and any number of ways of transporting them over existing protocols (HTTP, SMTP/POP, FTP, whatever).
Slashdot could benefit from it right now. One of Slash's weak points is its two-tier architecture. At present, there's a database layer without much logic, and a bunch of Perl executing on the webserver.
One of many easy ways SOAP can make the Slash engine more scalable would be to move the heavier Perl functions to another server, and leave the outward-facing webserver free to spit out pages without thinking too hard. I suggest the SOAP::Lite Perl module. It's got an elegant API that's so simple to use, you'd barely have to change any of the existing codebase. Throw your heavier logic on a non-public HTTP server, point your shell code on the main HTTP server at it with a couple of lines to tell it where the SOAP server is, and voila! You're three-tiered, and your public webserver no longer needs a direct connection to your database server, so it can be safer too.
Want to move one particularly nasty piece of logic to its own hardware? Easy. Want to handle some things like moderation asynchronously? Just make some of your SOAP calls via SMTP, and have a cron job pick them up and process them via cron. Again, without changing your existing code much at all.
RPC and distributed objects aren't really new. You could have done this with CORBA, DCOM, EJB, or any number of other technologies.. but this time around it's especially easy to use, easy to work across languages, and has the added advantage of being easy to make available across the Internet without a fight over exotic firewall rules. You don't have to work to tunnel it over HTTP.. it can be HTTP.
First of all, as others here have noted, there have been ads in games for years now. The Red Bull ads in the second Wipeout game were among the more clever, but look at sports titles too. When you see Coke, Panasoinc, Valvoline and Reebok logos in racing games, those are paid ads. There has also been product placement in RPG games for a while.
Michael, Michael, Michael. Do you have any idea how much it costs to create a new game these days? It's millions of dollars, often tens of millions. You want RPGs with giant worlds with realistic streets and buildings full of furniture,and knickknacks, and dozens of voice actors saying lines for a hundred or more animated characters? You want sports games where hundreds of motion-captured athletes are simulated down to physical tics, and cars are simulated from their oversteer and gear ratios to the pitch of their exhaust noise? Fine.
Now bear in mind that the publisher is selling the game to retailers for less than half the suggested retail price--often much less, because they're also paying for shelf space and local advertising even beyond their own national ads. And that's the publisher. The developer, unless they're a one-stop shop like EA or Sega, gets a small fraction of that.
You whine whine whine every time a game development shop you like gets bought out or goes out of business, and you whine whine whine when they try to sell ads to offset those insane development costs.
Okay, so it's yet another software registry, with yet another proprietary interface for posting package information (XML DTD, anyone?), that intends to do exactly the same thing as Freshmeat, except that they won't allow entries for software under non-OSD licenses, and they won't allow entries for unstable packages.
Freshmeat isn't so great. The filtering and search interface is terrible--but it is there and the data is categorized properly. A site with a more flexible way of getting at it would be a major improvement. This new site doesn't improve on Freshmeat, though. Indeed, its interface for filtering a browse is identical.
All they're doing differently from Freshmeat, in fact, is not allowing entries for non-OSD-compliant software.
So let me get this straight: they're hoping to raise awareness of open-source software by publishing a directory that's just like Freshmeat, except that it's less useful thanks to a dogmatic editorial policy.
Wind River's products aren't all good. They're also responsible for WinPOET, the horrid PPP-over-Ethernet client most residential DSL customers live with. It's got memory leaks--bad ones--and has had them for a few versions straight. Use it, and you'd be led to think PPPoE is a terrible technology with a lot of overhead. The installer is pretty big and involved, too.
What's even stranger is that this comes from an embedded-systems software company. You'd think they'd be well-positioned to pull off a PPPoE implementation at least as small and stable as some of the (downright tiny) Linux ones. Setting aside the kernel modules now available, there are things like rt-pppoe, a userspace client that manages to chug along merrily in a few dozen kilobytes of RAM.
The nice thing about it is that the "lzip" and "lunzip" utilities work on all modern platforms. I've tested them on Linux, Win32, MacOS and a WebTV so far.
Be's fate was sealed a few years ago, when Apple decided to make NeXTstep the basis of their new MacOS instead of BeOS. I can imagine Steve Jobs in talks with Be and suddenly realizing that if they went with BeOS, he'd have Jean-Louis Gasse--a very bright man who makes major design decisions on the basis of personal animosity or dislike of a piece of hardware--back at Apple. And the horror of that probably clinched it.
It's a better "new MacOS" than OS X in a number of ways, since it was written from the ground up to be a modern OS geared toward single-user operation, but the world can't support two "MacOS"es. So Be tried to do what it could: they reinvented themselves as an appliance OS company. And again, it's a pretty nice appliance OS with very good multimedia guts. But there are a lot of other appliance OSes out there, and most of them allow for more existing application code and development tools (and development skills) to be reused than BeOS does.
The faint smell of desperation that emanated from Be as they kept changing their business plan couldn't have helped them get OEM customers for the embedded version either. They went from trying to be a shiny new OS for cheap hardware, to trying to be a "better" riff on the MacOS concept, to trying to be a niche OS for content creators. And all of that was before they put out a stable 1.0 version. After that, they shifted focus to embedded systems, which left the developers who had been working on traditional desktop applications with no future, and put Be in the position of recruiting a developer base all over again essentially from scratch.
Stallman has stipulated that his interview must be able to be seen by GNU/Linux systems (i.e. just RealVideo is a no-no).
Sounds like you're free to use Real as well as Windows Media Player, and Quicktime too if you really want. Of those, Real can be used by x86 Linux users and some others.. pretty much any x86 Unix.
Stallman, however, appears to be asking that it be viewable also by someone using a "pure" Free Software/GNU system, thus ruling out all of the above, including Real. I believe Apple's RTSP server is open source. Your problem will be in finding a player.
But as long as he didn't stipulate that the GNU-compliant solution be as good as the others or that it must be streamed, I guess you could just post an MPEG-1 video clip and let him download it. (I'm assuming here that Stallman will be the only person who will insist on watching it this way, so don't worry about bandwidth for a horde of people downloading the MPEG.)
This is a fair and thought-provoking thing for Stallman to ask for. I'm just not sure what his intended point is, since the GNU community is certainly free to write a streaming server, codec, and playback system under the GPL.
Okay, so the System 390 was renamed the "zServer" last year, and now they've renamed OS/390 "z/OS". Got it.
But at the same time IBM renamed the AS/400 the "iServer". Will they now call OS/400 "i/OS"? I suspect Cisco will have something to say about that.
Okay, I'm looking at the latest version of Abiword.
It now has rudimentary header and footer support coming in. But it can't do tables, footnotes, endnotes, indexes, tables of contents, custom named styles, label printing, envelopes, or mail merging.
Couldn't the DOS versions of Word and WordPerfect do this ten years ago? Heck, didn't most word processors (with the exception of graphical ones on the Amiga) do nearly all of those things in 1987?
What exactly is AbiWord usable for right now? One-off letters to grandma? Have any the people here "impressed" with AbiWord ever written an academic paper? I remember needing to have footnotes and include tables (at least as attachments) in papers I wrote 13 years ago in my first year of college.
Even someone whose business is mowing lawns expects their word processor to be able to do a mail merge. Sure, I guess you can take AbiWord's XML document files, insert some custom tags with some other editor, and write a Perl program to perform a mail merge for you, but if you consider that a "solution", you probably don't believe in WYSIWYG word processors in the first place. Ditto making all tables externally in a spreadsheet--with mediocre formatting control--and embedding them.
Hey, it's Free Software. I know. It's noble, pure, whatever. But after two years, it's closer in functionality to Wordpad than to a 1991-vintage word processor. It's not really fair to compare it to the now-free OpenOffice, since that had a decade as a commercial product to get where it is. But KWord is much farther along--and a younger project.
The feature matrix on Abisource's site is revealing. You'll notice that with the exception of tables, the inventory of features implemented or planned only includes what's essentially already there. There's no evidence of a serious project roadmap, or any awareness of what features a modern word processor has. I know AbiWord isn't intended to do everything the so-called "bloated" word processors do. But being able to write a paper for an introductory Biology class or send a personalized form letter to twenty people aren't exactly "frills" these days.
I can only speculate that the core AbiWord developers don't use word processors in their daily lives and never have. Maybe they wrote their college papers with LaTeX in emacs.
AIM isn't just a "protocol", kids. It's a bunch of servers owned, run and paid for by AOL. AOL spends millions of dollars on Sybase licenses and support contracts alone to run AIM. Do you think it's peer-to-peer? That they track connection status in real time for millions of concurrent users without big, expensive databases running on big, expensive hardware?
Even if the Jabber team ever comes out with a stable, robust release, it's not going to be able to support even half as many users as Yahoo instant messaging without someone footing the bill for millions of dollars in servers and fiber-channel storage arrays, commercial database software, and tens of thousands of dollars a month in hosting and connectivity services.
Do you really think a multi-million concurrent-user instant messaging system can run on one rack of Postgres servers on a T1? Phooey.
You want free communication without ads or service charges? Buy a CB radio and talk to your neighbors. That's peer-to-peer.
I'd like to see a show of hands: how many of the people here calling for free access to AIM servers aren't (a) MSN and Yahoo employees or (b) people who have never had a job besides maybe cleaning trays in a dorm cafeteria?
Not sure why your "only" solution involves rigging up an old laptop. Maybe that's because you only have an old laptop lying around. You can buy used X terminals on eBay by the dozen, and several companies still make new ones (see IBM and NCD for starters), which you might have found if you took a minute to do a simple web search. X Terminals have waned somewhat in popularity since it's become so easy to make them out of old PCs. If you have a batch of old 486s or Pentiums with the same video and network hardware, it shouldn't take a decent admin more than a day or two to put together a workable kickstart installer that'll burn all the necessary packages and configs onto a blank machine.
You could also take any PC, say, a 486 or better with, say, a 300MB hard drive or a BIOS that supports booting from CD, and throw a Linux or BSD image on it that just boots with DHCP and XDM running.
Or you could buy one of Oracle's $199 New Internet Computers (see thinknic.com) and burn a modified disk image CD that comes up with XDM in broadcast mode instead of doing a local login. Others seem to have done it. You may want to spend a minute or two searching, say, Google or the old Deja archives before asking Slashdot when something is this easy to find.
Seeing as several of the large, full-service web hosting companies are doing more with the *BSDs, this makes enough sense. ASP support lets them reach a lot of would-be Windows hosting customers with a Unix-y solution that's easier and cheaper to offer than Win2K hosting. And it lets them offer customers something they can run UltraDev with without nearly as much system overhead as dozens of servlet/JSP engines on a virtual server box would need.
Crikeys! Red Hat's not blocking access to updates. They're not preventing anyone from running AutoRPM or any of the other half dozen or so Red Hat-compatible updaters, either. They're charging for their own version of the service, with bandwidth and uptime guarantees, automated distribution to multiple machines on a network, and their pretty GUI tool, as opposed to Eazel's, Ximian's, or whoever's.
If you want to get your updates straight from Red Hat, off a Red Hat-run server, and want to have an easy time connecting and have good speed when you do connect for those updates, this is your friend. If you're happy getting updates from a mirror site not maintained by Red Hat, using a tool that Red Hat's paid tech support people won't help you much with, as plenty of us are, that's fine, too.
Sheesh.
Ah, the mirror image of WINE. It would be useful for places where an in-house end-user app or commandline utility runs on Linux and they don't want to go through the trouble and expense of porting to Win32 with the MKS or Cygwin tools, especially when it's a command-line utility that needs to do I/O redirection with a Win32 app. Obviously, for more heavy-duty needs, at least when something doesn't have to integrate tightly with WIn32 apps themselves, something like VMWare makes more sense.
I do wonder how practical and successful this will be for running many applications, though. How will it deal with Win32's lack of a POSIX base? How will programs that rely on filename case-sensitivity and Unix-style file permissions and setuid issues, for starters, cope? Not many easy answers, especially if they're targeting Win98/ME and not just NT/Win2K.
Uh, there was a commercial FastCGI module available for the Netscape servers. Does the same thing most people use mod_perl for: it allows slightly-modified CGI code to be compiled and cached by a persistent Perl interpreter.
The only problem is that it was sold to another company, which was in turn acquired, and it was taken off the market. You may want to contact Adero to see if they'd be so kind as to point you in the right direction.
If you're running the Netscape/iPlanet webserver on NT or Win2K, you can also use ActiveState's PerlEx, which is another similar persistent-Perl engine.
There also appears to be a reasonably modern Perl NSAPI module, which is philosophically the closest thing to mod_perl in that it lets you get close to the metal and write true server modules in Perl. It's here.
Velocigen, another commercial product, isn't exclusively a Perl engine. It's a logic and content caching engine that uses XML tags that can hook to cached and embedded code--including Perl. It's probably a different development experience from these other systems, but if persistent Perl is your goal, this should do it too.
Ever tried searching the Web?
The Indrema people don't have a competent marketing operation. Have their developer relations people secured any commitments from Namco, EA or Square? Or for that matter, with Tecmo, Capcom, Eidos, or any other established development shop?
Do they have a developer relations team?
Do they have good hardware partners with a solid consumer electronics background? Do they have a sourcing and production team that can reasonably ensure a steady supply of parts and enforce good build quality?
Do they have a sales and marketing operation that has experience selling into the major retailers in this space? Do they have the marketing dollars to buy floor and shelf space so their product is visible?
Their current marketing, evidenced by their web site, is all about Linux, Linux, Linux. Why do consumers care about Linux? Why do retailers care about Linux? Why do professional development shops with the dozens of programmers and multimedia production people necessary fior making a modern console game care about Linux? Why do they think consumers want yet another second-rate WebTV-style web appliance when not many want WebTV?
They claim it will play DVDs and act as a TiVO-ish video recorder. Do they have partners for the DVD decoding component and the online TV listings? Are they revising the hardware spec upward now that a 10GB hard drive on a PVR is considered low end?
It doesn't help that the prototype case design looks like it was done by the accountant's brother-in-law. This doesn't come across as a company that understands the market for game consoles, much less how to create a product that can compete in that space.
Perl's footprint would be one problem. Its architecture would be another.
PalmOS devices use a 16-20 MHz 68000-family CPU, similar to a Mac of almost 15 years ago. Perl isn't an interpreter. It's a compiler. And it's a much more complex language, even without any modules, than the Tiny C and Forth compilers out there for the Palm.
So even if you somehow give a Palm enough RAM to work with (say, 16MB at minimum), you're still running it on something with less than half the horsepower of a 1988-vintage 386-based PC, what with the slow RAM and the CPU's roles in driving the LCD and polling the input devices. In other words, even if you did it, you'd probably be able to brew a pot of coffee while a 20-line script ran.
Just today, I was putting in for a quote on some IBM Thinkpad A21s from CDW, and noticed that CDW is now carrying Thinkpads in a wide variety of configurations preloaded with Caldera instead of Windows.
For a while now, Dell has been selling certain models direct as a special order this way, but this is the first I've seen of national distribution of Linux laptops through major resellers. And IBM makes mighty fine laptops with very nice tech, like bright screens, passthru ethernet and modem (indeed, passthru everything) on the docks and port replicators, reinforced door hinges and so on.
There's still some (rapidly dwindling) value to a company that makes tweaked, optimized Linux servers and workstations. But if you can get Linux fully supported from the major vendors on their best hardware at prices that beat the specialty vendors (who are just rebadging no-name Chinese laptops anyway), what's the point?
I'll bet IBM's return and repair services are better than the little guys', too.
On modern Windows systems, the simple WYSIWYG HTML editor that makes up FrontPage Express and the editor in Outlook Express should be embeddable as an ActiveX control.
And if your website is built with Lotus Domino (yeah, right), Domino's web interface includes an equally nice richtext-as-HTML editing widget implemented in Java.
You haven't said what audience you need this for or how complex the HTML needs to be. Tables? Forms? Styles? Is it for public use, paid customer use, or for an intranet? If it's an intranet, obviously you can go to a commercial or single-platform solution. For general public use, probably not.
Another interesting approach if this is for an serious content-management system is to use DDE (or its equivalent) through a plugin or a signed applet to launch a full-fledged HTML editor or word processor, pipe the content to it, and pipe the content back via the DDE/etc. link upon a "save" or "close" action in the editor.
Obviously, the KDE camp can't require use of another desktop environment to maintain its own. However, a KDE installer using the same backend "guts" as Red Carpet or Eazel's updater for its rpm and deb database maintenance and inventorying would be productive, such that the Qt/KDE and GTK+/GNOME/Ximian or Eazel installation systems are interchangeable.
I imagine this would mostly be focused on the login/authentication and subscription management sides of things, since once you're past that, it is mostly leaving things to RPM and dpkg.
I'd guess that SSH Corp. has a problem on its hands if the version of ssh that they released to the open-source community with no strings attached to form the basis of OpenSSH compiles to a binary called "ssh", and if the source tarball itself is called "ssh".
When Netscape and Sun released major products in open source form, they took some time to change the program's name. Netscape released "Mozilla" to the community, not "Netscape Communicator". Sun released "OpenOffice", not "StarOffice'. The trademark holders retained their "product" and opened up the source to an identical thing with a different name.
That the IETF RFCs authored by Mr. Ylonen specifiy protocols called "ssh" doesn't help his company's belated case.
At least he's trying to be civil about it.