Personally, I would consider it necessary, from an ethical point of view, to tell the author of the potential abuse. However, there's no benefit to putting your own job on the line, so arrange to contact the author anonymously. There are plenty of ways to be anonymous (or you can just tell the author, but ask to remain anonymous). Go through a trusted 3rd party if you choose, or use a technolical method like a Hotmail account. You can make sure the author believes you're really from company X by disclosing knowledge only an employee would know (the equivelent of signing the message with the company's PGP key).
Once the author knows, he can tell the company that he's away of the company's plans, and any actions of that kind will result in a lawsuit. That should get the suits attention! (Of course, you may wish to suggest the author be more subtle).
I don't want to be negative, but think about it - Daemonnews is a monthly publication. A new issue is released once per month, every month - on the first day of the month. Do we *really* need announcements about it on/. ?
Don't get me wrong - I like Daemonnews and read it every month. But I can't see what good monthly Slashdot repeats of the same story will do.
And if you're going to argue that it gives more publicity to BSD and Daemonnews - then, IMHO, most experienced BSD users and admins will already be familar with it. BSD newbies will probably be discouraged by the fact that the content is fairly technical (for better or for worse).
Uh, guys, M17 still hasn't been released... speaking of bad reporting:-) (I know, I shouldn't nitpick - sorry).
BTW, a clarification: the Mozilla source tree has branched. The M17 / nsbeta2 branch is being stabalized, and should be released fairly soon (speculation). The M18 'unstable' tree is where all the new features are going in. Once M17 has been released, the two trees will probably be merged.
BTW, you can get both pre-M17 and pre-M18 nightly builds from ftp.mozilla.org.
As to the actual story, CNET is just ignorant. Like any company in a capitalist economy, it only exists while there is demand for it to exist. If you make it well known that CNET is biased and inaccurate, the 'proles' will turn to another source for their news. Eventually, people will realize that better news sources exist, and use them instead.
We should all be watching closely, since this will be a real test to see whether Windows 2000 can meet or exceed an equivalent UNIX+Apache system.
Will it really? Or will MS just throw millions of dollars, and hundreds of engineers, at the project, just to make sure it doesn't fail? I would expect if MS wanted to, they could even run Hotmail on Win95; of course, you'd need TONS of hardware and a really, really good load balancing and failover system, but all that means is more $$$
The danger is there because the whole site could just crumble if Win2K isn't up to the task. If that happens, mainstream press like the Wall Street Journal will run front page articles saying that Win2K choked in the face of major hits. That damage could be irreperable.
While I agree with you in general, this is going a bit too far. If Hotmail is down or unresponsive for a couple days (until MS presumably switches back to the existing FreeBSD machines), then I doubt very many non-geek people will notice, much less care. And even then, don't expect to see it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
(Just trying to add a dash of realism to this discussion:-) )
The only previous screenshots I've seen of it were using funky GTK+ themes. It's 'default' appearance does look pretty similar to Outlook - but also Netscape Messenger, and IIRC, Eudora Pro.
As a culture, it mistakes mechanical skills -- like programming an operating system -- with technological knowledge and power.
Well, IMHO, programming an operating system requires a significant amount of technological power. And many of the 'techno-young' who you stereotype (of which I am perhaps one), are little interested in 'power' in the corporatist sense (i.e. money).
It tolerates an alarming amount of hostility and abuse, both of which make any political communications -- at least those in public -- nearly impossible.
Don't be rediculous. The Internet is a means for communication; the occaisonal, easily avoided flame war has little impact on the rest of Internet.
The techno-world eschews even the most marginal understanding of the tortured history of technology, the awareness that periods of technological advancement are always followed by periods of fear and retrenchment.
You mean the period of 'technological advancement' that started with the Renaissance, and continues, in one form or another, today?
JOEB7 doesn't seem to know that the vast majority of people have never even heard of encrypted e-mail programs, let alone used them.
I agree. JOEB7 is alarmingly ignorant; everyone has a right to privacy on the Internet, even the proles.:-)
And of course, there is that relabelling of bloat as "features" (non-functional, of course)
Compile your own copy with the IRC client excluded...
I also notice how positive remarks are subjective and not falsifiable ("I don't think Mozilla is slow..."). No one posts a "top" output to illustrate how small its memory footprint is.
Okay, first off, the speed and memory size of Mozilla is dependant largely on the chrome that Mozilla is using. I know this is a typical 'advocates' comment (don't you love it when logical, rational statements are ignored, because they come from someone stereotyped as an 'advocate'?); but here's some evidence (yes, not perfect, but marginally better than pure opinion - I suggest grabbing a nightly and seeing for yourself):
Mozilla with the 'Modern' theme (from `ps aux|grep mozilla`, removing children and the grep itself - these numbers are approximate, I forgot to write them down:-) - but it was ~37 MB):
nconway 539 0.0 23.2 37040 27612 pts/0 S 23:30 0:00./mozilla-bin
Mozilla with the 'Classic' theme (again, same totally informal test procedures, same box, same prefs et al):
nconway 557 0.1 16.3 26816 20776 pts/0 S 23:34 0:00./mozilla-bin
The theme switch shaves off 13 MB of memory (and the 'Classic' theme isn't even designed to be particularly lightweight. A stripped down, simple UI would doubtless be much smaller).
As to Mozilla's performance, it is obviously subjective. Benchmarks mean nothing, so what other kind of performance measurements are there? Mozilla performs fine on my Celeron 500 with 128 MB of RAM; on my P120 with 48 MB of RAM, it is slower, but (IMHO) still acceptable, and I prefer it to Netscape 4.
Even by that easy measure, Mozilla feels significantly slower and has a much bigger footprint.
I don't have a copy of Netscape 4 on this machine, so I can't judge, but IIRC, Netscape 4 tends to use much more than 26 MB of RAM (especially considering memory leaks).
You think they'll "eventually produce a kick-ass browser"? I do not believe you. I have no reason to.
Fine, you don't have to. But I use a kick-ass browser every day - last night's Mozilla build.
What we have is a bloated, buggy, slow monstrosity that makes open source look bad.
'Open source' is a style of development, not a specific entity. Mozilla has nothing to do with open source, and everything to do with the developers and the goals of the project. Think about it like this - Mozilla is written largely in an OO language (C++). Does Mozilla's so-called 'failure' make OOP look bad?
And I don't think Mozilla is slow. It isn't 'bloated' - it just has a lot of features. If you don't need all the features, Mozilla's clean modular design lets you eliminate them (e.g. Galleon).
the poor performance of the Mozilla project
How has the Mozilla project performed poorly? It may have been too ambitious (which is definately debatable), but it's good code, and will eventually produce a kick-ass browser. I use it myself, 24/7 (on both Linux and Windows).
After an eternity, nothing has shipped that can be considered stable or useful.
I disagree - I think the latest Mozilla nightlies (and the upcoming M17 / Netscape 6pr2) are very stable and useable. Mozilla is very fast, and hasn't ever crashed for me since I switched from M16 about a week ago. And what's the big deal with 'shipping' a product? Mozilla is perfectly useable right now. Simply labelling something '1.0' doesn't magically make it stable.
Mozilla HAS taken a long time to be developed, I agree. But considering the scope of the project, the internal problems at Netscape, and the pure horror of the Mozilla Classic codebase, I don't think the delay is unreasonable.
http://www.mozillazine.org has a rather devasting response to the Suck article (obviously, from a biased perspective, but the same applies to Suck and the rest of the media). Here it is:
----------------- Greg has gone about cataloging all of the extraneous features that are unnecessary to a modern day, competitive browser. Mail. News. XML. XSLT. MathML. In response to XUL, he writes, "Why? Who cares? The mere fact that it sounds sort of neat justifies its existence, and gives it priority over shipping something usable to the ninety percent of the population that has no use for the feature."
Why? Let's see. Could it be because at its heart is the ability to write the application to work on platforms other than just Windows? The ability to customize the application so that people like you can easily have "just a browser"? The ability to be prepared for the future by creating an application that's extensible and robust? The necessity of having a codebase that's easily ported onto emerging platforms? The ability to compete against a company who has turned their own browser product into a platform?
No, couldn't be any of those things. They're all just "cool shit", apparently. They're not important relative to having a browser that runs only on Windows that alienates 50% of the entire Netscape user-base because it doesn't have a Mail/News reader nor half the feature-set necessary to be a "just-a-browser" competitor.
Apparently cross-platform technologies such as XPCOM are a wasted effort; maybe coding the same browser independently for four or more platforms would be less of a waste of resources, Greg? Apparently cross-platform support isn't a sensible marketing strategy in today's monopoly-driven marketplace.
Greg indiscriminantly lumps third-party coders' work on such projects as XSLT, MathML and ColorSync [you must have delved into the archives to find ColorSync!] with the work of the main development effort, in an effort to prove his point that they're bogging down the process. Wrong. Those efforts are independent, and they'll only go into the first release if they're completed before the ship date. If you had been paying attention, Greg, you may have realized that.
The piece ends with a curious paragraph that begins, "Theater owes its advantageous position to picking its spots, exploiting its audience and making slow, purposeful strides, even if every step is second-guessed for its cost."
They don't call it Suck for nothing, I guess.
Maybe I should just give up on Mozilla. Maybe I should resign myself to a life of banality and security breaches using IE and Outlook the rest of my days.
I think I'll stick with it. I hold the Mozilla developers in higher esteem than I do any of their sniping critics.
Here's my teach-em-double-click-in-a-nanosecond spiel: Tap the wand on the hat and out pops the rabbit. tap tap. click click. same thing.
Yes, but lots of novice computer users can't get the timing right. 'click, wait 2 seconds, then click again' doesn't cut it (and in Windows, often begins to 'rename' the file). Or 'click, move mouse, click again' - that drags the icon/dialog around the screen. Personally, I have no problems - but my parents (1 semi-computer illiterate, 1 semi-computer literate), and my grandmother (~90 years old, just started using computers 2 weeks ago) have BIG problems with double-clicking.
They also tend to forget when to single-click and when to double-click. For example - why do you double-click to start 'Word' but only single-click to exit it (i.e. click on the 'X' in the top right hand corner)? I often look over my Dad's shoulder and watch as he double-clicks on hyperlinks.:-)
Man, if I was a retailer I would really think twice about stocking RedHat on my shelves. First it's not selling as fast as the other [...] so here's this upstart that makes me eat 20 copies of their software every 3 months.
the thing that really blows me away is the fact that it's OPEN SOURCE (!?!).. I wouldn't be surprised to see gMax evolve into the 3d equivalent of GIMP for Linux
Yeah, this could be awesome news. The critical question is the license - will it be something outrageous like the SCSL (sp?)? I doubt it will be BSD or GPL? (if it was, that would rock). But hopefully something like the MPL.
About this project. They're not using any legacy Windows code.
That's because they, obviously, don't have access to any. If they did, the project would be MUCH easier.
That means keeping it efficient, not having to deal with old code that you'd rather keep, etc
The amount of optimizations they can do while still keep it completely Windows compatible will be very limited. Chances are, if there was any 'old code' in Win9x that was poorly designed and could be removed/re-written without damaging backwards compatibility, it would have been done already (IIRC, MS has 30,000 plus programmers - that's what they're supposed to do). If this project is ever finished (ha!), it will probably be a slower and at best at par with Win98 performance.
We should be saluting these guys
Except, they're obviously smoking crack. I don't mind - let them go and try to write Win9x clone; but it will never, ever work.
it could be forged into something that is the best of both Windows and Linux - an OS that is truly accessible to the masses, very easy to use, very powerful, and very stable.
Again, if you're going to clone Win9x, you CANNOT create a stable, or powerful OS - the limitations of the Win9x architecture prevent that.
Where are the people who usually complain that all open source software lacks innovation? This is one project that, IMHO, just doesn't make any sense. They are trying to reverse engineer an entire operating system - and a bad one at that.
Keep your fingers crossed...I will for a few years.
Just don't hold your breath. I'll bet 20-1 that this project never has a working prototype.
I'd be in hell trying to figure out what the hell Evolution.03 is. I double checked the story posted, and then I followed the link to the GNOME evolution link.
It's trivial. Follow the 'announced' link - http://www.helixcode.com/newsitems/evolution-0.3.p hp3 . From the announcement:
Evolution is the GNOME mailer, calendar, and addressbook application. This is mostly a bugfix release.
How much more clear and concise do you need to be?
I look at all the icky Windows Software warehouses and press releases and there will be atleast a very brief description about the product being offered/used.
You mean *exactly* like what I quoted above? If you would actually read the announcement, you'd probably be in a more priviledged position to comment on it.
Every time Slashdot posts a software release without even the slightest hint of what the software is, what it does, or where it's from
There have been several (2 or 3) previous news stories about Evolution posted at Slashdot. I guess Taco assumed everyone was familiar with it - I certainly am. Besides, it takes about 10 seconds for those few people who aren't familiar with Evolution to go to the website and find out for themselves.
Having Linux programs that look the same as Microsofts? What I mean is, can't we go for a different look at all?
You mean, like Enlightenment? Or the GIMP? Or CSCMail? Or Blackbox, Mozilla, or numerous other Free Software projects? Give me a break. There's plenty of innovation.
At the end of the day I don't mind it looking the same as Microsofts efforts, but sometimes it would be nice to see a bit of originality break through.
Is it much of a surprise that many GNU/Linux apps close MS ones when tons of people say "I'd switch to Linux, except I need (Word|Outlook|Excel|IE5|Dreamweaver|Quicken)". Besides, it's much easier and faster to clone existing technologies than to invent something yourself. Last but not least, if you think Linux needs more innovative applications, get off your ass and go code them yourself! That's what I'm doing!
Evolution is made up of Bonobo components, that's the whole point. It will be easy to replace one part of the app (for example, the composer[1] or calendar) with an app of your own.
Your post seems to be a bit hypocritical - you claim to want 'an actual integrated desktop', but then you say 'give me small individual (scriptable) components'. That's basically 2 different goals (although Evolution + Bonobo does succeed in making this possible).
[1] - the composer is not currently a Bonobo component. It used to be, and may be in the future, but for now it's not.
when/if all BSD's switch to using GNU userland software, we lose the original BSD software, which wouldn't be a good thing.
Why would this be a bad thing? If the BSDs switch, this means the GNU stuff is better. And if that's true, then there would be no reason to continue using the BSD stuff.
Okay, I've heard this a million times from BSD advocates, and I want to know what it means (BTW, I use FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Debian GNU/Linux, so I'm not anti-BSD or anti-Linux). How, exactly, is *BSD's TCP/IP stack any better than the TCP/IP stack in Linux (particularly 2.4)? Give me some good technical reasons, not just the typical bullshit. Under what conditions is BSD's TCP/IP stack better or worse than Linux's? Why do these differences exist?
I'm actually interested; in my own personal experience, BSD's TCP/IP stack has been unremarkable.
Slashdot Mirror
Once the author knows, he can tell the company that he's away of the company's plans, and any actions of that kind will result in a lawsuit. That should get the suits attention! (Of course, you may wish to suggest the author be more subtle).
Or better yet, write a kernel patch which optionally embeds the .config in the kernel itself, like you can do with BSD.
Don't get me wrong - I like Daemonnews and read it every month. But I can't see what good monthly Slashdot repeats of the same story will do.
And if you're going to argue that it gives more publicity to BSD and Daemonnews - then, IMHO, most experienced BSD users and admins will already be familar with it. BSD newbies will probably be discouraged by the fact that the content is fairly technical (for better or for worse).
Just my opinion - what do you think?
Uh, guys, M17 still hasn't been released... speaking of bad reporting :-) (I know, I shouldn't nitpick - sorry).
BTW, a clarification: the Mozilla source tree has branched. The M17 / nsbeta2 branch is being stabalized, and should be released fairly soon (speculation). The M18 'unstable' tree is where all the new features are going in. Once M17 has been released, the two trees will probably be merged.
BTW, you can get both pre-M17 and pre-M18 nightly builds from ftp.mozilla.org.
As to the actual story, CNET is just ignorant. Like any company in a capitalist economy, it only exists while there is demand for it to exist. If you make it well known that CNET is biased and inaccurate, the 'proles' will turn to another source for their news. Eventually, people will realize that better news sources exist, and use them instead.
Will it really? Or will MS just throw millions of dollars, and hundreds of engineers, at the project, just to make sure it doesn't fail? I would expect if MS wanted to, they could even run Hotmail on Win95; of course, you'd need TONS of hardware and a really, really good load balancing and failover system, but all that means is more $$$
While I agree with you in general, this is going a bit too far. If Hotmail is down or unresponsive for a couple days (until MS presumably switches back to the existing FreeBSD machines), then I doubt very many non-geek people will notice, much less care. And even then, don't expect to see it on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
(Just trying to add a dash of realism to this discussion :-) )
The only previous screenshots I've seen of it were using funky GTK+ themes. It's 'default' appearance does look pretty similar to Outlook - but also Netscape Messenger, and IIRC, Eudora Pro.
The site is probably Slashdotted...
Well, IMHO, programming an operating system requires a significant amount of technological power. And many of the 'techno-young' who you stereotype (of which I am perhaps one), are little interested in 'power' in the corporatist sense (i.e. money).
It tolerates an alarming amount of hostility and abuse, both of which make any political communications -- at least those in public -- nearly impossible.
Don't be rediculous. The Internet is a means for communication; the occaisonal, easily avoided flame war has little impact on the rest of Internet.
The techno-world eschews even the most marginal understanding of the tortured history of technology, the awareness that periods of technological advancement are always followed by periods of fear and retrenchment.
You mean the period of 'technological advancement' that started with the Renaissance, and continues, in one form or another, today?
JOEB7 doesn't seem to know that the vast majority of people have never even heard of encrypted e-mail programs, let alone used them.
I agree. JOEB7 is alarmingly ignorant; everyone has a right to privacy on the Internet, even the proles. :-)
Compile your own copy with the IRC client excluded...
I also notice how positive remarks are subjective and not falsifiable ("I don't think Mozilla is slow..."). No one posts a "top" output to illustrate how small its memory footprint is.
Okay, first off, the speed and memory size of Mozilla is dependant largely on the chrome that Mozilla is using. I know this is a typical 'advocates' comment (don't you love it when logical, rational statements are ignored, because they come from someone stereotyped as an 'advocate'?); but here's some evidence (yes, not perfect, but marginally better than pure opinion - I suggest grabbing a nightly and seeing for yourself):
Mozilla with the 'Modern' theme (from `ps aux|grep mozilla`, removing children and the grep itself - these numbers are approximate, I forgot to write them down :-) - but it was ~37 MB):
nconway 539 0.0 23.2 37040 27612 pts/0 S 23:30 0:00 ./mozilla-bin
Mozilla with the 'Classic' theme (again, same totally informal test procedures, same box, same prefs et al):
nconway 557 0.1 16.3 26816 20776 pts/0 S 23:34 0:00 ./mozilla-bin
The theme switch shaves off 13 MB of memory (and the 'Classic' theme isn't even designed to be particularly lightweight. A stripped down, simple UI would doubtless be much smaller).
As to Mozilla's performance, it is obviously subjective. Benchmarks mean nothing, so what other kind of performance measurements are there? Mozilla performs fine on my Celeron 500 with 128 MB of RAM; on my P120 with 48 MB of RAM, it is slower, but (IMHO) still acceptable, and I prefer it to Netscape 4.
Even by that easy measure, Mozilla feels significantly slower and has a much bigger footprint.
I don't have a copy of Netscape 4 on this machine, so I can't judge, but IIRC, Netscape 4 tends to use much more than 26 MB of RAM (especially considering memory leaks).
You think they'll "eventually produce a kick-ass browser"? I do not believe you. I have no reason to.
Fine, you don't have to. But I use a kick-ass browser every day - last night's Mozilla build.
I'm fairly certain that's a troll (the post you're replying to, not your well meaning response).
'Open source' is a style of development, not a specific entity. Mozilla has nothing to do with open source, and everything to do with the developers and the goals of the project. Think about it like this - Mozilla is written largely in an OO language (C++). Does Mozilla's so-called 'failure' make OOP look bad?
And I don't think Mozilla is slow. It isn't 'bloated' - it just has a lot of features. If you don't need all the features, Mozilla's clean modular design lets you eliminate them (e.g. Galleon).
the poor performance of the Mozilla project
How has the Mozilla project performed poorly? It may have been too ambitious (which is definately debatable), but it's good code, and will eventually produce a kick-ass browser. I use it myself, 24/7 (on both Linux and Windows).
After an eternity, nothing has shipped that can be considered stable or useful.
I disagree - I think the latest Mozilla nightlies (and the upcoming M17 / Netscape 6pr2) are very stable and useable. Mozilla is very fast, and hasn't ever crashed for me since I switched from M16 about a week ago. And what's the big deal with 'shipping' a product? Mozilla is perfectly useable right now. Simply labelling something '1.0' doesn't magically make it stable.
Mozilla HAS taken a long time to be developed, I agree. But considering the scope of the project, the internal problems at Netscape, and the pure horror of the Mozilla Classic codebase, I don't think the delay is unreasonable.
----------------- Greg has gone about cataloging all of the extraneous features that are unnecessary to a modern day, competitive browser. Mail. News. XML. XSLT. MathML. In response to XUL, he writes, "Why? Who cares? The mere fact that it sounds sort of neat justifies its existence, and gives it priority over shipping something usable to the ninety percent of the population that has no use for the feature."
Why? Let's see. Could it be because at its heart is the ability to write the application to work on platforms other than just Windows? The ability to customize the application so that people like you can easily have "just a browser"? The ability to be prepared for the future by creating an application that's extensible and robust? The necessity of having a codebase that's easily ported onto emerging platforms? The ability to compete against a company who has turned their own browser product into a platform?
No, couldn't be any of those things. They're all just "cool shit", apparently. They're not important relative to having a browser that runs only on Windows that alienates 50% of the entire Netscape user-base because it doesn't have a Mail/News reader nor half the feature-set necessary to be a "just-a-browser" competitor.
Apparently cross-platform technologies such as XPCOM are a wasted effort; maybe coding the same browser independently for four or more platforms would be less of a waste of resources, Greg? Apparently cross-platform support isn't a sensible marketing strategy in today's monopoly-driven marketplace.
Greg indiscriminantly lumps third-party coders' work on such projects as XSLT, MathML and ColorSync [you must have delved into the archives to find ColorSync!] with the work of the main development effort, in an effort to prove his point that they're bogging down the process. Wrong. Those efforts are independent, and they'll only go into the first release if they're completed before the ship date. If you had been paying attention, Greg, you may have realized that.
The piece ends with a curious paragraph that begins, "Theater owes its advantageous position to picking its spots, exploiting its audience and making slow, purposeful strides, even if every step is second-guessed for its cost."
They don't call it Suck for nothing, I guess.
Maybe I should just give up on Mozilla. Maybe I should resign myself to a life of banality and security breaches using IE and Outlook the rest of my days.
I think I'll stick with it. I hold the Mozilla developers in higher esteem than I do any of their sniping critics.
Yes, but lots of novice computer users can't get the timing right. 'click, wait 2 seconds, then click again' doesn't cut it (and in Windows, often begins to 'rename' the file). Or 'click, move mouse, click again' - that drags the icon/dialog around the screen. Personally, I have no problems - but my parents (1 semi-computer illiterate, 1 semi-computer literate), and my grandmother (~90 years old, just started using computers 2 weeks ago) have BIG problems with double-clicking.
They also tend to forget when to single-click and when to double-click. For example - why do you double-click to start 'Word' but only single-click to exit it (i.e. click on the 'X' in the top right hand corner)? I often look over my Dad's shoulder and watch as he double-clicks on hyperlinks. :-)
It doesn't say it in the press release, but it does in the article (at the end, IIRC - they have a quote from someone).
Here's the solution - sell Debian!
Disclaimer - I love Debian and use it myself
Yeah, this could be awesome news. The critical question is the license - will it be something outrageous like the SCSL (sp?)? I doubt it will be BSD or GPL? (if it was, that would rock). But hopefully something like the MPL.
That's because they, obviously, don't have access to any. If they did, the project would be MUCH easier.
That means keeping it efficient, not having to deal with old code that you'd rather keep, etc
The amount of optimizations they can do while still keep it completely Windows compatible will be very limited. Chances are, if there was any 'old code' in Win9x that was poorly designed and could be removed/re-written without damaging backwards compatibility, it would have been done already (IIRC, MS has 30,000 plus programmers - that's what they're supposed to do). If this project is ever finished (ha!), it will probably be a slower and at best at par with Win98 performance.
We should be saluting these guys
Except, they're obviously smoking crack. I don't mind - let them go and try to write Win9x clone; but it will never, ever work.
it could be forged into something that is the best of both Windows and Linux - an OS that is truly accessible to the masses, very easy to use, very powerful, and very stable.
Again, if you're going to clone Win9x, you CANNOT create a stable, or powerful OS - the limitations of the Win9x architecture prevent that.
Where are the people who usually complain that all open source software lacks innovation? This is one project that, IMHO, just doesn't make any sense. They are trying to reverse engineer an entire operating system - and a bad one at that.
Keep your fingers crossed...I will for a few years.
Just don't hold your breath. I'll bet 20-1 that this project never has a working prototype.
It's trivial. Follow the 'announced' link - http://www.helixcode.com/newsitems/evolution-0.3.p hp3 . From the announcement:
Evolution is the GNOME mailer, calendar, and addressbook application. This is mostly a bugfix release.
How much more clear and concise do you need to be?
I look at all the icky Windows Software warehouses and press releases and there will be atleast a very brief description about the product being offered/used.
You mean *exactly* like what I quoted above? If you would actually read the announcement, you'd probably be in a more priviledged position to comment on it.
There have been several (2 or 3) previous news stories about Evolution posted at Slashdot. I guess Taco assumed everyone was familiar with it - I certainly am. Besides, it takes about 10 seconds for those few people who aren't familiar with Evolution to go to the website and find out for themselves.
You are in the miniority, I would expect.
You mean, like Enlightenment? Or the GIMP? Or CSCMail? Or Blackbox, Mozilla, or numerous other Free Software projects? Give me a break. There's plenty of innovation.
At the end of the day I don't mind it looking the same as Microsofts efforts, but sometimes it would be nice to see a bit of originality break through.
Is it much of a surprise that many GNU/Linux apps close MS ones when tons of people say "I'd switch to Linux, except I need (Word|Outlook|Excel|IE5|Dreamweaver|Quicken)". Besides, it's much easier and faster to clone existing technologies than to invent something yourself. Last but not least, if you think Linux needs more innovative applications, get off your ass and go code them yourself! That's what I'm doing!
Your post seems to be a bit hypocritical - you claim to want 'an actual integrated desktop', but then you say 'give me small individual (scriptable) components'. That's basically 2 different goals (although Evolution + Bonobo does succeed in making this possible).
[1] - the composer is not currently a Bonobo component. It used to be, and may be in the future, but for now it's not.
Why would this be a bad thing? If the BSDs switch, this means the GNU stuff is better. And if that's true, then there would be no reason to continue using the BSD stuff.
Unless I'm missing something...?
But that *hardly* has anything to do with the stuff BSD is supposed to be good at - servers (web, file, ftp, mail, etc) under high load.
Again - are there any significant advantages to BSD's TCP/IP stack?
I'm actually interested; in my own personal experience, BSD's TCP/IP stack has been unremarkable.