I managed to get 2.x up on my Linux box once, when I got the base to compile. Since then, I've had a few difficulties compiling a few parts, which caused the whole makefile to bomb. The ODBC library, for instance, did not compile, which would be okay, hunky-dory, it's unstable, but I couldn't even get make -k to get over it. Had to manually edit the makefile.
Recently, I've had to edit the makefile for kdelibs again because it compiles them out of order and several dependencies don't work. It would seem not one of the developers ever recompiles this system from scratch, because there is no dependency checking.
Anyhow, when I got it working, I was impressed by the speed and looks (a bit crashy, but this was EARLY stuff and I didn't have everything installed either). The wizard was incomplete, but the art was good, but "My name is Kandalf"??? OH PLEASE. The wizard doesn't need a name, much less such a god-AWFUL corny (Korny?) one. Just a nitpick, but I just about gagged. Really.
Anyhow, slightly less trivial notes: I certainly hope it's not the default QT 2.0 look that I saw there. There *is* too much of a thing as "too much 3d". The buttons had these ultra-rounded edges, and the radio buttons looked not only way too bumpy, but... rough. Almost like they were hand-drawn (though a true "hand-drawn" theme that introduced little variances in each widget would be COOL, if a little slow)
Kicker wasn't terribly impressive. I do not like having my taskbar crunched into a little, or even large applet space. I like to smack my mouse to the top of the screen (yeah i keep it at the top) and have the whole edge to select my app. yes, the idea of the "K" menu is also awful, I guess it's a necessary concession to people used to the equally awful "start" button. This is a gripe I had with gnome, and now KDE replicates it.
BTW, what the heck is krootwm called now? It was really crashy when I was using it, and I would have liked to be able to restart it.
Re:KDE doomed to repeat Windows's mistakes
on
KDE 2.0 in Action
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· Score: 2
> Report KDE bugs to http://bugs.kde.org, not to slashdot.
Where you can list open bugs that haven't been closed in over a year (maybe fixed, but the ticket is left to... die of loneliness I guess?)
And where you find that you cannot submit bugs from any kind of web form, but have to send some kind of specially-formatted email.
Windows, meanwhile, now comes with a bug submit program -- they just bury it real deep.
You can moderate THIS offtopic too. I thought it was a netscape bug that the colors in this topic looked awful, but am I led to understand that this is some sort of feature?
Gack, it's awful. Bring back slashdot green in all sections. Consistency is a GOOD THING.
> Why am I somewhat less than dazzled by drivers that (A) do not support Voodoo Graphics/Rush/2 cards, and (B) do not support the full Glide API?
Voodoo Rush is dead. It was still-born. Take it from someone who was foolish enough to actually buy one at one time.
Waah waah waahh... Look, 3dfx is still on probation in my book too, but god are you ever an ingrate. Has the Linux Way become to bitch at companies who don't do ALL your work for you?
> Ok, here it is: It's a multiprocessor that, given any instruction set, figures out ways to parallelize the code as much as possible by performing instructions out of order.
CPUs do that now. Hopefully they have something more original. Hate to deflate everyone's expectations, but the word "mobility" suggests to me that they just made a plain ol CPU that's probably very low-power. Heck, some CPU's today can be driven by the juice from the instruction pins alone (long as you still have electrical ground connected, of course).
Microsoft's Direct3D has been tracking the latest developments in cards: D3D 7.0 will have direct support for lightmaps and stencil buffers, for example.
Where is OpenGL headed? Is anyone furthering its development? Is it going to track the features it needs to stay competitive as a games API?
Otherwise we're stuck with Glide and D3D. Talk about a Hobson's choice.
Try compiling something a little larger than "hello world" with gcc sometime before comparing code footprints. apache produced a smaller executable with gcc than it did with DevPro (though DevPro could still probably crunch it way down if I used all the size-over-speed optimizations).
My "hello world" is 1K, I just moved it to libc, gee doesn't that make it useful?
> Oh, think this is good for OpenSource and the GPL? Try this: Motorola uses GCC on its switches. Ask Motorola for its changes to GCC. You won't get them.
And they don't have to. Do you see Motorola GCC being distributed anywhere? Jesus H Christ, are there any brain cells still active on slashdot whenever the GPL is mentioned?
> Ever hear that Microsoft requires a compile at the end of the day, no matter how they get it?
Microsoft operates on a daily build basis. If you break the tree, you tend to get a lot of blame heaped on you, so last-minute kludges tend to be made to get the thing to compile. It's far from "no matter how you did it" because eventually your kludge will break it again.
Guess what: Mozilla operates on daily builds too. Sure would be nice if gnome would -- on a virgin system, gnome out of CVS won't even begin to compile. Now it dies with some nonsense about ORBit in automake macros. Been broken in some fashion for months.
'course, just getting something to compile isn't terribly meaningful, but at least it keeps integration testing going, whereas a broken tree brings it to a screeching halt.
> Instead of bitching, go download the nightly release and do some bughunting/verifying.
I want a browser that works. I used to get PAID to hunt bugs. I've had enough of being an unpaid QA drone by using Microsoft products.
Look, when my browser crashes with an Invalid Page Fault, that's sloppy code. That's not stub code that isn't written yet, that's not a failed assertion, that's a mistake. And mozilla is ridden with them.
You wouldn't think an Open Source project would need to engage in "Spinning" would you? Another first for the Mozilla team.
Oh, and Linux has absolutely no one engaging in spin control... Bloody hell, at least Windows only insults my intelligence, unlike the blistering verbiage I get whenever I say anything negative about Linux. M$ Whore, Tool, FUDmeister, on and on.
Know what Steve Jobs said to the crowd that booed Bill Gates when he appeared on the screen? "Grow up". I'd pay good money to hear Linus say the same thing.
> I don't know how or why, but for some reason Qt programs always seem to resemble windows for me...
Same shade of grey, same height of buttons, and if you're running with the windows theme, then it takes pains to look the same. Window manager with its flush relief-detailed window controls looks more like OS/2 to me. KDE 2.0 has a (pretty horrendous) looking button set that looks a lot more like MacOS 8.x buttons than windows.
Anyhow, this has gotten way off topic. AFAIK, I don't think CAD programs are designed for any widget set in general.
> Will some day Alan Cox and Linus say yes to Devfs so I can know with more accuracy where to find my USB, SCSI and Fire Wire devices without the need to have 10 000+/dev nodes for every possible piece of hardware I can plug in my machine?
What on *earth* do you need all of them present for? Detect device, MAKEDEV. Repeat. Perfectly automatable, and it's pretty much exactly what Solaris already does. I like the idea of devfs, I don't like the idea of having to tar it up to maintain state though.
Did you know that you can do tricks with antialiasing in your fonts to change the text on your screen as it appears to a tempest scanner?
tempest isn't there to read text off your screen. it's there to show that your screen is on in the first place and that it's doing something, and that something matches patterns kind of like typing. so if you say "i was in bora bora the day that system was cracked" they can ask you, "then who was typing on your computer?"
> Please explain how ActiveX is superior to Netscape's plugin system.
Technologically, they're almost exactly the same. Netscape Plugins on Win32 use OLE2, whereas ActiveX is simply a marketroid word for the same thing (sort of, OLE2 is an ActiveX "technology" that adds on a late-binding dispatch layer, one that isn't strictly necessary now).
Netscape can now autoinstall plugins for you when you hit pages that require them. They can run arbitrary code that can do anything they want to your system. This is *exactly* like ActiveX controls, without the benefit of code signing! Yet why isn't Netscape being nailed to a cross for this? Oh, because they have to be accessable from Netscape's site, giving them more control over the content than Microsoft, which doesn't require the middleman. Why isn't Netscape in the stocks now?
Because they're not Microsoft, that's why.
War this, war that. I'm really sick of these childish games. Real innocent bystanders die in real wars, sometimes millions are slaughtered in the efficient machinery of murder. The War on Drugs, the War on Crime, the War on Poverty, the War on Microsoft. I'm really god damn SICK of the war metaphor, dig?
> Permanantly mount the floppy and cdrom? How do you plan on ejecting? Personally, I'd just remove the floppy from the write cache.
He just doesn't have the correct terminology, which is hardly a crime. He wants volume management, something I take for granted on Solaris and Windows both, and have yet to see on Linux. Truth be told, most intuitive volume management I've seen was on the mac, back in 1992 or so (though it was a bit aggressive about asking for floppies when ejecting them).
Let's just go over some of these, ah, "improvements".
> Totally drop the command prompt, or at least make it so you can do ANYTHING without it. Like Windows is right now.
Ludicrous. Fragmenting a unified interface into a dozen GUI interfaces spread across a dozen dialogs each taking, yes, an icky TYPED text option, is not getting rid of the command line. Doing automated complex things in NT still requires typing up some kind of perl script.
> Graphical installation screen for programs (similar to StarOffice, I myself would LOVE this too)
Joy, then we can see a burgeoning market in programs like CleanSweep that "really uninstall programs for real" thanks to idiodicy like InstallShield, which keeps its install information in the directory of the program, so if you erase or just plain move the install directory, you can't uninstall the program. Or get rid of it from your add/remove programs menu without special tools. The sheer bureacracy of installshield is something I hear no end of griping about, from novices and experts alike.
> Make it easier to use. Most of it has to do with the heavily text nature of Linux. My dad finds it easier to click some button then type in a bunch of acrane commands and options.
My experience at the helpdesk is that windows requires you to click a bunch of buttons, then type various arcane things, then click on some more buttons, type arcane things, and so on. Are you sensing a theme here? The GUI in Windows ain't so graphical.
You lose. I had the displeasure of running M10 on win98. First immediate annoyance: mousewheel doesn't work. Reflow is decent, a damn sight better than netscape, but not as smooth as IE. Some images got placed slightly off, I could actually see the placeholder and a piece of the ALT text where the image should have been.
But when I selected several items off menus, it was always crash, crash, crash. And not from failed assertions, mind you, but invalid page faults. Meaning this thing has null or stale pointers all over the place, possibly even buffer overruns. Does expect that these are just going to all get fixed so long as we just chase 'em out and patch 'em as we hit them? If that kind of ad hoc methodology is driving Mozilla, it doesn't have a prayer.
Holy crap if I were a webmaster I wouldn't read past sentence 1 of such an insufferably superior attitude.
How about: "I'm trying to read your page with on . It's broken, such and such doesn't render properly. Looks like you have an unclosed table tag [or whatever is the problem]. Could you please fix it? Thanks from a potential paying customer."
Just because you're right doesn't mean you have to be righteous.
> Hey - you just described IE5. Hate to admit it but...all the components of IE are just generally available COM objects.
AND you can script those components with Perl. Or Python. Or Javascript, C++, Delphi, VB, or even freakin Haskell
Unix can only claim superior scriptability at the moment because it has a passable scripting language as its command shell (some better than others, ksh has better typing for example). But what it can't do is script individual components of a program in any language that has a native interface. Want to embed a browser component in emacs and remote-control it with elisp? Fat chance.
Yes, yes, this is all promised with gnome and bonobo and corba corba uber alles. But so far, like mozilla, it hasn't produced any deliverables. I'm not even impressed with the stability of mozilla under win32.
Gah, I managed to screw up the name of the compiler every time. It's DevPro, not DevStudio. Suffice to say I prefer it to gcc every time, and thankfully so does autoconf.
Slashdot Mirror
I managed to get 2.x up on my Linux box once, when I got the base to compile. Since then, I've had a few difficulties compiling a few parts, which caused the whole makefile to bomb. The ODBC library, for instance, did not compile, which would be okay, hunky-dory, it's unstable, but I couldn't even get make -k to get over it. Had to manually edit the makefile.
... rough. Almost like they were hand-drawn (though a true "hand-drawn" theme that introduced little variances in each widget would be COOL, if a little slow)
Recently, I've had to edit the makefile for kdelibs again because it compiles them out of order and several dependencies don't work. It would seem not one of the developers ever recompiles this system from scratch, because there is no dependency checking.
Anyhow, when I got it working, I was impressed by the speed and looks (a bit crashy, but this was EARLY stuff and I didn't have everything installed either). The wizard was incomplete, but the art was good, but "My name is Kandalf"??? OH PLEASE. The wizard doesn't need a name, much less such a god-AWFUL corny (Korny?) one. Just a nitpick, but I just about gagged. Really.
Anyhow, slightly less trivial notes: I certainly hope it's not the default QT 2.0 look that I saw there. There *is* too much of a thing as "too much 3d". The buttons had these ultra-rounded edges, and the radio buttons looked not only way too bumpy, but
Kicker wasn't terribly impressive. I do not like having my taskbar crunched into a little, or even large applet space. I like to smack my mouse to the top of the screen (yeah i keep it at the top) and have the whole edge to select my app. yes, the idea of the "K" menu is also awful, I guess it's a necessary concession to people used to the equally awful "start" button. This is a gripe I had with gnome, and now KDE replicates it.
BTW, what the heck is krootwm called now? It was really crashy when I was using it, and I would have liked to be able to restart it.
> Report KDE bugs to http://bugs.kde.org, not to slashdot.
... die of loneliness I guess?)
Where you can list open bugs that haven't been closed in over a year (maybe fixed, but the ticket is left to
And where you find that you cannot submit bugs from any kind of web form, but have to send some kind of specially-formatted email.
Windows, meanwhile, now comes with a bug submit program -- they just bury it real deep.
You can moderate THIS offtopic too. I thought it was a netscape bug that the colors in this topic looked awful, but am I led to understand that this is some sort of feature?
Gack, it's awful. Bring back slashdot green in all sections. Consistency is a GOOD THING.
> Why am I somewhat less than dazzled by drivers that (A) do not support Voodoo Graphics/Rush/2 cards, and (B) do not support the full Glide API?
Voodoo Rush is dead. It was still-born. Take it from someone who was foolish enough to actually buy one at one time.
Waah waah waahh... Look, 3dfx is still on probation in my book too, but god are you ever an ingrate. Has the Linux Way become to bitch at companies who don't do ALL your work for you?
> Ok, here it is: It's a multiprocessor that, given any instruction set, figures out ways to parallelize the code as much as possible by performing instructions out of order.
CPUs do that now. Hopefully they have something more original. Hate to deflate everyone's expectations, but the word "mobility" suggests to me that they just made a plain ol CPU that's probably very low-power. Heck, some CPU's today can be driven by the juice from the instruction pins alone (long as you still have electrical ground connected, of course).
Microsoft's Direct3D has been tracking the latest developments in cards: D3D 7.0 will have direct support for lightmaps and stencil buffers, for example.
Where is OpenGL headed? Is anyone furthering its development? Is it going to track the features it needs to stay competitive as a games API?
Otherwise we're stuck with Glide and D3D. Talk about a Hobson's choice.
Try compiling something a little larger than "hello world" with gcc sometime before comparing code footprints. apache produced a smaller executable with gcc than it did with DevPro (though DevPro could still probably crunch it way down if I used all the size-over-speed optimizations).
My "hello world" is 1K, I just moved it to libc, gee doesn't that make it useful?
> Oh, think this is good for OpenSource and the GPL? Try this: Motorola uses GCC on its switches. Ask Motorola for its changes to GCC. You won't get them.
And they don't have to. Do you see Motorola GCC being distributed anywhere? Jesus H Christ, are there any brain cells still active on slashdot whenever the GPL is mentioned?
> frivolous use of any content/technology that would otherwise be useful (java, jscript, animations, etc
And of course YOU are the authority on what is frivolous. Why this country would be in an artistic golden age if they only painted art I liked, right?
I defy you to even tell me what ActiveX is, BTW, and the similarities to plugins.
Mozilla won't make it up the steps if it doesn't work with Shockwave. end of story.
> Ever hear that Microsoft requires a compile at the end of the day, no matter how they get it?
Microsoft operates on a daily build basis. If you break the tree, you tend to get a lot of blame heaped on you, so last-minute kludges tend to be made to get the thing to compile. It's far from "no matter how you did it" because eventually your kludge will break it again.
Guess what: Mozilla operates on daily builds too. Sure would be nice if gnome would -- on a virgin system, gnome out of CVS won't even begin to compile. Now it dies with some nonsense about ORBit in automake macros. Been broken in some fashion for months.
'course, just getting something to compile isn't terribly meaningful, but at least it keeps integration testing going, whereas a broken tree brings it to a screeching halt.
> Instead of bitching, go download the nightly release and do some bughunting/verifying.
I want a browser that works. I used to get PAID to hunt bugs. I've had enough of being an unpaid QA drone by using Microsoft products.
Look, when my browser crashes with an Invalid Page Fault, that's sloppy code. That's not stub code that isn't written yet, that's not a failed assertion, that's a mistake. And mozilla is ridden with them.
You wouldn't think an Open Source project would need to engage in "Spinning" would you? Another first for the Mozilla team.
Oh, and Linux has absolutely no one engaging in spin control... Bloody hell, at least Windows only insults my intelligence, unlike the blistering verbiage I get whenever I say anything negative about Linux. M$ Whore, Tool, FUDmeister, on and on.
Know what Steve Jobs said to the crowd that booed Bill Gates when he appeared on the screen? "Grow up". I'd pay good money to hear Linus say the same thing.
> I don't know how or why, but for some reason Qt programs always seem to resemble windows for me...
Same shade of grey, same height of buttons, and if you're running with the windows theme, then it takes pains to look the same. Window manager with its flush relief-detailed window controls looks more like OS/2 to me. KDE 2.0 has a (pretty horrendous) looking button set that looks a lot more like MacOS 8.x buttons than windows.
Anyhow, this has gotten way off topic. AFAIK, I don't think CAD programs are designed for any widget set in general.
> Will some day Alan Cox and Linus say yes to Devfs so I can know with more accuracy where to find my USB, SCSI and Fire Wire devices without the need to have 10 000+ /dev nodes for every possible piece of hardware I can plug in my machine?
What on *earth* do you need all of them present for? Detect device, MAKEDEV. Repeat. Perfectly automatable, and it's pretty much exactly what Solaris already does. I like the idea of devfs, I don't like the idea of having to tar it up to maintain state though.
Did you know that you can do tricks with antialiasing in your fonts to change the text on your screen as it appears to a tempest scanner?
tempest isn't there to read text off your screen. it's there to show that your screen is on in the first place and that it's doing something, and that something matches patterns kind of like typing. so if you say "i was in bora bora the day that system was cracked" they can ask you, "then who was typing on your computer?"
I'm still laughing, and I still think you're a troll.
> Please explain how ActiveX is superior to Netscape's plugin system.
Technologically, they're almost exactly the same. Netscape Plugins on Win32 use OLE2, whereas ActiveX is simply a marketroid word for the same thing (sort of, OLE2 is an ActiveX "technology" that adds on a late-binding dispatch layer, one that isn't strictly necessary now).
Netscape can now autoinstall plugins for you when you hit pages that require them. They can run arbitrary code that can do anything they want to your system. This is *exactly* like ActiveX controls, without the benefit of code signing! Yet why isn't Netscape being nailed to a cross for this? Oh, because they have to be accessable from Netscape's site, giving them more control over the content than Microsoft, which doesn't require the middleman. Why isn't Netscape in the stocks now?
Because they're not Microsoft, that's why.
War this, war that. I'm really sick of these childish games. Real innocent bystanders die in real wars, sometimes millions are slaughtered in the efficient machinery of murder. The War on Drugs, the War on Crime, the War on Poverty, the War on Microsoft. I'm really god damn SICK of the war metaphor, dig?
> As far as the browsers, it would be nice if there were a shockwave player for Linux.
I'm using it now. What would be nice would be Macromedia Director for Linux.
> Permanantly mount the floppy and cdrom? How do you plan on ejecting? Personally, I'd just remove the floppy from the write cache.
He just doesn't have the correct terminology, which is hardly a crime. He wants volume management, something I take for granted on Solaris and Windows both, and have yet to see on Linux. Truth be told, most intuitive volume management I've seen was on the mac, back in 1992 or so (though it was a bit aggressive about asking for floppies when ejecting them).
Let's just go over some of these, ah, "improvements".
> Totally drop the command prompt, or at least make it so you can do ANYTHING without it. Like Windows is right now.
Ludicrous. Fragmenting a unified interface into a dozen GUI interfaces spread across a dozen dialogs each taking, yes, an icky TYPED text option, is not getting rid of the command line. Doing automated complex things in NT still requires typing up some kind of perl script.
> Graphical installation screen for programs (similar to StarOffice, I myself would LOVE this too)
Joy, then we can see a burgeoning market in programs like CleanSweep that "really uninstall programs for real" thanks to idiodicy like InstallShield, which keeps its install information in the directory of the program, so if you erase or just plain move the install directory, you can't uninstall the program. Or get rid of it from your add/remove programs menu without special tools. The sheer bureacracy of installshield is something I hear no end of griping about, from novices and experts alike.
> Make it easier to use. Most of it has to do with the heavily text nature of Linux. My dad finds it easier to click some button then type in a bunch of acrane commands and options.
My experience at the helpdesk is that windows requires you to click a bunch of buttons, then type various arcane things, then click on some more buttons, type arcane things, and so on. Are you sensing a theme here? The GUI in Windows ain't so graphical.
> not crash very often
You lose. I had the displeasure of running M10 on win98. First immediate annoyance: mousewheel doesn't work. Reflow is decent, a damn sight better than netscape, but not as smooth as IE. Some images got placed slightly off, I could actually see the placeholder and a piece of the ALT text where the image should have been.
But when I selected several items off menus, it was always crash, crash, crash. And not from failed assertions, mind you, but invalid page faults. Meaning this thing has null or stale pointers all over the place, possibly even buffer overruns. Does expect that these are just going to all get fixed so long as we just chase 'em out and patch 'em as we hit them? If that kind of ad hoc methodology is driving Mozilla, it doesn't have a prayer.
Holy crap if I were a webmaster I wouldn't read past sentence 1 of such an insufferably superior attitude.
How about: "I'm trying to read your page with on . It's broken, such and such doesn't render properly. Looks like you have an unclosed table tag [or whatever is the problem]. Could you please fix it? Thanks from a potential paying customer."
Just because you're right doesn't mean you have to be righteous.
> Hey - you just described IE5. Hate to admit it but...all the components of IE are just generally available COM objects.
AND you can script those components with Perl. Or Python. Or Javascript, C++, Delphi, VB, or even freakin Haskell
Unix can only claim superior scriptability at the moment because it has a passable scripting language as its command shell (some better than others, ksh has better typing for example). But what it can't do is script individual components of a program in any language that has a native interface. Want to embed a browser component in emacs and remote-control it with elisp? Fat chance.
Yes, yes, this is all promised with gnome and bonobo and corba corba uber alles. But so far, like mozilla, it hasn't produced any deliverables. I'm not even impressed with the stability of mozilla under win32.
they're going to need a really big box.
Gah, I managed to screw up the name of the compiler every time. It's DevPro, not DevStudio. Suffice to say I prefer it to gcc every time, and thankfully so does autoconf.