I've used just about every single distribution available, including some that are not even out yet.( we get sent a LOT of betas) Thus far I've enjoyed Mandrake as it's easy to install, doesn't default to that ugly FVWM (uses KDE instead;-)
Administration has been a breeze and it comes with the basic GNOME libs and apps as well.... Not to mention the extra CD's that come with it that really save me time from downloading them off of the net!;-)
Ok this is BS. My company codes a LOT of custom apps. for clients using C, C++ and Ada95. These are easy to bind to GTK. (haven't tried QT but I've heard it's cool to develop on as well)
I can say definitively that GNU compiled apps are leaner, meaner and are written in REAL C, C++ (M$ doesn't do Ada much to their demise;-) )
Visual C++ etc. is garbage. Way to much proprietary extensions and code bloat. I've had programmers interview that have only used Visual C++ for development and they are amazed that it's actually possible to compile and link from a command line. I hire programmers who know ANSI/ISO coding not M$.
I promised that I would never leave my roots and I'm sticking to that so here I am. From the perspective of a company CEO, this was a very positive news feature.
I do disagree with Bob Youngs perspective that Linux is not for the end user yet. Thus far a combination of KDE (or gnome) with Star Office and a good email program is all most people need now days.... The Linux power user still knows how to get to his/her tools and is not restricted from them. I like the way KDE works well with Star Office for the end user effect of ease of use combined with a productive, robust environment. 1999 should be a very good year for Linux.
Actually, SCO and M$ have an agreement that stipulates that M$ will not create another Unix OS to compete with SCO (it actually bars them from the creation of a Unix OS period according to my attorney who is a intellectual properties attorney) so M$ shot itself in the foot with this one becuause I'll take any Unix over NT any day!
Running as strict static bin files they were fine in most cases. For others, it takes all of 5-10 minutes to recompile most apps. Big deal. They apps were not broken like the Windows apps will be. I mean how long can one kludge over DOS? If you find that Word97 is broken because of Windows-2000 how are you going to recompile that? You can't. Your forced to be at the whim of M$ to produce the next service pack that will yet again break more things than it fixes.
One of the great things about Linux is its rapid development cycle.
By the time Windows-2000 comes out we should be on kernel 2.2.14
This works to the favour of Open-Source Software as a whole...
Funny... My company Linux Systems Group, writes a lot of custom Linux applications for clients and we have no problem running them on a 2.0.x kernel or a 2.2.x kernel. (Of course the apps may run more efficiently on the newer kernel but certainly don't break at all....)
The Linux community and Linux based companies should shout this to the high heavens and let the frustrated developers out there know.....they have a new home in Linux.
In fact OSS is more like the town hall meeting where people can converge to discuss what things need to be improved, and then decide the manner in which to improve them.
Microsoft is more like many of the neo-fascist regimes I have seen in my tour of duty as a USMC officer.
Is clearly suffering from the Psuedo-wanna-be-intellectual syndrome....
Attempting to sound intellectual, while not being able to adequately fake it.
Typical of Microsoft. All the buzzwords, with no content behind them. I seriously doubt if this person would even know how to install Linux, as he has obviously never used it.
My company uses and support both KDE and GNOME. I personally will use a KDE environment with the GNOME-Calander and other GNOME applications. I've never had a problem with drag & drop between the two and the seem to play very nicely with each other...
Yes that is the actual name of it. Two of my employees are former Microsoft employees who worked on the original 95 release "Chicago", and according to them, all the real coders an M$ work for a company called Volt Scientific and M$ takes the credit. The project managers are hired right into M$ but many of the coders etc. come from Volt.
And yes it is a bunch of crappy code. In fact much of the code had comments going back as far as 1986 in Win95, (one assumes to kludge around DOS)
Anyway, I wouldn't want their code. In fact because Microsoft is not Linux compatable it should not be a choice of business that needs a reliable, supported product.
Sorry guys but I don't call the 18 year old kid at Soft Bank, technical support. By the way Soft Bank (whose owners are personal friends with Bill Gates) owns ZD-Net. Hell they own Comdex for that matter;-)
KDE is an excellent desktop. Gnome is not as far developed as KDE but is progressing nicely. My company supports both and as long as Troll supports the QPL license then everyting is fine. However, I don't know what would stop Troll from writing the next improvement to the API and saying now it's back to our old license....
A safer bet would be to hedge on GNOME and GTK but hey...Red Hat announced they were having both KDE and GNOME on 6.0 tonight so what the heck...
One of the points I made was that M$ would gear up the media to say "Linux is good (condescendingly) and it rivals NT4.0 but it's nothing compared to Windows 2000 After all we've included all the meaningless buzzwords that make CIOs cream their jeans like intuitiveness, interoperability, discoverability...etc. Of course accountability will not be included in this release. (If you want that...buy Linux)"
Let me call a spade a spade. I'm a CEO of a Linux based business that is really doing well. Not because of moronic license agreements, but because we actually give good SERVICE and SUPPORT. Question... How many companies bring lawsuits against software companies? Not as many as you'd think. With the thousands upon thousands of companies out there maybe a few hundred ever take civil action. And even fewer sue M$. If M$ products are so well supported then how come they are reluctant to give OEMs the refunds that customers have been demanding? If you read the EULA it reads in many ways like a disclaimer for the GPL especially the parts about "No fitness for particular purpose etc." If Microsoft Products are so damn well supported how come they have to reorganize the entire company to be able to deal with customers? If Microsoft products are so well supported how come calling their so-called support lines yield the automaton response of "Did you reboot?" That's not the answer corporate IT customers want to hear. They want to deal with intelligent, experienced people who actually stand behind their product. One client of whom we had the pleasure of replacing his NT Server, MS Application Server, MS Back Office, and MS SQL server and MS-Exchange Server with 2 Linux boxes, complained that one MS Support engineer said he should not rely on MS-Exchange server to allow good internet email access but should buy MS-Proxy Server instead.
With over 700 NT server replaced by Linux and over 300 Windows clients replaced the resounding message I hear form IT managers isn't one of disatisfaction but more often than not it's "Wow Linux can do that also?"
In the real world, not one made up by the ZD-Nets and the Pollsters of Gartner Group, and not one made up by hapless wanna-be journalists who just didn't make the grade, IT managers want professionals, not the 18 year old kid at SoftBank for their customer support. Did I mention that SoftBank owns ZD-Net and Softbank provides tech-support for much of M$ product line.....
No enterprise support? Please tell me that the Gartner Group is not doing the Hit-and-Run Style of journalism.... or perhaps this is the beginning or the great MS payoff....they realize that the "Let's us OSS as our scapegoat" thing got out of hand now they can't control it. It's gotten to large... Hell my company has 24-7 support both for OEMS and End users.... these people are really clueless...
Think that Falwell is nuts. But then even though I'm conservative doesn't neccessarily mean that I'm Christain though either. I'm a Shingon Buddhist and prefer to make my own decisions as I don't really believe that people like Falwell have the moral authority to make decisions about what my kids will and will not watch. Besides, my kids range in age from 1 to 14 and except for the youngest..... we all like Scooby Doo! I've have to tell you though...a Buddhist priest once told me to "beware of those who seek to divide, they only want people to join them to re-enforce the dogma they themselves are unsure of." It makes scense to me so....
As a former Captain of the USMC and the President of Linux Systems Group, I've been inside of North Korea, I've been to East Germany (When it exisited) so I suspect your not even old enough to remember the cold war... this is the one issue that is a pet peeve of mine. Linux is more like the town hall meeting. The place where the little guys can get together in the name of....let's see what was that elusive word..Oh yes DEMOCRACY! and Capitalism to create a great product. As I recall a few people got together in the 1700's to form a union of states and they did it by conscensus, and formed the constitution. Your analysis is not only flawed but represents a psuedo-wannabe-intellectualism that I find in many people who have never traveled outside of US borders or have studied history in any meaningfull way. If Linux were communistic, Linux would not be a party boss and us peons would contribute nothing. As it is this CAPITALISTIC approach to creating a product, must really frighten Microsoft lovers like yourself.... After all It was Microsoft who spouted "One World...One Program"
Trying to lock out competition (the very essence of what makes capitalism work) is fascist and communistic in many ways (ala Microsoft).
Linux displays the very essence of democracy. The willing gathering of talanted people, to create something from nothing. Not because the 'party' said so, not because some labor union boss said so..but because programming, or submitting bug reports, or even helping do a grammer/spellcheck a friends web site. I've fought on foriegn soil for my country and have a pretty good understanding of world affairs.
Before you speak of something you know nothing of at least try to become educated first.
I signed my name to this document and noticed you did not.
The spirit of adventure is perhaps no where more prevalent than in the technology sector. This year alone I predict many new startups based entirely on Linux alone. Linux is great technology that is made better every day. It's dynamic development model allows Linux to gain an advantage over even the largest competitors technically speaking.
The one thing that does have to change is we need a cohesive marketing effort from the community to combat the ZD-Net FUD. After all... when ZD-Net condescends to come down from their high loft to do a Linux story it's either to do a useless comparison by people who no nothing about Linux or to do the beck-and-call of their annointed leader Bill.
The hit-and-run style of so-called Journalism ala Jesse Berst, ZD-Net et. al has done nothing but spread untruths about Linux for a very long time. They have no accountability, and therefor they have no credability. However many clueless newcomers to Linux read the FUD in ZD-Net and believe it. ZD-Net even has a so-called "Briefing Center" to go and learn about Linux. (Do people really go in there??) Talk about the blind leading the blind....
I apologize for the rant but IMHO a Linux community based marketing effort with official elected spokespersons might not be such a bad idea to help us counter the Jesse Bersts, James Allchins and Sherrif Nottinghams of the IT world. That way the press can have a source of official information which will be backed by conscensus in the Linux community. Such a spokesperson would be elected by vote and report to a board of elected people to come up with an official Linux "word" on event X,Y and Z.
As many of you here know, my company uses both GNOME and KDE on desktops. Both have their unique featuresets. We do alot of development in Ada95 on Linux building very robust GUI apps. Because GNOME has Ada bindings that are very workable, GNOME is a no brainer. The GNAT compiler works on Solaris, HP-UX, SCO etc. and is not just Linux centeric.
Slashdot Mirror
I've used just about every single distribution available, including some that are not even out yet.( we get sent a LOT of betas) ;-)
;-)
Thus far I've enjoyed Mandrake as it's easy to install, doesn't default to that ugly FVWM (uses KDE instead
Administration has been a breeze and it comes with the basic GNOME libs and apps as well....
Not to mention the extra CD's that come with it that really save me time from downloading them off of the net!
Go Mandrake!
Nick
Linux Systems Group
Could we use this type of technology to build a new 3D ultra-user friendly desktop for Linux?
What things would hold us back? I honestly don't have much experience in 3d world but I've used Blender before and found it to be quite fun.
A 3D interface could really be interesting. Any thoughts on the API or design?
Nick
Linux Systems Group
New York
Ok this is BS. My company codes a LOT of custom apps. for clients using C, C++ and Ada95. These are easy to bind to GTK. (haven't tried QT but I've heard it's cool to develop on as well)
;-) )
I can say definitively that GNU compiled apps are leaner, meaner and are written in REAL C, C++ (M$ doesn't do Ada much to their demise
Visual C++ etc. is garbage. Way to much proprietary extensions and code bloat. I've had programmers interview that have only used Visual C++ for development and they are amazed that it's actually possible to compile and link from a command line. I hire programmers who know ANSI/ISO coding not M$.
Nick
LSG
In answer to your question yes we sell, use and support Mandrake-Linux. Give it a try if you havn't already done so. It's good stuff!
Take Care,
Nick
LSG
I promised that I would never leave my roots and I'm sticking to that so here I am. From the perspective of a company CEO, this was a very positive news feature.
I do disagree with Bob Youngs perspective that Linux is not for the end user yet. Thus far a combination of KDE (or gnome) with Star Office and a good email program is all most people need now days.... The Linux power user still knows how to get to his/her tools and is not restricted from them. I like the way KDE works well with Star Office for the end user effect of ease of use combined with a productive, robust environment.
1999 should be a very good year for Linux.
Cheers,
Nick Donovan
Linux Systems Group
New York
Actually, SCO and M$ have an agreement that stipulates that M$ will not create another Unix OS to compete with SCO (it actually bars them from the creation of a Unix OS period according to my attorney who is a intellectual properties attorney) so M$ shot itself in the foot with this one becuause I'll take any Unix over NT any day!
Nick
LSG
Running as strict static bin files they were fine in most cases. For others, it takes all of 5-10 minutes to recompile most apps. Big deal.
They apps were not broken like the Windows apps will be. I mean how long can one kludge over DOS?
If you find that Word97 is broken because of Windows-2000 how are you going to recompile that?
You can't. Your forced to be at the whim of M$ to produce the next service pack that will yet again break more things than it fixes.
One of the great things about Linux is its rapid development cycle.
By the time Windows-2000 comes out we should be on kernel 2.2.14
Cheers,
Nick Donovan
If you don't want to recompile, simply stick to the older kernel. Linux just has faster development cycle. Unlike Windows(tm)
This works to the favour of Open-Source Software as a whole...
Funny... My company Linux Systems Group, writes a lot of custom Linux applications for clients and we have no problem running them on a 2.0.x kernel or a 2.2.x kernel.
(Of course the apps may run more efficiently on the newer kernel but certainly don't break at all....)
The Linux community and Linux based companies should shout this to the high heavens and let the frustrated developers out there know.....they have a new home in Linux.
Nicholas Donovan
Linux Systems Group
In fact OSS is more like the town hall meeting where people can converge to discuss what things need to be improved, and then decide the manner in which to improve them.
Microsoft is more like many of the neo-fascist regimes I have seen in my tour of duty as a USMC officer.
"One Program, One Operating System" -- Microsot
Nick
LSG
Is clearly suffering from the Psuedo-wanna-be-intellectual syndrome....
Attempting to sound intellectual, while not being able to adequately fake it.
Typical of Microsoft. All the buzzwords, with no content behind them. I seriously doubt if this person would even know how to install Linux, as he has obviously never used it.
Cheers,
Nick
Linux Systems Group
My company has Linux laptops for sale. That's all we do. No Windows or anything else on them.
Nick
LSG
My company uses and support both KDE and GNOME.
I personally will use a KDE environment with the GNOME-Calander and other GNOME applications. I've never had a problem with drag & drop between the two and the seem to play very nicely with each other...
Nick
LSG
Yes that is the actual name of it.
;-)
Two of my employees are former Microsoft employees who worked on the original 95 release "Chicago", and according to them, all the real coders an M$ work for a company called Volt Scientific and M$ takes the credit. The project managers are hired right into M$ but many of the coders etc. come from Volt.
And yes it is a bunch of crappy code. In fact much of the code had comments going back as far as 1986 in Win95, (one assumes to kludge around DOS)
Anyway, I wouldn't want their code. In fact because Microsoft is not Linux compatable it should not be a choice of business that needs a reliable, supported product.
Sorry guys but I don't call the 18 year old kid at Soft Bank, technical support. By the way Soft Bank (whose owners are personal friends with Bill Gates) owns ZD-Net. Hell they own Comdex for that matter
Cheers,
Nick
LSG
....For Linux compatability.
I agree. Microsoft is NOT Linux compliant.
So I can not bet my job on it.
Cheers,
Nick
LSG
KDE is an excellent desktop. Gnome is not as far developed as KDE but is progressing nicely.
My company supports both and as long as Troll supports the QPL license then everyting is fine.
However, I don't know what would stop Troll from writing the next improvement to the API and saying now it's back to our old license....
A safer bet would be to hedge on GNOME and GTK but hey...Red Hat announced they were having both KDE and GNOME on 6.0 tonight so what the heck...
Nick
LSG
One of the points I made was that M$ would gear up the media to say "Linux is good (condescendingly) and it rivals NT4.0 but it's nothing compared to Windows 2000 After all we've included all the meaningless buzzwords that make CIOs cream their jeans like intuitiveness, interoperability, discoverability...etc. Of course accountability will not be included in this release. (If you want that...buy Linux)"
Let me call a spade a spade. I'm a CEO of a Linux based business that is really doing well. Not because of moronic license agreements, but because we actually give good SERVICE and SUPPORT.
Question... How many companies bring lawsuits against software companies? Not as many as you'd think. With the thousands upon thousands of companies out there maybe a few hundred ever take civil action. And even fewer sue M$. If M$ products are so well supported then how come they are reluctant to give OEMs the refunds that customers have been demanding? If you read the EULA it reads in many ways like a disclaimer for the GPL especially the parts about "No fitness for particular purpose etc." If Microsoft Products are so damn well supported how come they have to reorganize the entire company to be able to deal with customers?
If Microsoft products are so well supported how come calling their so-called support lines yield the automaton response of "Did you reboot?"
That's not the answer corporate IT customers want to hear. They want to deal with intelligent, experienced people who actually stand behind their product. One client of whom we had the pleasure of replacing his NT Server, MS Application Server, MS Back Office, and MS SQL server and MS-Exchange Server with 2 Linux boxes, complained that one MS Support engineer said he should not rely on MS-Exchange server to allow good internet email access but should buy MS-Proxy Server instead.
With over 700 NT server replaced by Linux and over 300 Windows clients replaced the resounding message I hear form IT managers isn't one of disatisfaction but more often than not it's "Wow Linux can do that also?"
In the real world, not one made up by the ZD-Nets and the Pollsters of Gartner Group, and not one made up by hapless wanna-be journalists who just didn't make the grade, IT managers want professionals, not the 18 year old kid at SoftBank for their customer support. Did I mention that SoftBank owns ZD-Net and Softbank provides tech-support for much of M$ product line.....
Reality is a BitchX huh Gartner?
Nick
LSG
No enterprise support? Please tell me that the Gartner Group is not doing the Hit-and-Run Style of journalism.... or perhaps this is the beginning or the great MS payoff....they realize that the "Let's us OSS as our scapegoat" thing got out of hand now they can't control it. It's gotten to large... Hell my company has 24-7 support both for OEMS and End users.... these people are really clueless...
Nick
LSG
Think that Falwell is nuts. But then even though I'm conservative doesn't neccessarily mean that I'm Christain though either. I'm a Shingon Buddhist and prefer to make my own decisions as I don't really believe that people like Falwell have the moral authority to make decisions about what my kids will and will not watch. Besides, my kids range in age from 1 to 14 and except for the youngest..... we all like Scooby Doo!
I've have to tell you though...a Buddhist priest once told me to "beware of those who seek to divide, they only want people to join them to re-enforce the dogma they themselves are unsure of." It makes scense to me so....
My 2 Cents
Nick
LSG
Hurrying out the door to fast this morning....
I'm doing this in my car so please excuse the mess....
Nick
LSG
Hurrying out the door to fast this morning....
I'm doing this in my car so please excuse and mess....
Nick
LSG
As a former Captain of the USMC and the President of Linux Systems Group, I've been inside of North Korea, I've been to East Germany (When it exisited) so I suspect your not even old enough to remember the cold war... this is the one issue that is a pet peeve of mine. Linux is more like the town hall meeting. The place where the little guys can get together in the name of....let's see what was that elusive word..Oh yes DEMOCRACY! and Capitalism to create a great product. As I recall a few people got together in the 1700's to form a union of states and they did it by conscensus, and formed the constitution. Your analysis is not only flawed but represents a psuedo-wannabe-intellectualism that I find in many people who have never traveled outside of US borders or have studied history in any meaningfull way. If Linux were communistic, Linux would not be a party boss and us peons would contribute nothing. .... After all It was Microsoft who spouted "One World...One Program"
As it is this CAPITALISTIC approach to creating a product, must really frighten Microsoft lovers like yourself
Trying to lock out competition (the very essence of what makes capitalism work) is fascist and communistic in many ways (ala Microsoft).
Linux displays the very essence of democracy. The willing gathering of talanted people, to create something from nothing. Not because the 'party' said so, not because some labor union boss said so..but because programming, or submitting bug reports, or even helping do a grammer/spellcheck a friends web site. I've fought on foriegn soil for my country and have a pretty good understanding of world affairs.
Before you speak of something you know nothing of at least try to become educated first.
I signed my name to this document and noticed you did not.
Nick Donovan
LSG - President
The spirit of adventure is perhaps no where more prevalent than in the technology sector. This year alone I predict many new startups based entirely on Linux alone. Linux is great technology that is made better every day. It's dynamic development model allows Linux to gain an advantage over even the largest competitors technically speaking.
The one thing that does have to change is we need a cohesive marketing effort from the community to combat the ZD-Net FUD. After all... when ZD-Net condescends to come down from their high loft to do a Linux story it's either to do a useless comparison by people who no nothing about Linux or to do the beck-and-call of their annointed leader Bill.
The hit-and-run style of so-called Journalism ala Jesse Berst, ZD-Net et. al has done nothing but spread untruths about Linux for a very long time.
They have no accountability, and therefor they have no credability. However many clueless newcomers to Linux read the FUD in ZD-Net and believe it. ZD-Net even has a so-called "Briefing Center" to go and learn about Linux. (Do people really go in there??) Talk about the blind leading the blind....
I apologize for the rant but IMHO a Linux community based marketing effort with official elected spokespersons might not be such a bad idea to help us counter the Jesse Bersts, James Allchins and Sherrif Nottinghams of the IT world.
That way the press can have a source of official information which will be backed by conscensus in the Linux community. Such a spokesperson would be elected by vote and report to a board of elected people to come up with an official Linux "word"
on event X,Y and Z.
Just my 2 cents....
Nick
LSG
So THAT'S what the force is that Obi-Wan was talking about....;-)
As many of you here know, my company uses both GNOME and KDE on desktops. Both have their unique featuresets. We do alot of development in Ada95 on Linux building very robust GUI apps. Because GNOME has Ada bindings that are very workable, GNOME is a no brainer. The GNAT compiler works on Solaris, HP-UX, SCO etc. and is not just Linux centeric.