Trolltech did not found the KDE project; Matthias Ettrich created KDE. Trolltech just created QT, the widget toolkit library used by KDE. God, don't the Slashdot editors know anything?!
> and police/armies that enforce it.
I disagree with the assertion that only police and military forces enforce the Constitution. I think the Constitution is defended by anyone who believes the Constitution lays the framework for a good government, i.e. a government that balances justice, compassion, fairness, and liberty. Yes, this is a libertarian view.
The problem with this idea is that, with the massive pre-existing collection of web sites, enforcing such a policy in.com,.org, and.net domains would be nearly impossible.
So what is so non-usable about Mandrake 9.1? That was my first Linux Distro, and I found it to be very usable, much more so than any other one since then. DrakX could repartition my FAT32 partition (I do not know if it could repartition NTFS, but I would not be surprised), it gave me a nice selection of packages to choose from, it autodetected and set-up my sound card, network card, parallel-port printer, and it seemed to have a sane desktop layout. It was a little slow, but I think that problem could be solved by modern hardware (well, more modern than my 1.5 GHZ Pentium IV with an Asus K8N-E mobo, 256 MB RAM, and an Nvidia Riva TNT2 {I have since upgraded to a MUCH more modern system}). The only problem is that you have to pay for upgrades, and some of the packages were not the latest, although they seemed to be stable, which is what desktop users want anyway.
What a retarded practice!
on
The CVS Cop-Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I have always thought that 'security' was a retarded reason for not shipping with a compiler. Any semi-intelligent 'bad guy' will have his own box capable of compiling programs, and he will upload his compiled programs, or he could upload a compiler and C library with innocuous names, such as 'report.doc'. Even if the target system is different from the bad guy's system (ex: the bad guy only has x86 boxes and the target is running Debian PPC), the bad guy could still compile his programs using a cross-compiler.
Although I usually disagree with sacrificing security for convenience, I think it is OK in this instance.
Personal Computers are just that: PERSONAL. They are meant for individual people to own a computer and write and run programs. They are a toy FOR SERIOUS HOBBYISTS ONLY, and they should NOT be corrupted by 'big corporations'. Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computers and the sole designer of that hot new Apple II, said that, in a few years, all the big software companies will have gone out of business, because people will just learn to program all the software they need, and the tech field will be free of big business forever!
I think ideals are a good thing; however, if you cannot look past your insular world view and take a REALISTIC assessment of the situation for just a second, then your projects will probably share the same fate as the mainframes.
I think OSS does have a promising future, but if the FSF zealots continue to rabidly attack people with a different software development ideology, then OSS will be relegated to a niche like servers, or, as only a mere curiosity for the hackers of the future, who do all their REAL work in Visual Studio 2018. If 'we' want to help foster OSS development, 'we' have to be willing to work with people who do not share 'our' beliefs. One part of 'growing up' is learning how to work with people who do not share the same ideals as you, but sometimes you two can strike a compromise that benefits everyone.
In 2003, there is a deep ambivalence in our attitude -- a tension between elitism and missionary populism. We want to reach and convert the 92% of the world for whom computing means games and multimedia and glossy GUI interfaces and (at their most technical) light email and word processing and spreadsheets. We are spending major effort on projects like GNOME and KDE designed to give Unix a pretty face. But we are still elitists at heart, deeply reluctant and in many cases unable to identify with or listen to the needs of the Aunt Tillies of the world.
To non-technical end users, the software we build tends to be either bewildering and incomprehensible, or clumsy and condescending, or both at the same time. Even when we try to do the user-friendliness thing as earnestly as possible, we're woefully inconsistent at it. Many of the attitudes and reflexes we've inherited from old-school Unix are just wrong for the job. Even when we want to listen to and help Aunt Tillie, we don't know how -- we project our categories and our concerns onto her and give her 'solutions' that she finds as daunting as her problems.
Our greatest challenge as a culture is whether we can outgrow the assumptions that have served us so well -- whether we can acknowledge, not merely intellectually but in the sinew of daily practice, that the Macintosh people have a point. Their point is made in more general, less Mac-specific way in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum [Cooper], an insightful and argumentative book about what its author calls interaction design that (despite occasional crotchets) contains a good deal of hard truth that every Unix programmer ought to know.
We can turn aside from this; we can remain a priesthood appealing to a select minority of the best and brightest, a geek meritocracy focused on our historical role as the keepers of the software infrastructure and the networks. But if we do this, we will very likely go into decline and eventually lose the dynamism that has sustained us through decades. Someone else will serve the people; someone else will put themselves where the power and the money are, and own the future of 92% of all software. The odds are, whether that someone else is Microsoft or not, that they will do it using practices and software we don't much like.
Or we can truly accept the challenge. The open-source movement is trying hard to do so. But the kind of sustained work and intelligence we have brought to other problems in the past will not alone suffice. Our attitudes must change in a fundamental and difficult way.
Since OpenGL will be used in the Playstation 3(and maybe Wii), the market for OpenGL will grow exponentially, which means more games might be ported to Linux and OSX.
The problem is that quality is not determined by marketshare (as a Mac user, I am sure you can agree with that). True, you will be shielded from most buggy, poor quality games that die in the market-place before the developers can even THINK about a port. Unfortunately, you will miss out on a lot of gems that, for whatever reason, did not sell well. Surefire hits like the Sims, Warcraft (and WOW), Unreal, and any idSoftware game will be ported to the Mac, but less popular games, such as the excellent Gothic series, may never be, because the few more sales would not justify the cost of a port. Just like Linux, OSX may be shielded from a lot of crappy commercial games, but most of the ported titles will cater to the lowest common denominator, which disatisfies gamers with alternate tastes.
None of the programs you mentioned are open source. How exactly do they follow Eric Raymond's bazaar model? Most of Microsoft's 'integration' was done for marketing reasons rather than technical reasons, except for the kernel mode video interface. There are programs that will trim the fat from Windows installations, so the components cannot be integrated THAT tightly.
No, the admin recently changed it back to 'child porn'. It was 'terrorism' for a while, but some of the other users (president, congress) complained that it was too hard of a password to remember, so he recently changed it back to good old-fashioned 'child porn'. Why do you even need the root password to the Constitution; last time I checked, it was running Sendmail, which is just as good.
>> but last I checked, Linux was effectively DOS with a gui and different command names.
Isn't that what Windows is?
But seriously, I have found software installation to be a lot easier under Linux. Instead of manually downloading, installing, and updating all third-party software, you can simply launch Synaptic, browse or search for the packages you want, click on the packages, and click "Apply"; or, if you want to update the packages, click "Mark All Upgrades", and then click "Apply".
>> If you have an ATI card, you're kind of out of luck,
You can still use the Xorg with an ATI card, even at high resolutions such as 1600x1200 24-bit. The only thing you will not have is hardware acceleration, which most applications do not need, anyway.
>> If you want to run an amd64 system, the amd64 fbsd is in pretty good shape, but software that can be run on it is a bit more limiting than linux for amd64.
The biggest problem for desktop users is that Nvidia has not released 64-bit Nvidia drivers; at least they had not the last time I checked.
>> Printing is fine, but configuration is a bit more clumsy as I recall.
Egads! Printing has always been a bitch under *nix, at least in my limited experience. I hate to say this, but you should probably install CUPS. I hope the FreeBSD port of KDE supports the printing manager, because it makes printing setup quite painless.
>> Overall, just be aware that almost nothing will work right out of the box--you probably won't boot up with even your network connection or sound card detected, and these you will need to configure the support for yourself.
I started using FreeBSD at 5.2, and my NICs (a RealTek and a 3com 3c59x) have always been autodetected. Since 5.3 (I think), sound support has been enabled by default, and that has always been autodetected (even my nForce3 onboard sound card). I switched to FreeBSD because I was amazed by the ease of setting-up my sound card, which I could not set-up under Gentoo, no matter how many different kernel's, ALSA drivers, and OSS drivers I tried.
The x86 won the desktop war, but what about embedded systems? In this arena, there are more choices. Sure there are three major architectures: MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, but there are some lesser used systems, such as the Z80 and Motorola {6,8}800 (some), SPARC (a few). Most of these systems are nanos, and the moniker 'personal computer' may not apply to them, but computer geeks can still tinker with them. The lament, 'x86 is the only processor line left', is SO 1990's. Also, I think that most of the 'micro' computers were based on either the z80, 8080, or 6800, so you have approximately the same number of choices you had in 1977.
>>If you plan to use a server machine at home, don't even think a second and try FreeBSD.
Did you intend to say that we should use FreeBSD as a home server? If so, you should have said "If you plan to use a server machine at home, use FreeBSD."
Initially, I thought you meant to say "don't even think for a second about trying FreeBSD".
What CS department would use.NET? CS Departments typically shy away from single platform programming languages, at least the ones that I know of do. Even at my extremely Windows-centric university, beginning courses use Java, systems courses use C (and some assembly), networking courses use C & Perl, and programming language design courses use Scheme. Even if your university used.NET, Mono should be acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Trolltech did not found the KDE project; Matthias Ettrich created KDE. Trolltech just created QT, the widget toolkit library used by KDE. God, don't the Slashdot editors know anything?!
> and police/armies that enforce it. I disagree with the assertion that only police and military forces enforce the Constitution. I think the Constitution is defended by anyone who believes the Constitution lays the framework for a good government, i.e. a government that balances justice, compassion, fairness, and liberty. Yes, this is a libertarian view.
The problem with this idea is that, with the massive pre-existing collection of web sites, enforcing such a policy in .com, .org, and .net domains would be nearly impossible.
You can also do this with Windows 2000 and XP. See the Wikipedia entry for more information.
So what is so non-usable about Mandrake 9.1? That was my first Linux Distro, and I found it to be very usable, much more so than any other one since then. DrakX could repartition my FAT32 partition (I do not know if it could repartition NTFS, but I would not be surprised), it gave me a nice selection of packages to choose from, it autodetected and set-up my sound card, network card, parallel-port printer, and it seemed to have a sane desktop layout. It was a little slow, but I think that problem could be solved by modern hardware (well, more modern than my 1.5 GHZ Pentium IV with an Asus K8N-E mobo, 256 MB RAM, and an Nvidia Riva TNT2 {I have since upgraded to a MUCH more modern system}). The only problem is that you have to pay for upgrades, and some of the packages were not the latest, although they seemed to be stable, which is what desktop users want anyway.
I have always thought that 'security' was a retarded reason for not shipping with a compiler. Any semi-intelligent 'bad guy' will have his own box capable of compiling programs, and he will upload his compiled programs, or he could upload a compiler and C library with innocuous names, such as 'report.doc'. Even if the target system is different from the bad guy's system (ex: the bad guy only has x86 boxes and the target is running Debian PPC), the bad guy could still compile his programs using a cross-compiler.
Although I usually disagree with sacrificing security for convenience, I think it is OK in this instance.
Lisp Forever!!! It would not be too hard to emulate a Lisp Machine, so 3rd world kids could run MIT CADR.
The previous statement was a joke by the way.
I think ideals are a good thing; however, if you cannot look past your insular world view and take a REALISTIC assessment of the situation for just a second, then your projects will probably share the same fate as the mainframes.
I think OSS does have a promising future, but if the FSF zealots continue to rabidly attack people with a different software development ideology, then OSS will be relegated to a niche like servers, or, as only a mere curiosity for the hackers of the future, who do all their REAL work in Visual Studio 2018. If 'we' want to help foster OSS development, 'we' have to be willing to work with people who do not share 'our' beliefs. One part of 'growing up' is learning how to work with people who do not share the same ideals as you, but sometimes you two can strike a compromise that benefits everyone.
Here is a quotationg from Eric Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming:
Kororaa provides a binary installation of Gentoo. Most of the source code is still available through portage.
No, Global Warming is not the US's fault, it's Man-Bear-Pig's fault. I'm being cereal this time.
Oh no? PearPC has allowed one to run the PPC version of OSX on a regular x86 box for quite some time now. Plus, old G4's are pretty cheap.
Since OpenGL will be used in the Playstation 3(and maybe Wii), the market for OpenGL will grow exponentially, which means more games might be ported to Linux and OSX.
The problem is that quality is not determined by marketshare (as a Mac user, I am sure you can agree with that). True, you will be shielded from most buggy, poor quality games that die in the market-place before the developers can even THINK about a port. Unfortunately, you will miss out on a lot of gems that, for whatever reason, did not sell well. Surefire hits like the Sims, Warcraft (and WOW), Unreal, and any idSoftware game will be ported to the Mac, but less popular games, such as the excellent Gothic series, may never be, because the few more sales would not justify the cost of a port. Just like Linux, OSX may be shielded from a lot of crappy commercial games, but most of the ported titles will cater to the lowest common denominator, which disatisfies gamers with alternate tastes.
None of the programs you mentioned are open source. How exactly do they follow Eric Raymond's bazaar model? Most of Microsoft's 'integration' was done for marketing reasons rather than technical reasons, except for the kernel mode video interface. There are programs that will trim the fat from Windows installations, so the components cannot be integrated THAT tightly.
No, the admin recently changed it back to 'child porn'. It was 'terrorism' for a while, but some of the other users (president, congress) complained that it was too hard of a password to remember, so he recently changed it back to good old-fashioned 'child porn'. Why do you even need the root password to the Constitution; last time I checked, it was running Sendmail, which is just as good.
>> but last I checked, Linux was effectively DOS with a gui and different command names. Isn't that what Windows is? But seriously, I have found software installation to be a lot easier under Linux. Instead of manually downloading, installing, and updating all third-party software, you can simply launch Synaptic, browse or search for the packages you want, click on the packages, and click "Apply"; or, if you want to update the packages, click "Mark All Upgrades", and then click "Apply".
What about GNU/Linux?
>> If you have an ATI card, you're kind of out of luck,
You can still use the Xorg with an ATI card, even at high resolutions such as 1600x1200 24-bit. The only thing you will not have is hardware acceleration, which most applications do not need, anyway.
>> If you want to run an amd64 system, the amd64 fbsd is in pretty good shape, but software that can be run on it is a bit more limiting than linux for amd64.
The biggest problem for desktop users is that Nvidia has not released 64-bit Nvidia drivers; at least they had not the last time I checked.
>> Printing is fine, but configuration is a bit more clumsy as I recall.
Egads! Printing has always been a bitch under *nix, at least in my limited experience. I hate to say this, but you should probably install CUPS. I hope the FreeBSD port of KDE supports the printing manager, because it makes printing setup quite painless.
>> Overall, just be aware that almost nothing will work right out of the box--you probably won't boot up with even your network connection or sound card detected, and these you will need to configure the support for yourself.
I started using FreeBSD at 5.2, and my NICs (a RealTek and a 3com 3c59x) have always been autodetected. Since 5.3 (I think), sound support has been enabled by default, and that has always been autodetected (even my nForce3 onboard sound card). I switched to FreeBSD because I was amazed by the ease of setting-up my sound card, which I could not set-up under Gentoo, no matter how many different kernel's, ALSA drivers, and OSS drivers I tried.
The x86 won the desktop war, but what about embedded systems? In this arena, there are more choices. Sure there are three major architectures: MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, but there are some lesser used systems, such as the Z80 and Motorola {6,8}800 (some), SPARC (a few). Most of these systems are nanos, and the moniker 'personal computer' may not apply to them, but computer geeks can still tinker with them. The lament, 'x86 is the only processor line left', is SO 1990's. Also, I think that most of the 'micro' computers were based on either the z80, 8080, or 6800, so you have approximately the same number of choices you had in 1977.
>> but that doesn't mean that synchronous designs are good: they are just easier to understand and debug.
:)
Which typically means that they (synchronous designs) win. I am a Phyiscs major, so I know almost nothing about the topic though.
>> Dedicated cards? Probably. Dedicated computers? Definitely,
Either say "Dedicated cards? Probably not. Dedicated computers? Definitely" or "Dedicated cards? Probably. Dedicated computers? Definitely not".
>>If you plan to use a server machine at home, don't even think a second and try FreeBSD.
Did you intend to say that we should use FreeBSD as a home server? If so, you should have said "If you plan to use a server machine at home, use FreeBSD."
Initially, I thought you meant to say "don't even think for a second about trying FreeBSD".
What CS department would use .NET? CS Departments typically shy away from single platform programming languages, at least the ones that I know of do. Even at my extremely Windows-centric university, beginning courses use Java, systems courses use C (and some assembly), networking courses use C & Perl, and programming language design courses use Scheme. Even if your university used .NET, Mono should be acceptable.
>> Remember, nothing overrides the Constitution and its amendments
except a proposal agreed upon by two-thirds of Congress and ratified by 3/4 of the State legislatures.
I thought it said 'Fly poor thing. Fly'.