If the next version of KDE was to be name KDE XP, it'd probably be a pretty smart marketing strategy, assuming there are no legality issues with using the letters X and P consecutively.
No, the JesusWindows is bad enough, we don't want a JesusKDE. (You know, XP...XPISTOS...Greek, XP is a very much used symbol in such iconography.)
"The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate,"
of, not on, as it was in the/. article.
Do you people ever read the articles? (Like I haven't heard this before on/.)
The "nuclear mutant flies" may sound dangerous, but are really not in any way, as the "mutat" in this case basicly just means that they are so radically mutant that they are sterile. In real world, radical mutants don't get superpowers or anything.
All natural individuals of any species (including humans) are more or less mutant anyhow, so there's nothing inherently dangerous about that (unless you consinder life as dangerous).
'Life, I mean, will find a way. Oooh and aah, that's how it starts, and then comes the running and the screaming.'
And a hearty round of thanks to all the Warez dudes out there.
The warez community might not be as strong in Linux games as in Wincrap. Warez needs networks of people, but if you don't have enough nodes, their connections won't reach the critical threshold to "crystallize" to form a network. (Everything is explainable with NK nets...)
On the other hand, Loki games didn't (don't...) have much if any copy protection, except in the multi-play mode of some games. This was a very user-friendly feature, as it made it easier to handle the game (no need to carry the cds around all the time), and I thank Loki for it.
Unlike with Windows games, I haven't a genuine illegal copy of any Linux game. (I have 9 Loki games, and you bet I'll be ordering a few more today if they still have them at the retailer.) And Linux games cost about 30% more here than their old Wincrap version, that is, about $60 for new Linux titles.
But yeah, this is a really sad day for me I and believe for much of the Linux community. Loki was very important for Linux.
1) Data with maximal entropy?
2) Random file picked from Internet?
In case of 1), I'd say the article is crap. If bits in the data have absolutely no dependency between them, i.e., redundancy, (also between non-adjacent bits) it is absolutely impossible to compress them. It's not even good as a fairy tale.
In case of 2), ok, 1:100 may be possible for most non-compressed data. The new JPEG-2 algorithms can do 1:100, but it's lossy. Text compression algorithms might do 10:1 on typical text, but they are also quite fast and don't therefore find all redundancies. For example, Huffman encoding is at simplest done with just single characters, and not much longer sequences, the searching of which takes a lot of time. The redundancies do not also have to be linear; for example "wDoRrOdW" ('word' written first in lower case, and then with upper case to opposite direction) would be difficult to compress completely, although it clearly has high redundancy.
Removing all redundancies would require finding the shortest description, i.e., a program that prints the string. To find it, we have to go through all possible programs that are shorter than printf("wDoRrOdW"). Many of them don't even terminate (for example "while(1);"). Complete search is therefore impossible; all algorithms make guesses about the topology of the search landskape, and don't search everything.
I have absolutely no doubt that this method works well within the theoretical limits, albeit it's of course always possible that it verges the limits closer than any earlier methods.
Perhaps one of the critics should sit down with someone from the install team (or the whole team via phone) and hammer out a better UI for installation. Hell, consider this a challenge to anyone who doesn't like Debian's installer to improve it with us.
I'll promise to send at least a case report the next time I install Debian (probably the latest 2.2r4), although I'm not a Debian virgin anymore...
Aptitude is definitely much nicer than dselect, but still not intuitive enough, in my opinion.
Generally, I'd recommend at least mimicking the UI of other installers and package managers. Not that any of them are really good, but they are at least much easier to use than dselect, aptitude, or *eek* command-line apt-get. You don't have to hire a horde of UI specialists if you just borrow the work of Microsoft's/Redhat's/SuSE's/Mandrake's horde. Copying UI concepts is what made MS Windows, KDE, and many others very successful. Stealing ideas is good. It's building on other people's work, exactly what the basic idea of Free Software is.
Graphical UI would help a lot, as you can make it much more eye-friendly with colors, fonts, and graphics, and have more freedom in doing the layout.
When upgrading packages, I'd recommend to make it totally non-interactive (at least by default).
I really like Debian because of the relatively well working package system, and will definitely install it also as my next workstation distro, probably quite soon.
Dselect has maybe the most horrible, messy and counterintuitive user interface I've ever seen.
Sure, it probably has some ubercool highly generic logic if you use hours learning to understand it, but that's not quite what a person installing an operating system should be expected to do.
Really, when I first *tried* to install Debian, I had 18 years of experience with computers, 5 years with (Redhat) Linux, and I got totally lost with the Debian installation.
For example, why can't the "go-back-to-previous-menu-key" be like it is in 100% of modern software? Why does it have to be Shift+Q? Why do I have to read some help to find this out? Why am I required to read ONE SCREEN full of help text when I start selecting packages?
When I'm installing an operating system, I *don't* want to spend one second of brain time trying to learn something totally unnecessary.
Just follow the user interfaces of Redhat, Mandrake or SuSE, they are rather good, although still have quite many problems too (I reported roughly 10 problems with last Mandrake installation). I think Corel Linux had the best and easiest installation I've seen.
Also messing up with the APT sources list isn't too easy. It really should have some meta servers. Corel Linux had some nice manager which does that, I think.
One very good thing which I like, is that Debian saves a journal of the installation to the disk, and thus remembers the selections you've done. This is very important if the installation fails/crashes for some reason at some point. All the Redhat-based distros are missing this very important feature.
The apt-get seems to be generally much better than the RPM counterparts, although I've had some problems with apt-get too, usually with dependencies in the unstable release. Even one database corruption, but luckily it's text-based so it was easyish to fix. (When my RPM database corrupted under Redhat, the only option was to reinstall the entire distro.)
And please make the CD bootable. The previous potato distro didn't have a bootable CD (or at least it didn't boot in my machine), and I don't have a floppy drive, so I had to fight with it for three days to get it installed from my old Redhat partition (I had to mount the floppy image as loop-back, chroot it, etc).
I think MS Word interoperability is perhaps the single most important barrier limiting companies from changing to Linux. Other Office products such as MS Excel and MS Powerpoint are also important.
You should remember that it's not just necessary to have some semi-lousy import filters to Linux word-processors, but also have 100% compatible export filters. It's practically impossible to make a transition in any company that has to communicate with an existing MS Word user base. And that is the case for almost any companies and public administration.
And 99% doesn't do, it must be 100.000%. If there are even small incompatibilities, you have to use genuine MS Word -> MS Windows.
StarOffice 6.0 beta (same as OpenOffice build 638c) has some compatibility in basic formatting. The older StarOffice 5.2 has, in my experience, much better MS Word compatibility, but it also breaks up quite quickly. However, its Excel compatibility is worse than with SO6.0b/OO638c.
KOffice (1.1) is not even worth mentioning with regard to MS Office compatibility. Its Word import filter simply strips all formatting, and it doesn't have an export filter.
I work in an IT company, doing purely Linux work, but have to do all documentation, communication, and administrative tasks with MS Office. I was able to use StarOffice 5.2 for a while in some tasks, but can't rely on it completely. The situation really sucks.
Wow, that was easy. Thanks! (To other people who replied too.)
I had some slight problems with my own library that wants to have the source root directory in includes, and I had used "-I..". I had to add a "-I $(top_srcdir)". But that's not too much trouble.
One feature which I like in one Makefile system that I use, is not writing the output files, i.e., object and target files, to the source directory but somewhere else.
Writing them somewhere else makes doing backups much easier, plus the directories don't get overcrowded. You can even make source distros just with a simple tar command.
However, using Makefiles leads to really ugly bungles. Autoconf doesn't, to my knowledge, have any kind of support for this.
Any ideas about how to do it easily and cleanly?
What freedom? Who cares?
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
What's this software freedom about?
I've found it very difficult to explain it to those who don't care about it. It's just like trying to explain the importance of western freedom to a stalinist, a chinese, or a religious fanatic. They simply say, "What do I need that freedom for?" Why would a monogamist need freedom for free sex or a muslism for free beer?
I guess the main problem is that we who appreciate this freedom live in such a different world. We appreciate it because we have experienced it and we don't want to give it away, ever again.
10 years ago, I had a computer. All of my software was pirated, because I nor my family wasn't exactly filthy rich, so I never could have afforded to buy all the software I needed. I loved programming, but the costs of even cheapest development tools would have been prohibitive.
But even with enough money, there would still have been inpenetrable barriers of the proprietary software which I could never change or use in any way, except the restricted ways the producers allow me. I was living, from morning to the evening, in a totaliarian world with high walls everywhere.
5 years ago, I became a Linux user. All the barriers crumbled down, and I could at last breathe freely and freely look at everything in the world in which I live. My world had changed.
Well, my world has its problems. If I want to buy a computer, Linux may or may not have drivers for its hardware. Not all web pages work any more, because Internet Explorer has become a standard. "The other world" is a threat to my dream world, to my freedom. Then someone thinks I'm a fanatic just because I want to protect my free world from Microsoft, which is a totalitarian regime par taleban or the chinese gov. To them, my free world is The Enemy, because if I live in my world, I don't make them profit, and *gasp* might even seduce other paying customers to my world. They want to take my freedom away.
But this is me, a programmer, who really *needs* the freedom. Why would anybody else care about this free world?
Free software isn't just Liber Software, but also gratis beer software. It changes the entire idea that you have to pay for the air you breathe. It decriminalizes all the kids who have a computer and want to explore the world of computing (like playing games).
But no, I don't believe I could ever explain the splendidness of my world of Free Software or other freedoms to a taleban or a chinese communist or a religious fundamentalist or any other authoritarian person. Such as a Microsoft shareholder.
Even with my background, it took me a long time to understand the freedom RMS is talking about. He is talking about software freedom, where you can change and distribute any software without being jailed as a thief, not your freedom to take the freedom of others away with (proprietary) licenses.
Of course RMS is a libertarian in other many senses too. It might be that he sometimes unnecessarily mixes different concepts of liberties, I don't know. But he's perhaps the most influential person for creating the world I live in today, so I'll gladly give him my respect for that.
I've rarely seen so splendid *GOTCHA* as this one from Redhat. It will really show Microsoft's double-faced behaviour.
Sadly, of course Microsoft will not accept it, and the court will accept Microsoft's proposal. This kind of settlement would be just too adventurous for the justice system, I'm afraid.
And the public will not care a bit, but all children of America will praise Microsoft's generosity and kind-heartness. That's the saddest thing. TANJ.
I also don't quite believe Redhat's proposal. I doubt they would be delivering 1 million Redhat boxed packages with printed manuals and everything. Perhaps one for each school, or maybe just a CD set, or just "here's the URL."
This is one aspect which might make the proposal less appealing.
Great to have those binaries for RedHat. I've been whining about them here after every recent KDE release, so perhaps someone at last did something. THANKS!
Now, if they don't work with RH7.1, I'll whine a bit more... (Naah, I'll just update my RH.)
I just hope they finally compiled it with that-one-option-which-makes-app-startup-half-time.
Oh this is fun. I sent mail to the Dell's Finnish sales representative.
Me: "Hi, is it possible to buy a Dell laptop without an operating system? If so, how does it affect the price?"
SR: "We don't sell Inspiro laptops without an operating system or softwares. You can order a Latitude laptop without softwares or also without operating system. However, we have remove the pre-installed operating system, which work will cost you $40."
Me (pondering): "Also a Latitude might do. How much is the price reduced if I buy it without an operating system and other softwares, which are usually in the price?"
SR: "The basic price is without softwares and since the operating system is an OEM version, it doesn't affect the price."
Me: "Thank you for your answer. I understand that Dell as an OEM pays for the operating systems it installs on its products, so it's clear that it affects the price."
Me: "Understandably, I will not pay for products which I do not use, so Dell laptops are not an option for me."
Me: "If you change your offer, you may contact me."
Me: "Best regards, "
So great, if I want to buy a laptop without paying money for criminal organizations, I have to pay more. Absolutely great.
Same problem with Compaq. IBM sells some Linux laptops, but I think they have Caldera, and cost strawberries, and not even less than with Windows. Umh. DoJ, DO SOMETHING!
This doesn't answer my big question - can I buy a Dell (or some other common) laptop without any operating system?
While having a Linux preinstalled may be good for some people, I don't really care. I'd probably re-install my own fav distro anyhow (especially as some manufacturers preinstall Caldera or something equally exotic/nonstandard).
Most essentially, I absolutely refuse to pay for any Microsoft software, especially if I wouldn't even use it.
I wish the KDE people published more binaries during the development, nightly or weekly builds or something. Compiling all the stuff takes several days, and it's usually hellishly difficult to get through compilations successfully.
SuSE seems to have published a limited 3.0.0 beta1 binaries, but I haven't found them for RH nor Mandrake. Well, RH takes usually a long time to publish even the release versions.
At one time, I participated in some minor KDE development, but it was somewhat bothersome that I could rarely get even kdelibs compiled easily. It made development a bit difficult sometimes.
KDE is just so damn big, and the libs change just too much all the time.
I know very little about the politics of he "globalization" issue, and I hope I find a chance to learn more about it. Definition of concepts is always difficult and usually you just have to accept it. Context-sensitivity of words is very common.
One interesting point of view might be mathematics, or more exactly, studies of complex nonlinear systems (you know, the freaky chaos people).
There are numerous studies concerning the behaviour of complex nonlinear systems interconnected in different ways. The research of Stuart Kauffman (a theoretical biologist) is perhaps the most well known, as well as other research from the Santa Fe Institute.
One aspect is simply evolutionary - globally interconnected systems tend to converge fast, while sparsely interconnected systems (such as 2d-lattices) tend to converge slower, but they have higher diversity, which often results in better overall solutions.
Also, highly interconnected systems are rigid because each connection is also a constraint. I don't really know how to apply this to economical globalization. The problem is that the human culture is interconnected in so many ways and on so many levels. Globalization might force a radical self-organizational change in the connectivity structure of humanity, by reducing connectivity in many aspects, or in other words, reducing diversity.
One significant problem in many complex systems is that simple changes at a lower level of a system (in parameters or laws) can result in emergence of totally unpredictable and often undesirable effects in large scale.
Some call this "the invisible hand". It's a pretty well-known concept in many scientific fields, especially the science of finance and economy.
For example, globalization of economy forces countries to compete with their laws to get foreign investments and workers. The result is that companies control laws very effectively. Sometimes this may be good, such as for preventing wars, but quite often not. For example, countries that have stonger social balancing system may suffer in short-term economical competition, as their taxes can be forced to too low level.
Unfortunately, just like the watchmaker of biological evolution, the invisible hand of market economy is blind. Just like other nature, it doesn't have ethics nor does it care anything about humans, and is thus sometimes undesirable.
I mean, corporate life, it will find a way, and then comes the running and the screaming.
I'm not sure if this helps the terminology issue much, but hopefully it gives some directions.
This is typical behavior of authoritarians. Authoritarians can't stand to be told what to do, so, often, they will form or work strongly within anti-oppression movements.
So what? This whole topic is useless. What does it matter why people do what they do, if they do something that is considered good for the society?
One might say: "Computer geeks usually do programming because they can show their intellectual superiority through it. Their (unrealistic) fantasy is that this helps them get women, because intelligence is often appreciated. Therefore, programmers program to get sex."
So what? Does this animal motivation lessen the value of programming somehow?
Only situation where motivations might be useful to know, is knowing if there is motivation for deception, a hidden agenda. This applies to some politicians (such as Stallman) poorly, because they would not win much with deception.
Stallman'sagenda is perfectly well known and he follows it rather consistently. He is respected because his ideas and arguments about freedom of software are considered mostly good by many people. His motivations don't matter, as long as they don't direct him to act against his public agenda.
Now, if Stallman is against non-free software in Gnome (or whatever is the issue), he speaks with the voice of rather many.
If you disagree with him, use good arguments, not ad hominem attacks.
Remember M$ are still being dragged through the courts in Europe so Europeans ought to send some of those intelligent and informed opinions to their representitives too.
Nah, if the EU ever made Microsoft to pay for their abuse of monopoly, and enforce some penalties, Microsoft would lobby the USA to use WTO to declare the penalties as baseless import regulations.
Then, the US import tolls of European bananas would go up again (remember the hormone meat case?).
2) All communication protocols used by all microsoft products must be fully documented. Such documents must be made available to any and all parties for any reason.
This is a very important part. I'd suggest a few additions:
- the clause must include also file formats used in any Microsoft products
- the documents must be made available for free at the Microsoft web site, not just in MSDN nor through some other expensive service or licensing.
- the documentation must be released at least 60 days before the publication of the product, and also 60 days before the publication of any updates.
- Microsoft itself must follow the documentation and not make any unpublished private extensions on top of the published protocols
- the clause must apply also to any security protocols or fileformat encryptions
The fileformat documentation is very important, because they are also "communication protocols" used when communicating content between application instances. This would be especially important for MS Office, as it is strategically essential component of the infamous application barrier. Microsoft has an effective monopoly in Office products, which work properly only in Windows, which is the single most influential factor in creating and maintaining the OS monopoly.
There might still be loopholes for protocols requiring pantented or otherwise closed or proprietary third-party components. Microsoft should be forbidden of using such 3rd-party components to circumvent the requirements.
We found a large difference between C++ and Java - with Java being up to five times faster end-to-end.
That's interesting. Did your tasks require very special libraries which Java includes by default? What base libraries you used for C++?
There's an enormous difference between coding C++ with a good class library such as Qt or just using the default classes. STL doesn't count, it's pretty useless.
2) Take your best estimate , and double it and add 5 or something....
The standard multiplier used is PI.
There are also some interesting results of programming speed in the Prechelt's comparison of different programming languages: an article, a tech report.
One of the conclusions is that script languages such as Python or Perl are about 2-3 times as fast to program with than Java or C/C++, at least in the small projects. The script programs were also about half as long in lines. There were also some differences in the reliability of the solutions - Python and Tcl had a very good score compared to C, although the small sample size for C may give misleading results.
I'd personally be very interested to see better data for differences between C and C++. I've recently been involved in C again after a long pause, and it seems like an awfully risky language to program with. However, it may be faster than C++, on average, and the Prechelt's results agree with this conception.
As much as I agree that universities should keep their networks open, I have to disagree with this point. Why? Because initial "gray" work can (and probably should) still be done on an isolated network.
Some yes, at least theoretically. If someone makes an ingenious new important system, he could develop it first for some time, and then might get a permission to run it on an open server. Yes, possible, in theory.
In real world, I think most projects are not so "important" or high-end that professors would give them permission at any point. Many of the projects may be (at least initially) hobby-related and professors would not appreciate them much. Notice that the reasons may need to be *very* heavy, so even having written some "new internet protocol" such as http might not qualify.
It's basicly a problem of unnecessary obstacles which unmotivate people. If you have to struggle too much to get that one cool service you'd like to do in your limited sparetime, you'll probably do something else. This is of course rather difficult subject to consider generally, but this is my intuition, based on how I do things.
What's so interesting about the source of for IE? I can't think of much.
The keyword for selecting the source codes to open is intercompatibility. IE follows open standards reasonably well, and any of it's own web standards are open (or otherwise no one could write html for IE), so it's not so much of a problem, not at least yet.
The most important source code would be for Office, especially for its file format, and also for the data structures (i.e. headers). Office is the most important source of the infamous Application Barrier mentioned in the Fact of Findings.
Other pieces would be other file formats, such as those handled by Media Player.
Another yet more useful would be requirement that any hardware drivers must be opened. This might be somewhat more difficult to get as it would require that also other companies than Microsoft open their drivers. It could be formulated in a way that Microsoft must require that any hardware drivers be licensed with an open license (with "open" I don't mean Open Source but a minimal source license that allows reading the code to attain intercompatibility).
Slashdot Mirror
If the next version of KDE was to be name KDE XP, it'd probably be a pretty smart marketing strategy, assuming there are no legality issues with using the letters X and P consecutively.
No, the JesusWindows is bad enough, we don't want a JesusKDE. (You know, XP...XPISTOS...Greek, XP is a very much used symbol in such iconography.)
The article says:
/. article.
/.)
"The impact of the fly is difficult to exaggerate,"
of, not on, as it was in the
Do you people ever read the articles? (Like I haven't heard this before on
The "nuclear mutant flies" may sound dangerous, but are really not in any way, as the "mutat" in this case basicly just means that they are so radically mutant that they are sterile. In real world, radical mutants don't get superpowers or anything.
All natural individuals of any species (including humans) are more or less mutant anyhow, so there's nothing inherently dangerous about that (unless you consinder life as dangerous).
'Life, I mean, will find a way. Oooh and aah, that's how it starts, and then comes the running and the screaming.'
It seems that that Ragnar BOY finally destroyed Loki's evil plans to destroy the world.
Now, was it *really* wise to port that Rune, eh?
May you live forever in the halls of the One-Eyed.
And a hearty round of thanks to all the Warez dudes out there.
The warez community might not be as strong in Linux games as in Wincrap. Warez needs networks of people, but if you don't have enough nodes, their connections won't reach the critical threshold to "crystallize" to form a network. (Everything is explainable with NK nets...)
On the other hand, Loki games didn't (don't...) have much if any copy protection, except in the multi-play mode of some games. This was a very user-friendly feature, as it made it easier to handle the game (no need to carry the cds around all the time), and I thank Loki for it.
Unlike with Windows games, I haven't a genuine illegal copy of any Linux game. (I have 9 Loki games, and you bet I'll be ordering a few more today if they still have them at the retailer.) And Linux games cost about 30% more here than their old Wincrap version, that is, about $60 for new Linux titles.
But yeah, this is a really sad day for me I and believe for much of the Linux community. Loki was very important for Linux.
What does the article mean with "random data"?
1) Data with maximal entropy?
2) Random file picked from Internet?
In case of 1), I'd say the article is crap. If bits in the data have absolutely no dependency between them, i.e., redundancy, (also between non-adjacent bits) it is absolutely impossible to compress them. It's not even good as a fairy tale.
In case of 2), ok, 1:100 may be possible for most non-compressed data. The new JPEG-2 algorithms can do 1:100, but it's lossy. Text compression algorithms might do 10:1 on typical text, but they are also quite fast and don't therefore find all redundancies. For example, Huffman encoding is at simplest done with just single characters, and not much longer sequences, the searching of which takes a lot of time. The redundancies do not also have to be linear; for example "wDoRrOdW" ('word' written first in lower case, and then with upper case to opposite direction) would be difficult to compress completely, although it clearly has high redundancy.
Removing all redundancies would require finding the shortest description, i.e., a program that prints the string. To find it, we have to go through all possible programs that are shorter than printf("wDoRrOdW"). Many of them don't even terminate (for example "while(1);"). Complete search is therefore impossible; all algorithms make guesses about the topology of the search landskape, and don't search everything.
I have absolutely no doubt that this method works well within the theoretical limits, albeit it's of course always possible that it verges the limits closer than any earlier methods.
Perhaps one of the critics should sit down with someone from the install team (or the whole team via phone) and hammer out a better UI for installation. Hell, consider this a challenge to anyone who doesn't like Debian's installer to improve it with us.
I'll promise to send at least a case report the next time I install Debian (probably the latest 2.2r4), although I'm not a Debian virgin anymore...
Aptitude is definitely much nicer than dselect, but still not intuitive enough, in my opinion.
Generally, I'd recommend at least mimicking the UI of other installers and package managers. Not that any of them are really good, but they are at least much easier to use than dselect, aptitude, or *eek* command-line apt-get. You don't have to hire a horde of UI specialists if you just borrow the work of Microsoft's/Redhat's/SuSE's/Mandrake's horde. Copying UI concepts is what made MS Windows, KDE, and many others very successful. Stealing ideas is good. It's building on other people's work, exactly what the basic idea of Free Software is.
Graphical UI would help a lot, as you can make it much more eye-friendly with colors, fonts, and graphics, and have more freedom in doing the layout.
When upgrading packages, I'd recommend to make it totally non-interactive (at least by default).
I really like Debian because of the relatively well working package system, and will definitely install it also as my next workstation distro, probably quite soon.
[Some (hopefully) constructive criticism incoming.]
Dselect has maybe the most horrible, messy and counterintuitive user interface I've ever seen.
Sure, it probably has some ubercool highly generic logic if you use hours learning to understand it, but that's not quite what a person installing an operating system should be expected to do.
Really, when I first *tried* to install Debian, I had 18 years of experience with computers, 5 years with (Redhat) Linux, and I got totally lost with the Debian installation.
For example, why can't the "go-back-to-previous-menu-key" be like it is in 100% of modern software? Why does it have to be Shift+Q? Why do I have to read some help to find this out? Why am I required to read ONE SCREEN full of help text when I start selecting packages?
When I'm installing an operating system, I *don't* want to spend one second of brain time trying to learn something totally unnecessary.
Just follow the user interfaces of Redhat, Mandrake or SuSE, they are rather good, although still have quite many problems too (I reported roughly 10 problems with last Mandrake installation). I think Corel Linux had the best and easiest installation I've seen.
Also messing up with the APT sources list isn't too easy. It really should have some meta servers. Corel Linux had some nice manager which does that, I think.
One very good thing which I like, is that Debian saves a journal of the installation to the disk, and thus remembers the selections you've done. This is very important if the installation fails/crashes for some reason at some point. All the Redhat-based distros are missing this very important feature.
The apt-get seems to be generally much better than the RPM counterparts, although I've had some problems with apt-get too, usually with dependencies in the unstable release. Even one database corruption, but luckily it's text-based so it was easyish to fix. (When my RPM database corrupted under Redhat, the only option was to reinstall the entire distro.)
And please make the CD bootable. The previous potato distro didn't have a bootable CD (or at least it didn't boot in my machine), and I don't have a floppy drive, so I had to fight with it for three days to get it installed from my old Redhat partition (I had to mount the floppy image as loop-back, chroot it, etc).
Any suggestions on how to get one from Europe (more specifically from Finland) if you don't have a credit card?
I think MS Word interoperability is perhaps the single most important barrier limiting companies from changing to Linux. Other Office products such as MS Excel and MS Powerpoint are also important.
You should remember that it's not just necessary to have some semi-lousy import filters to Linux word-processors, but also have 100% compatible export filters. It's practically impossible to make a transition in any company that has to communicate with an existing MS Word user base. And that is the case for almost any companies and public administration.
And 99% doesn't do, it must be 100.000%. If there are even small incompatibilities, you have to use genuine MS Word -> MS Windows.
StarOffice 6.0 beta (same as OpenOffice build 638c) has some compatibility in basic formatting. The older StarOffice 5.2 has, in my experience, much better MS Word compatibility, but it also breaks up quite quickly. However, its Excel compatibility is worse than with SO6.0b/OO638c.
KOffice (1.1) is not even worth mentioning with regard to MS Office compatibility. Its Word import filter simply strips all formatting, and it doesn't have an export filter.
I work in an IT company, doing purely Linux work, but have to do all documentation, communication, and administrative tasks with MS Office. I was able to use StarOffice 5.2 for a while in some tasks, but can't rely on it completely. The situation really sucks.
Wow, that was easy. Thanks! (To other people who replied too.)
..". I had to add a "-I $(top_srcdir)". But that's not too much trouble.
I had some slight problems with my own library that wants to have the source root directory in includes, and I had used "-I
I'll be using that feature a lot in future!
One feature which I like in one Makefile system that I use, is not writing the output files, i.e., object and target files, to the source directory but somewhere else.
Writing them somewhere else makes doing backups much easier, plus the directories don't get overcrowded. You can even make source distros just with a simple tar command.
However, using Makefiles leads to really ugly bungles. Autoconf doesn't, to my knowledge, have any kind of support for this.
Any ideas about how to do it easily and cleanly?
What's this software freedom about?
I've found it very difficult to explain it to those who don't care about it. It's just like trying to explain the importance of western freedom to a stalinist, a chinese, or a religious fanatic. They simply say, "What do I need that freedom for?" Why would a monogamist need freedom for free sex or a muslism for free beer?
I guess the main problem is that we who appreciate this freedom live in such a different world. We appreciate it because we have experienced it and we don't want to give it away, ever again.
10 years ago, I had a computer. All of my software was pirated, because I nor my family wasn't exactly filthy rich, so I never could have afforded to buy all the software I needed. I loved programming, but the costs of even cheapest development tools would have been prohibitive.
But even with enough money, there would still have been inpenetrable barriers of the proprietary software which I could never change or use in any way, except the restricted ways the producers allow me. I was living, from morning to the evening, in a totaliarian world with high walls everywhere.
5 years ago, I became a Linux user. All the barriers crumbled down, and I could at last breathe freely and freely look at everything in the world in which I live. My world had changed.
Well, my world has its problems. If I want to buy a computer, Linux may or may not have drivers for its hardware. Not all web pages work any more, because Internet Explorer has become a standard. "The other world" is a threat to my dream world, to my freedom. Then someone thinks I'm a fanatic just because I want to protect my free world from Microsoft, which is a totalitarian regime par taleban or the chinese gov. To them, my free world is The Enemy, because if I live in my world, I don't make them profit, and *gasp* might even seduce other paying customers to my world. They want to take my freedom away.
But this is me, a programmer, who really *needs* the freedom. Why would anybody else care about this free world?
Free software isn't just Liber Software, but also gratis beer software. It changes the entire idea that you have to pay for the air you breathe. It decriminalizes all the kids who have a computer and want to explore the world of computing (like playing games).
But no, I don't believe I could ever explain the splendidness of my world of Free Software or other freedoms to a taleban or a chinese communist or a religious fundamentalist or any other authoritarian person. Such as a Microsoft shareholder.
Even with my background, it took me a long time to understand the freedom RMS is talking about. He is talking about software freedom, where you can change and distribute any software without being jailed as a thief, not your freedom to take the freedom of others away with (proprietary) licenses.
Of course RMS is a libertarian in other many senses too. It might be that he sometimes unnecessarily mixes different concepts of liberties, I don't know. But he's perhaps the most influential person for creating the world I live in today, so I'll gladly give him my respect for that.
I've rarely seen so splendid *GOTCHA* as this one from Redhat. It will really show Microsoft's double-faced behaviour.
Sadly, of course Microsoft will not accept it, and the court will accept Microsoft's proposal. This kind of settlement would be just too adventurous for the justice system, I'm afraid.
And the public will not care a bit, but all children of America will praise Microsoft's generosity and kind-heartness. That's the saddest thing. TANJ.
I also don't quite believe Redhat's proposal. I doubt they would be delivering 1 million Redhat boxed packages with printed manuals and everything. Perhaps one for each school, or maybe just a CD set, or just "here's the URL."
This is one aspect which might make the proposal less appealing.
Great to have those binaries for RedHat. I've been whining about them here after every recent KDE release, so perhaps someone at last did something. THANKS!
.
Now, if they don't work with RH7.1, I'll whine a bit more... (Naah, I'll just update my RH.)
I just hope they finally compiled it with that-one-option-which-makes-app-startup-half-time
Oh this is fun. I sent mail to the Dell's Finnish sales representative.
Me: "Hi, is it possible to buy a Dell laptop without an operating system? If so, how does it affect the price?"
SR: "We don't sell Inspiro laptops without an operating system or softwares. You can order a Latitude laptop without softwares or also without operating system. However, we have remove the pre-installed operating system, which work will cost you $40."
Me (pondering): "Also a Latitude might do. How much is the price reduced if I buy it without an operating system and other softwares, which are usually in the price?"
SR: "The basic price is without softwares and since the operating system is an OEM version, it doesn't affect the price."
Me: "Thank you for your answer. I understand that Dell as an OEM pays for the operating systems it installs on its products, so it's clear that it affects the price."
Me: "Understandably, I will not pay for products which I do not use, so Dell laptops are not an option for me."
Me: "If you change your offer, you may contact me."
Me: "Best regards, "
So great, if I want to buy a laptop without paying money for criminal organizations, I have to pay more. Absolutely great.
Same problem with Compaq. IBM sells some Linux laptops, but I think they have Caldera, and cost strawberries, and not even less than with Windows. Umh. DoJ, DO SOMETHING!
This doesn't answer my big question - can I buy a Dell (or some other common) laptop without any operating system?
While having a Linux preinstalled may be good for some people, I don't really care. I'd probably re-install my own fav distro anyhow (especially as some manufacturers preinstall Caldera or something equally exotic/nonstandard).
Most essentially, I absolutely refuse to pay for any Microsoft software, especially if I wouldn't even use it.
I wish the KDE people published more binaries during the development, nightly or weekly builds or something. Compiling all the stuff takes several days, and it's usually hellishly difficult to get through compilations successfully.
SuSE seems to have published a limited 3.0.0 beta1 binaries, but I haven't found them for RH nor Mandrake. Well, RH takes usually a long time to publish even the release versions.
At one time, I participated in some minor KDE development, but it was somewhat bothersome that I could rarely get even kdelibs compiled easily. It made development a bit difficult sometimes.
KDE is just so damn big, and the libs change just too much all the time.
I know very little about the politics of he "globalization" issue, and I hope I find a chance to learn more about it. Definition of concepts is always difficult and usually you just have to accept it. Context-sensitivity of words is very common.
One interesting point of view might be mathematics, or more exactly, studies of complex nonlinear systems (you know, the freaky chaos people).
There are numerous studies concerning the behaviour of complex nonlinear systems interconnected in different ways. The research of Stuart Kauffman (a theoretical biologist) is perhaps the most well known, as well as other research from the Santa Fe Institute.
One aspect is simply evolutionary - globally interconnected systems tend to converge fast, while sparsely interconnected systems (such as 2d-lattices) tend to converge slower, but they have higher diversity, which often results in better overall solutions.
Also, highly interconnected systems are rigid because each connection is also a constraint. I don't really know how to apply this to economical globalization. The problem is that the human culture is interconnected in so many ways and on so many levels. Globalization might force a radical self-organizational change in the connectivity structure of humanity, by reducing connectivity in many aspects, or in other words, reducing diversity.
One significant problem in many complex systems is that simple changes at a lower level of a system (in parameters or laws) can result in emergence of totally unpredictable and often undesirable effects in large scale.
Some call this "the invisible hand". It's a pretty well-known concept in many scientific fields, especially the science of finance and economy.
For example, globalization of economy forces countries to compete with their laws to get foreign investments and workers. The result is that companies control laws very effectively. Sometimes this may be good, such as for preventing wars, but quite often not. For example, countries that have stonger social balancing system may suffer in short-term economical competition, as their taxes can be forced to too low level.
Unfortunately, just like the watchmaker of biological evolution, the invisible hand of market economy is blind. Just like other nature, it doesn't have ethics nor does it care anything about humans, and is thus sometimes undesirable.
I mean, corporate life, it will find a way, and then comes the running and the screaming.
I'm not sure if this helps the terminology issue much, but hopefully it gives some directions.
This is typical behavior of authoritarians. Authoritarians can't stand to be told what to do, so, often, they will form or work strongly within anti-oppression movements.
So what? This whole topic is useless. What does it matter why people do what they do, if they do something that is considered good for the society?
One might say: "Computer geeks usually do programming because they can show their intellectual superiority through it. Their (unrealistic) fantasy is that this helps them get women, because intelligence is often appreciated. Therefore, programmers program to get sex."
So what? Does this animal motivation lessen the value of programming somehow?
Only situation where motivations might be useful to know, is knowing if there is motivation for deception, a hidden agenda. This applies to some politicians (such as Stallman) poorly, because they would not win much with deception.
Stallman'sagenda is perfectly well known and he follows it rather consistently. He is respected because his ideas and arguments about freedom of software are considered mostly good by many people. His motivations don't matter, as long as they don't direct him to act against his public agenda.
Now, if Stallman is against non-free software in Gnome (or whatever is the issue), he speaks with the voice of rather many.
If you disagree with him, use good arguments, not ad hominem attacks.
Remember M$ are still being dragged through the courts in Europe so Europeans ought to send some of those intelligent and informed opinions to their representitives too.
Nah, if the EU ever made Microsoft to pay for their abuse of monopoly, and enforce some penalties, Microsoft would lobby the USA to use WTO to declare the penalties as baseless import regulations.
Then, the US import tolls of European bananas would go up again (remember the hormone meat case?).
You like bananas, not?
2) All communication protocols used by all microsoft products must be fully documented. Such documents must be made available to any and all parties for any reason.
This is a very important part. I'd suggest a few additions:
- the clause must include also file formats used in any Microsoft products
- the documents must be made available for free at the Microsoft web site, not just in MSDN nor through some other expensive service or licensing.
- the documentation must be released at least 60 days before the publication of the product, and also 60 days before the publication of any updates.
- Microsoft itself must follow the documentation and not make any unpublished private extensions on top of the published protocols
- the clause must apply also to any security protocols or fileformat encryptions
The fileformat documentation is very important, because they are also "communication protocols" used when communicating content between application instances. This would be especially important for MS Office, as it is strategically essential component of the infamous application barrier. Microsoft has an effective monopoly in Office products, which work properly only in Windows, which is the single most influential factor in creating and maintaining the OS monopoly.
There might still be loopholes for protocols requiring pantented or otherwise closed or proprietary third-party components. Microsoft should be forbidden of using such 3rd-party components to circumvent the requirements.
We found a large difference between C++ and Java - with Java being up to five times faster end-to-end.
That's interesting. Did your tasks require very special libraries which Java includes by default? What base libraries you used for C++?
There's an enormous difference between coding C++ with a good class library such as Qt or just using the default classes. STL doesn't count, it's pretty useless.
2) Take your best estimate , and double it and add 5 or something....
The standard multiplier used is PI.
There are also some interesting results of programming speed in the Prechelt's comparison of different programming languages: an article, a tech report.
One of the conclusions is that script languages such as Python or Perl are about 2-3 times as fast to program with than Java or C/C++, at least in the small projects. The script programs were also about half as long in lines. There were also some differences in the reliability of the solutions - Python and Tcl had a very good score compared to C, although the small sample size for C may give misleading results.
I'd personally be very interested to see better data for differences between C and C++. I've recently been involved in C again after a long pause, and it seems like an awfully risky language to program with. However, it may be faster than C++, on average, and the Prechelt's results agree with this conception.
As much as I agree that universities should keep their networks open, I have to disagree with this point. Why? Because initial "gray" work can (and probably should) still be done on an isolated network.
Some yes, at least theoretically. If someone makes an ingenious new important system, he could develop it first for some time, and then might get a permission to run it on an open server. Yes, possible, in theory.
In real world, I think most projects are not so "important" or high-end that professors would give them permission at any point. Many of the projects may be (at least initially) hobby-related and professors would not appreciate them much. Notice that the reasons may need to be *very* heavy, so even having written some "new internet protocol" such as http might not qualify.
It's basicly a problem of unnecessary obstacles which unmotivate people. If you have to struggle too much to get that one cool service you'd like to do in your limited sparetime, you'll probably do something else. This is of course rather difficult subject to consider generally, but this is my intuition, based on how I do things.
What's so interesting about the source of for IE? I can't think of much.
.NET and Passport.
The keyword for selecting the source codes to open is intercompatibility. IE follows open standards reasonably well, and any of it's own web standards are open (or otherwise no one could write html for IE), so it's not so much of a problem, not at least yet.
The most important source code would be for Office, especially for its file format, and also for the data structures (i.e. headers). Office is the most important source of the infamous Application Barrier mentioned in the Fact of Findings.
Other pieces would be other file formats, such as those handled by Media Player.
Another yet more useful would be requirement that any hardware drivers must be opened. This might be somewhat more difficult to get as it would require that also other companies than Microsoft open their drivers. It could be formulated in a way that Microsoft must require that any hardware drivers be licensed with an open license (with "open" I don't mean Open Source but a minimal source license that allows reading the code to attain intercompatibility).
And of course,