Yeah seriously. Who the hell buys inkjet printers? You can get a decent LaserJet for just a little bit more now. People have these inkjet printers because they come free with computers so often. Greatest scheme ever: give the printer and half-filled cartridges for free, over-price new cartridges!
Problem: IE >= 7 is for XP and Vista only. There are still a bunch of users out there using IE 5.5 (or worse yet 4 or 3) because they do not want/know how to update. Maybe they are on dial-up and updating is too slow (although I would update on dial-up). Then there are the IE 6 users on Windows 2000. That is the highest they can go, and for a lot of these computers, it makes no sense to upgrade to XP.
When I develop a page, I develop a whole different sheet (that tries its best to look like the original for COMPLIANT browsers) for IE 6. For IE 7, a few changes but not many. For IE 8, hopefully less. The point of a compliant browser is I do not have to do any of the above because it should work in any compliant browser. I do not consider IE of any version to be a compliant browser. Not until its engine gets 71 or more on the Acid3 test, preferably 100.
...should be a drastic change to Windows, removing Internet Explorer, all Windows dependencies on it; minimalising the DLLs needed for old dumb applications that used IE's rendering engine, and installing a new browser out of a few, namely: Firefox, Opera, Safari, and others that are free and web-standards compliant.
I prefer KDE over GNOME but my only problem lately has been worry of easily moving to another desktop. It does not look like it will be easy. I am not sure if this problem exists with other environments like GNOME or Xfce or even Rox.
Basically, all of KDE's (and ALL app's) settings are in ~/.kde as one would expect. However, although (obviously) all settings file are open standards (for example, iCal, vCard, etc), it seems as though you have to hunt down these files, know what they are, in order to migrate to GNOME because running full-time apps like Kontact on GNOME (or any other environment) is not appealing and SLOW. Yes, GTK+ certainly takes a lot less RAM than Qt3 and then you add another layer, KDE for theming, special widgets, desktop integration, etc. It makes sense but in the end it has been slower than alternatives for most people. There IS a difference however between distros. You might notice that Kubuntu is REALLY SLOW and awful for running KDE, while Gentoo (with some nice - USE flags) and even Fedora have a much faster KDE. If you're running Kubuntu (like I was) and find it slow, I would suggest trying another distro. Moving ~/.kde from one distro to another does not work 100% but works a lot.
But what if you want to move from KDE to GNOME? Again, you hunt down those.ics files and vCards and the MBOX email box (I use Thunderbird because it's far better than KMail on 3.5). Then you import those. This is manual labour (meaning an average user could never figure it out) in my opinion that should be handled by the apps that create the data. Right now, there are a few apps that export settings but will average users (and even us lazy users) want to bother finding these options?
I think there needs to be less artificial lock-in between desktops. At the moment, I feel a tiny bit locked in to KDE because I use its apps (which I like a lot). When KDE4 is stable enough FOR ME, I will move to it. Overall, KDE has been the best because you get all the options thrown at you instead of (in the case of GTK/GNOME) limited options in dialog boxes and the rest in ~/.gtkrc and other places.
I'm not sure. Is NFS a viable alternative? I keep seeing Samba get better performance than Windows->Windows networking and have heard that NFS 'sucks' and 'wait until NFSv4'.
I knew about NT on Alpha. They also had it for MIPS. I understand perfectly if nobody really used it, but how much work is it to maintain it? If they maintained it, then a port to a new, better platform that is more 'green' (environmentally) is possible without much expense. Most of the code should be portable; assembly (obviously) and endinesses differ but that is nearly it.
From an engineering standpoint: There is no reason for software to break, and yet it does, a lot of the time. To use a familiar example: We see this all the time with video games on the PC, hardware requirements, etc, etc.
This sounds like a fantasy world to me, but I do agree with you that half the problem has been the MS domination of OS's in the marketplace. It makes sense that MS's code is not going to be portable and when Windows, DOS, Apple DOS, every other DOS, and every other GUI-based OS (before Windows' domination with 95) were developed there was no fast Internet and no easy way to share ideas in order to make portable libraries (imagine if there were a cross-platform DOS and Apple DOS library in the 70's). Sure, there were newsgroups, but MS partially created what we now know of as the business of selling software, not bundling it with hardware as had been done for decades. They simply did not have the capital necessary to make hardware. Apple got theirs, but we know how that was and how it is now.
So now we have a mess where the x86 platform is not perfect yet because MS refuses to do anything to make Windows work on other platforms, it MUST be supported and nearly every PC manufactured is going to have an x86 processor (now x86-64). All hardware manufacturers (in order to recoup costs) MUST make Windows drivers, and every 'software company' must make a version for Windows (yet for some reason, every software company making games prefers DirectX over OpenGL, then complain about not being able to port to Mac quickly, and use cheap fast solutions like Cider (EA)). Now Microsoft even wants to blame hardware manufacturers for making crappy drivers that cause their OS to break. Never blame themselves of course because then shareholders are cutting their losses (as they should do now). Selling packaged software as a business did not exist before Microsoft. Is that part of the problem? I would not be surprised, since seemingly the industry would fail to work easily (in its current state) if there were 5 OS's to support. If they used cross-platform libraries, not such a big problem.
Another issue is the hardware requirements of software. No one can truly estimate the 'best' requirements, but we can always know the minimum to get something going.
For Microsoft the problem is exactly like this: they COULD start over from scratch to find the bugs that have been probably around since the first build of Chicago, or they could add even more bug check/hack code. Which is cheaper? The latter. I wish they would make a quality product from scratch, but they are unwilling to do so. Consumers do not see the non-quality because it runs what they need and they forget about errors and problems quickly as they get used to them. They get used to the idea of running Norton 360 to 'protect their PC' from 'spyware'. Things that could have been avoided, and there would not even be a business in making anti-virus software had Windows been developed with security in mind. But because DOS already had to access the kernel with its drivers by default, and there was no true Internet access in the 80's, it was no big deal. Bringing that to Windows 95 for compatibility (not everyone had Internet yet) instead of telling hardware OEMs to make new drivers, no big deal. This continues till Me and everything dies. NT already was guilty too because it was developed at the same time as 9x, and Windows 2000 or XP were certainly not rewrites (although much better).
Agreed. Every student in CS probably knows 'a thing or 2' about computers and will try to multitask. Again and again it has been proven that multitasking actually does not work nearly as well 'single tasking'. The computer multitasks, not the user! So you cannot open up your word processor/text editor, type a paragraph, go on Facebook, (stupid people) check your sports statistics/(smart people) check important news, your downloads on whatever client, and rinse and repeat. For many, this is normal behaviour. And it does not apply to just CS students really. It applies to just about anyone with a PC these days. Older people often do not even know the computer can do more than one thing at once, so they stay focused one thing at a time. Not bad I guess.
I would love to see a school implement what you are saying. Old computers, no Internet, a foreign but learnable *nix (BSD or Linux with no X until necessary!). And students not allowed to bring their own computers. Then CS can really focus and will learn how to use *nix (not X or any GUI), a good text editor (Vim or Emacs; Nano for quick edits), and everything else necessary without even using a mouse. In fact, take away the mouse completely! Minimalise!
At my university the normal thing for 1st/2nd year CS students is to go to the "Linux Lab" (old crappy Red Hat with GCC 3.4.x and GNOME), open up an X terminal and ssh (because the server runs x86 and the machines are running x86-64 mode). They could forgo the entire X portion (speed things up too), and use x86 mode.
I am not sure why every time I go to any lab I find things not set up the way I would like to see. And I do not think I am the only one, nor am I complaining because I am not root. GCC 3.4.x and all the other old versions of software in that RHEL distro is a joke in my opinion. An insult.
I agree. I like the idea, but this sounds dangerous, and this is NOT because I see nothing related to FSF or other already existing groups. Why should anyone just trust these people?
As for computers, even as a CS major we used shared computer labs. Most schools today already have enough PCs spread around classrooms to make a substantial computer lab or two, and any PC older than 5 years old is perfectly good for both tasks, and are being given away for free everywhere.
Agreed. My high school got brand new HP computers with new LCDs nearly every year while I was there. The entire network was locked down, no roaming accounts (yes it was all Windows), a terrible content filtering system (I disagree it is necessary! Give up already), and hardly enough space on the server for all those 'Windows Movie Maker' projects (120 GB). Half the time, students had no idea how to use WMM so they saved their work as a project, never encoded it, tried to bring it around and found out that does NOT work. The school taught no concepts which I had already learned (in this case, video encoding and what it does). Secondly, the school was a big Microsoft proponent as the classes it taught were almost all for Microsoft products, and the ONLY time they used free software was when they needed audio-editing software and could not find anything good that was cheap but also good. They chose Audacity (I give credit for this move). Schools generally do not trust free software as they do not think it will be quality software. THAT is a big problem. So they stick with licensing Windows (usually through a volume licence), Office (same as above), and all the rest of their software. What browser did the teacher have students use for what should be called 'HTML class'? IE, of course. Sure, MS gives incentives as always but parents need to understand the implications of being locked into MS software, which they never will because they have Windows at home, at work, everywhere nearly. Maybe even their phone and their console (Xbox/Xbox 360).
If it were up to me, would have been desktops (for things like multimedia) and terminals (for small tasks like web browsing and typing documents) all connected to a Linux server with a large hard drive. That is cheaper than buying new PCs every year for literally no reason (the old computers were fine, what's not is running Windows).
Also, if schools want to prevent students from running their games (EXEs), run Linux and do not install Wine.
A job essentially created by Microsoft's crappy software gone. Yay.
'Tech guys' should manage important things, sites, DBs, servers, etc. And I am talking whether it is Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, anything server-ish. They should not be fixing someone's 'I've got popups coming up like crazy now' problems. These problems could have been avoided (by the user and the software vendor)!
I disagree entirely. There is nothing mature about 'watching the game' like 'everyone else' does. The only way I see this hate-on going away when 'geeks' get older is at a place like a bar where desperate men (read: geeks) go to meet women, so they pretend to care about the game. Last episode of IT Crowd covered this topic in a comedic manner.
Agreed. It is very unfortunate GCC in Mingw is still using such old utilities. It generally works for all the code I write but I would like to have 4.x on Mingw (it is possible to have but it does not work well).
Most people don't understand the first thing about computers, and they don't have to.
I nearly want these people to GO AWAY (but then I would not have a particular job). Honestly in the long run, stress levels of everyone would be lower if these know-nothing-and-don't-want-to-know people would just go away and do sports or whatever ACTUALLY interests them. These are the people who watch televised sports and go to mlb.com to check 'stats', a total waste.
Did you know in Windows Vista it takes 5+ clicks just to connect to a network? XP takes about 3, Linux takes one right-click on the NetworkManager icon (which shows found networks), Mac OS X takes one click on the wifi icon (which also shows found networks). Windows always lags.
Look, I thought Java was dumb when it first came out. I thought 'Hey, why not make some sort of professional-looking cross-platform C/C++ GUI library instead? We could just all write to that + POSIX. Hell, throw in more modern standard libary functions while you're at it, and shims so that multiple OSes don't require any changes to do, for example, multi-threading.'
I note that, as of now, I am essentially just described glib and gtk, although as those were not designed to operate on non-Unix systems, their Windows versions are not as nice as could be.
True, but Qt4 looks almost equivalent to any native interface (by default) on Windows and Mac OS X. Out of the two I would go with Qt4. Also, the Mac port is complete unlike Gtk.
And, if you're really clever, invent a new 'fat' binary format so that combined Windows/Mac/Linux/whatever can be distributed, and passed it to a shim loader that grabs the right thing and loads it.
Who is this directed at? Microsoft?
The VM idea was horrible bad for anything but web pages, and, face it, the applets were always a toy. Loading a VM with security is insanely stupid vs. using a pre-designed VM that starts out in the crippled form that embedded browser applets need, like Flash.
I agree but my main problem with the VM in the first place is speed. I've read all about XNA and how id made Quake for.NET and claimed it was faster. A cross-platform library avoids the need for any VM. I really prefer fast loading, high performance native binaries (even Cygwin is better than.NET or Java).
But Java is a frickin miracle compared to.Net.
.Net isn't a solution in search of a problem like Java was, it's a problem in search of a problem.
Like I said above, part of it was to solve the DLL hell problem.
It has no fucking redeeming qualities at all. And before someone points out some language nicity, I have no problem with the.Net languages. (Although breaking backwards compatibility with VB was spectacularly stupid on their part in that it really pissed off VB developers.) I have no problem with new shared libraries, as I said before.
Nothing to say here except yes, my experience with C# (for a short time) was not unpleasant.
What is spectacularly offensive, though, is presenting this as some sort of magic bullet for problems that don't exist at all, when in actuality it appears to be a way to break Wine.
Honestly, new/old/current conspiracy theory? I could believe that MS is trying to break Wine; everyday there's more chance someone is going to find they can run their 'extremely needed' app on Wine on Linux and thus no more Windows.
And, Microsoft, we already had a way around 'DLL hell'. It's called named versioning. Release damn DLLs named newlibrary100.dll. When there's a new version, name it newlibrary101.dll. Duh.
Yeah, it won't fix your old DLLs...but, then again,.Net is even less of a help there.
Microsoft also implemented WinSxS/manifests to fix the DLL hell problem. I am not sure how it works (Wine implements it too), but basically an app requests a certain revision (exact version number) for a DLL and inside %WINDIR%\WinSxS is all these DLL versions, and the correct DLL is loaded. Placing a version number on the DLL does solve the problem much more easily. On Windows, the first place to search for DLLs is the app's directory, which is why so many apps ship their own MSVC* DLL file. That also has helped in many cases, even in Wine. Like I said before,.NET is hardly a solution to the problem. (dumb car analogy alert).NET is like carrying a loaded trailer with your pick-up because you are too lazy to unlatch it.
I agree. I hate that classes teach Flash, and students have no idea of the implications of using such a closed standard (just because it works on Windows easily).
I greatly discourage making full-sites with Flash. For right now, we are kind of stuck with Flash FLV for video (unless you want to use Cortado, which works pretty great IMO, Java-based audio/video player; Wikipedia uses it).
I also agree with you that it can be such a waste of breath. No one who uses Windows and then goes into a 'Flash class' thinking it is the way to develop sites ('the best sites out there use Flash,' they think) understands the real problems. Adobe wants to keep developers embracing Flash instead of finding other solutions. I am glad most sites are replacing old Flash-based solutions with Ajax, but now we need more. Search SVG Tetris on Google and play using Firefox. It is a Javascript-based SVG game that works as fast or faster than Flash. With this as an example, and if Microsoft would actually support SVG completely and natively, Flash games can easily be replaced. Video/audio content can be replaced with the Cortado player or using embedded OGG/OGM/Theora (which you can use VLC's plug-in, mplayer's plugin (what I use), and a number of others). Currently, even most WMV files will work with Mplayer's plugin, so I do not see what is the problem with embedded video directly as opposed to an FLV.
In the case that Microsoft refuses to support SVG, will the community make an open-source plugin for IE? I would generally think not, but it would get the word out to a great number of people that Flash is out, SVG is in.
I was getting 4.0 as soon as it was in the main tree. We all know 4.0 had its problems. I have not tried any recent releases. I really want to hear from everyone 'general acceptance' before I make the jump. And all my PIM data better import properly. My life is on KDE (Kontact, Korganizer, etc).
Perhaps, but you sound like you are suggesting that the 'free/open software community' would ever act in the manner that Microsoft has when it comes to standards.
I'm against.NET in the sense that many of apps made using.NET code (managed code) could be made with true cross-platform code (like C, C++, even Python or Perl) or environments like Java (yes, it has patents but at least every major OS has a version)..NET is not cross-platform by any means. Theres dotGNU and Mono and a few others (Wine included) that are trying to implement.NET. Mono is at Microsoft's discretion it seems, and so far it seems Microsoft's discretion is to keep it far behind.NET (it only supports.NET 2.0 officially and some functionality of 3.0). Beyond that, many people make front-end utilities using.NET nowadays that launch Windows native applications. Not running in a Wine environment (or anything similar) means that a Mono/.NET program cannot work completely. Mono and Wine will never work together for the very reason that Microsoft seems to have the ultimate say on Mono to Novell.
I am not a big fan of Java either, but like I said, there are many implementations; Java is nearly completely open source and there are many open source implementations partially complete or complete. Beyond that, there is gcj, which can compile native code. Where is the same for.NET or Mono? I have not seen it.
In VS, you tell it to start a Win32 application and it treats you like a criminal almost nowadays for not wanting to make use of.NET..NET is even in the product name now. And what is odd to me is Microsoft claims this is part of their solution to the DLL hell problem, and thus.NET apps will run on anything supports.NET, but more importantly a Windows 98 machine can run a.NET 2.0 (only up to 2.0 by the way) compiled on XP. Who wants to wait minutes for an application to start? Not me.
I agree. I tried it. Took 4 or so hours to compile it on Gentoo. Had to unmask many packages. Not worth the time!
I really want to use it. It looks great for the most part. It is not ready for prime time. I stick with KDE 3.5.x just as I stick with Windows XP as opposed to Vista.
You are going to have to name a real example where the free/open software community has practised an EEE strategy.
At the very least, the community always embraces. This is necessary.
Secondly, extensions are always documented. They are never kept secret or used to keep others from 'competing'. There is no real competition. There is simply different opinion. GNOME vs KDE vs Xfce vs is a matter of opinion for both developers and users. It is good to have choice.
The real problem nowadays is that Firefox's engine and everyone else's has to handle tags like (brought by Microsoft) and (brought by Netscape), otherwise known as non-standard HTML tags. But simply, a long time ago, Joe Six pack made his web site, thought marquees were great and left his site alone. Now if a browser does not implement the functionality the site looks broken, and is not being shown as the desired by the designer.
I have not seen an example of 'extinguishing' in the community. Standards and features get deprecated, but they never get undocumented nor 'pretend' forgotten. Microsoft can do this in many ways. The best example is HTML. Microsoft added so much new and UNWANTED functionality into HTML that only IE would support. They purposely sent other stylesheets to other browsers (the Opera ordeal); they tried to make other browsers look bad with the sites they had control over. And with their own extensions, and browsers possibly not supporting them, even sites that were not created by MS could look bad. 'Joe Sixpack goes back to IE after trying Firefox and seeing does not work the same as IE.'
Extensions in the community will always be documented, unlike with a company like Microsoft.
Oh please. Until ATI specs are FULLY released and the open source drivers fully support 3D and are stable, it is pointless to think ATI/AMD are our new ally. Right now the open source drivers ati and radeon support 2D only (however they are 10x more stable than binary ATI drivers, any version).
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Streaming works fine over proxy; currently watching Apparitions
Yeah seriously. Who the hell buys inkjet printers? You can get a decent LaserJet for just a little bit more now. People have these inkjet printers because they come free with computers so often. Greatest scheme ever: give the printer and half-filled cartridges for free, over-price new cartridges!
Problem: IE >= 7 is for XP and Vista only. There are still a bunch of users out there using IE 5.5 (or worse yet 4 or 3) because they do not want/know how to update. Maybe they are on dial-up and updating is too slow (although I would update on dial-up). Then there are the IE 6 users on Windows 2000. That is the highest they can go, and for a lot of these computers, it makes no sense to upgrade to XP.
When I develop a page, I develop a whole different sheet (that tries its best to look like the original for COMPLIANT browsers) for IE 6. For IE 7, a few changes but not many. For IE 8, hopefully less. The point of a compliant browser is I do not have to do any of the above because it should work in any compliant browser. I do not consider IE of any version to be a compliant browser. Not until its engine gets 71 or more on the Acid3 test, preferably 100.
...should be a drastic change to Windows, removing Internet Explorer, all Windows dependencies on it; minimalising the DLLs needed for old dumb applications that used IE's rendering engine, and installing a new browser out of a few, namely: Firefox, Opera, Safari, and others that are free and web-standards compliant.
I prefer KDE over GNOME but my only problem lately has been worry of easily moving to another desktop. It does not look like it will be easy. I am not sure if this problem exists with other environments like GNOME or Xfce or even Rox.
Basically, all of KDE's (and ALL app's) settings are in ~/.kde as one would expect. However, although (obviously) all settings file are open standards (for example, iCal, vCard, etc), it seems as though you have to hunt down these files, know what they are, in order to migrate to GNOME because running full-time apps like Kontact on GNOME (or any other environment) is not appealing and SLOW. Yes, GTK+ certainly takes a lot less RAM than Qt3 and then you add another layer, KDE for theming, special widgets, desktop integration, etc. It makes sense but in the end it has been slower than alternatives for most people. There IS a difference however between distros. You might notice that Kubuntu is REALLY SLOW and awful for running KDE, while Gentoo (with some nice - USE flags) and even Fedora have a much faster KDE. If you're running Kubuntu (like I was) and find it slow, I would suggest trying another distro. Moving ~/.kde from one distro to another does not work 100% but works a lot.
But what if you want to move from KDE to GNOME? Again, you hunt down those .ics files and vCards and the MBOX email box (I use Thunderbird because it's far better than KMail on 3.5). Then you import those. This is manual labour (meaning an average user could never figure it out) in my opinion that should be handled by the apps that create the data. Right now, there are a few apps that export settings but will average users (and even us lazy users) want to bother finding these options?
I think there needs to be less artificial lock-in between desktops. At the moment, I feel a tiny bit locked in to KDE because I use its apps (which I like a lot). When KDE4 is stable enough FOR ME, I will move to it. Overall, KDE has been the best because you get all the options thrown at you instead of (in the case of GTK/GNOME) limited options in dialog boxes and the rest in ~/.gtkrc and other places.
I'm not sure. Is NFS a viable alternative? I keep seeing Samba get better performance than Windows->Windows networking and have heard that NFS 'sucks' and 'wait until NFSv4'.
I knew about NT on Alpha. They also had it for MIPS. I understand perfectly if nobody really used it, but how much work is it to maintain it? If they maintained it, then a port to a new, better platform that is more 'green' (environmentally) is possible without much expense. Most of the code should be portable; assembly (obviously) and endinesses differ but that is nearly it.
From an engineering standpoint: There is no reason for software to break, and yet it does, a lot of the time. To use a familiar example: We see this all the time with video games on the PC, hardware requirements, etc, etc.
This sounds like a fantasy world to me, but I do agree with you that half the problem has been the MS domination of OS's in the marketplace. It makes sense that MS's code is not going to be portable and when Windows, DOS, Apple DOS, every other DOS, and every other GUI-based OS (before Windows' domination with 95) were developed there was no fast Internet and no easy way to share ideas in order to make portable libraries (imagine if there were a cross-platform DOS and Apple DOS library in the 70's). Sure, there were newsgroups, but MS partially created what we now know of as the business of selling software, not bundling it with hardware as had been done for decades. They simply did not have the capital necessary to make hardware. Apple got theirs, but we know how that was and how it is now.
So now we have a mess where the x86 platform is not perfect yet because MS refuses to do anything to make Windows work on other platforms, it MUST be supported and nearly every PC manufactured is going to have an x86 processor (now x86-64). All hardware manufacturers (in order to recoup costs) MUST make Windows drivers, and every 'software company' must make a version for Windows (yet for some reason, every software company making games prefers DirectX over OpenGL, then complain about not being able to port to Mac quickly, and use cheap fast solutions like Cider (EA)). Now Microsoft even wants to blame hardware manufacturers for making crappy drivers that cause their OS to break. Never blame themselves of course because then shareholders are cutting their losses (as they should do now). Selling packaged software as a business did not exist before Microsoft. Is that part of the problem? I would not be surprised, since seemingly the industry would fail to work easily (in its current state) if there were 5 OS's to support. If they used cross-platform libraries, not such a big problem.
Another issue is the hardware requirements of software. No one can truly estimate the 'best' requirements, but we can always know the minimum to get something going.
For Microsoft the problem is exactly like this: they COULD start over from scratch to find the bugs that have been probably around since the first build of Chicago, or they could add even more bug check/hack code. Which is cheaper? The latter. I wish they would make a quality product from scratch, but they are unwilling to do so. Consumers do not see the non-quality because it runs what they need and they forget about errors and problems quickly as they get used to them. They get used to the idea of running Norton 360 to 'protect their PC' from 'spyware'. Things that could have been avoided, and there would not even be a business in making anti-virus software had Windows been developed with security in mind. But because DOS already had to access the kernel with its drivers by default, and there was no true Internet access in the 80's, it was no big deal. Bringing that to Windows 95 for compatibility (not everyone had Internet yet) instead of telling hardware OEMs to make new drivers, no big deal. This continues till Me and everything dies. NT already was guilty too because it was developed at the same time as 9x, and Windows 2000 or XP were certainly not rewrites (although much better).
Agreed. Every student in CS probably knows 'a thing or 2' about computers and will try to multitask. Again and again it has been proven that multitasking actually does not work nearly as well 'single tasking'. The computer multitasks, not the user! So you cannot open up your word processor/text editor, type a paragraph, go on Facebook, (stupid people) check your sports statistics/(smart people) check important news, your downloads on whatever client, and rinse and repeat. For many, this is normal behaviour. And it does not apply to just CS students really. It applies to just about anyone with a PC these days. Older people often do not even know the computer can do more than one thing at once, so they stay focused one thing at a time. Not bad I guess.
I would love to see a school implement what you are saying. Old computers, no Internet, a foreign but learnable *nix (BSD or Linux with no X until necessary!). And students not allowed to bring their own computers. Then CS can really focus and will learn how to use *nix (not X or any GUI), a good text editor (Vim or Emacs; Nano for quick edits), and everything else necessary without even using a mouse. In fact, take away the mouse completely! Minimalise!
At my university the normal thing for 1st/2nd year CS students is to go to the "Linux Lab" (old crappy Red Hat with GCC 3.4.x and GNOME), open up an X terminal and ssh (because the server runs x86 and the machines are running x86-64 mode). They could forgo the entire X portion (speed things up too), and use x86 mode.
I am not sure why every time I go to any lab I find things not set up the way I would like to see. And I do not think I am the only one, nor am I complaining because I am not root. GCC 3.4.x and all the other old versions of software in that RHEL distro is a joke in my opinion. An insult.
Microsoft is behind this one. Yup. They think they can act. // End sarcasm
However, I will not allow that idea to escape me.
I agree. I like the idea, but this sounds dangerous, and this is NOT because I see nothing related to FSF or other already existing groups. Why should anyone just trust these people?
As for computers, even as a CS major we used shared computer labs. Most schools today already have enough PCs spread around classrooms to make a substantial computer lab or two, and any PC older than 5 years old is perfectly good for both tasks, and are being given away for free everywhere.
Agreed. My high school got brand new HP computers with new LCDs nearly every year while I was there. The entire network was locked down, no roaming accounts (yes it was all Windows), a terrible content filtering system (I disagree it is necessary! Give up already), and hardly enough space on the server for all those 'Windows Movie Maker' projects (120 GB). Half the time, students had no idea how to use WMM so they saved their work as a project, never encoded it, tried to bring it around and found out that does NOT work. The school taught no concepts which I had already learned (in this case, video encoding and what it does). Secondly, the school was a big Microsoft proponent as the classes it taught were almost all for Microsoft products, and the ONLY time they used free software was when they needed audio-editing software and could not find anything good that was cheap but also good. They chose Audacity (I give credit for this move). Schools generally do not trust free software as they do not think it will be quality software. THAT is a big problem. So they stick with licensing Windows (usually through a volume licence), Office (same as above), and all the rest of their software. What browser did the teacher have students use for what should be called 'HTML class'? IE, of course. Sure, MS gives incentives as always but parents need to understand the implications of being locked into MS software, which they never will because they have Windows at home, at work, everywhere nearly. Maybe even their phone and their console (Xbox/Xbox 360).
If it were up to me, would have been desktops (for things like multimedia) and terminals (for small tasks like web browsing and typing documents) all connected to a Linux server with a large hard drive. That is cheaper than buying new PCs every year for literally no reason (the old computers were fine, what's not is running Windows).
Also, if schools want to prevent students from running their games (EXEs), run Linux and do not install Wine.
A job essentially created by Microsoft's crappy software gone. Yay.
'Tech guys' should manage important things, sites, DBs, servers, etc. And I am talking whether it is Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, anything server-ish. They should not be fixing someone's 'I've got popups coming up like crazy now' problems. These problems could have been avoided (by the user and the software vendor)!
I disagree entirely. There is nothing mature about 'watching the game' like 'everyone else' does. The only way I see this hate-on going away when 'geeks' get older is at a place like a bar where desperate men (read: geeks) go to meet women, so they pretend to care about the game. Last episode of IT Crowd covered this topic in a comedic manner.
Agreed. It is very unfortunate GCC in Mingw is still using such old utilities. It generally works for all the code I write but I would like to have 4.x on Mingw (it is possible to have but it does not work well).
Most people don't understand the first thing about computers, and they don't have to.
I nearly want these people to GO AWAY (but then I would not have a particular job). Honestly in the long run, stress levels of everyone would be lower if these know-nothing-and-don't-want-to-know people would just go away and do sports or whatever ACTUALLY interests them. These are the people who watch televised sports and go to mlb.com to check 'stats', a total waste.
Did you know in Windows Vista it takes 5+ clicks just to connect to a network? XP takes about 3, Linux takes one right-click on the NetworkManager icon (which shows found networks), Mac OS X takes one click on the wifi icon (which also shows found networks). Windows always lags.
Look, I thought Java was dumb when it first came out. I thought 'Hey, why not make some sort of professional-looking cross-platform C/C++ GUI library instead? We could just all write to that + POSIX. Hell, throw in more modern standard libary functions while you're at it, and shims so that multiple OSes don't require any changes to do, for example, multi-threading.'
I note that, as of now, I am essentially just described glib and gtk, although as those were not designed to operate on non-Unix systems, their Windows versions are not as nice as could be.
True, but Qt4 looks almost equivalent to any native interface (by default) on Windows and Mac OS X. Out of the two I would go with Qt4. Also, the Mac port is complete unlike Gtk.
And, if you're really clever, invent a new 'fat' binary format so that combined Windows/Mac/Linux/whatever can be distributed, and passed it to a shim loader that grabs the right thing and loads it.
Who is this directed at? Microsoft?
The VM idea was horrible bad for anything but web pages, and, face it, the applets were always a toy. Loading a VM with security is insanely stupid vs. using a pre-designed VM that starts out in the crippled form that embedded browser applets need, like Flash.
I agree but my main problem with the VM in the first place is speed. I've read all about XNA and how id made Quake for .NET and claimed it was faster. A cross-platform library avoids the need for any VM. I really prefer fast loading, high performance native binaries (even Cygwin is better than .NET or Java).
But Java is a frickin miracle compared to .Net.
Like I said above, part of it was to solve the DLL hell problem.
It has no fucking redeeming qualities at all. And before someone points out some language nicity, I have no problem with the .Net languages. (Although breaking backwards compatibility with VB was spectacularly stupid on their part in that it really pissed off VB developers.) I have no problem with new shared libraries, as I said before.
Nothing to say here except yes, my experience with C# (for a short time) was not unpleasant.
What is spectacularly offensive, though, is presenting this as some sort of magic bullet for problems that don't exist at all, when in actuality it appears to be a way to break Wine.
Honestly, new/old/current conspiracy theory? I could believe that MS is trying to break Wine; everyday there's more chance someone is going to find they can run their 'extremely needed' app on Wine on Linux and thus no more Windows.
And, Microsoft, we already had a way around 'DLL hell'. It's called named versioning. Release damn DLLs named newlibrary100.dll. When there's a new version, name it newlibrary101.dll. Duh.
Yeah, it won't fix your old DLLs...but, then again, .Net is even less of a help there.
Microsoft also implemented WinSxS/manifests to fix the DLL hell problem. I am not sure how it works (Wine implements it too), but basically an app requests a certain revision (exact version number) for a DLL and inside %WINDIR%\WinSxS is all these DLL versions, and the correct DLL is loaded. Placing a version number on the DLL does solve the problem much more easily. On Windows, the first place to search for DLLs is the app's directory, which is why so many apps ship their own MSVC* DLL file. That also has helped in many cases, even in Wine. Like I said before, .NET is hardly a solution to the problem. (dumb car analogy alert) .NET is like carrying a loaded trailer with your pick-up because you are too lazy to unlatch it.
I agree. I hate that classes teach Flash, and students have no idea of the implications of using such a closed standard (just because it works on Windows easily).
I greatly discourage making full-sites with Flash. For right now, we are kind of stuck with Flash FLV for video (unless you want to use Cortado, which works pretty great IMO, Java-based audio/video player; Wikipedia uses it).
I also agree with you that it can be such a waste of breath. No one who uses Windows and then goes into a 'Flash class' thinking it is the way to develop sites ('the best sites out there use Flash,' they think) understands the real problems. Adobe wants to keep developers embracing Flash instead of finding other solutions. I am glad most sites are replacing old Flash-based solutions with Ajax, but now we need more. Search SVG Tetris on Google and play using Firefox. It is a Javascript-based SVG game that works as fast or faster than Flash. With this as an example, and if Microsoft would actually support SVG completely and natively, Flash games can easily be replaced. Video/audio content can be replaced with the Cortado player or using embedded OGG/OGM/Theora (which you can use VLC's plug-in, mplayer's plugin (what I use), and a number of others). Currently, even most WMV files will work with Mplayer's plugin, so I do not see what is the problem with embedded video directly as opposed to an FLV.
In the case that Microsoft refuses to support SVG, will the community make an open-source plugin for IE? I would generally think not, but it would get the word out to a great number of people that Flash is out, SVG is in.
I was getting 4.0 as soon as it was in the main tree. We all know 4.0 had its problems. I have not tried any recent releases. I really want to hear from everyone 'general acceptance' before I make the jump. And all my PIM data better import properly. My life is on KDE (Kontact, Korganizer, etc).
Perhaps, but you sound like you are suggesting that the 'free/open software community' would ever act in the manner that Microsoft has when it comes to standards.
At least F77 can compile native binaries.
I'm against .NET in the sense that many of apps made using .NET code (managed code) could be made with true cross-platform code (like C, C++, even Python or Perl) or environments like Java (yes, it has patents but at least every major OS has a version). .NET is not cross-platform by any means. Theres dotGNU and Mono and a few others (Wine included) that are trying to implement .NET. Mono is at Microsoft's discretion it seems, and so far it seems Microsoft's discretion is to keep it far behind .NET (it only supports .NET 2.0 officially and some functionality of 3.0). Beyond that, many people make front-end utilities using .NET nowadays that launch Windows native applications. Not running in a Wine environment (or anything similar) means that a Mono/.NET program cannot work completely. Mono and Wine will never work together for the very reason that Microsoft seems to have the ultimate say on Mono to Novell.
I am not a big fan of Java either, but like I said, there are many implementations; Java is nearly completely open source and there are many open source implementations partially complete or complete. Beyond that, there is gcj, which can compile native code. Where is the same for .NET or Mono? I have not seen it.
In VS, you tell it to start a Win32 application and it treats you like a criminal almost nowadays for not wanting to make use of .NET. .NET is even in the product name now. And what is odd to me is Microsoft claims this is part of their solution to the DLL hell problem, and thus .NET apps will run on anything supports .NET, but more importantly a Windows 98 machine can run a .NET 2.0 (only up to 2.0 by the way) compiled on XP. Who wants to wait minutes for an application to start? Not me.
I agree. I tried it. Took 4 or so hours to compile it on Gentoo. Had to unmask many packages. Not worth the time!
I really want to use it. It looks great for the most part. It is not ready for prime time. I stick with KDE 3.5.x just as I stick with Windows XP as opposed to Vista.
You are going to have to name a real example where the free/open software community has practised an EEE strategy.
At the very least, the community always embraces. This is necessary.
Secondly, extensions are always documented. They are never kept secret or used to keep others from 'competing'. There is no real competition. There is simply different opinion. GNOME vs KDE vs Xfce vs is a matter of opinion for both developers and users. It is good to have choice.
The real problem nowadays is that Firefox's engine and everyone else's has to handle tags like (brought by Microsoft) and (brought by Netscape), otherwise known as non-standard HTML tags. But simply, a long time ago, Joe Six pack made his web site, thought marquees were great and left his site alone. Now if a browser does not implement the functionality the site looks broken, and is not being shown as the desired by the designer.
I have not seen an example of 'extinguishing' in the community. Standards and features get deprecated, but they never get undocumented nor 'pretend' forgotten. Microsoft can do this in many ways. The best example is HTML. Microsoft added so much new and UNWANTED functionality into HTML that only IE would support. They purposely sent other stylesheets to other browsers (the Opera ordeal); they tried to make other browsers look bad with the sites they had control over. And with their own extensions, and browsers possibly not supporting them, even sites that were not created by MS could look bad. 'Joe Sixpack goes back to IE after trying Firefox and seeing does not work the same as IE.'
Extensions in the community will always be documented, unlike with a company like Microsoft.
Oh please. Until ATI specs are FULLY released and the open source drivers fully support 3D and are stable, it is pointless to think ATI/AMD are our new ally. Right now the open source drivers ati and radeon support 2D only (however they are 10x more stable than binary ATI drivers, any version).