Thank you for your balanced assessment of this situation.
Many slashdot readers detest the idea of their own comments being censored... but then whine about when slashdot excercises it's right to post what it bloody well wants on it's front page. They did the same thing with Jon Katz, their doing it with Roland, and when he's gone they'll find another target.
BTW- I think the filters are a fine idea too... The Right to not listen is just as important as the right to speak.
Alas, the time has come for SCO to reap the bitter harvest of the ill will they've planted amidst the unix/linux community. The thought of funding SCO's anti-linux war machine will drive away what few customers they had left. Many will really ponder the question, is there anything OpenServer can do that can be done better by someone else?
I found your comment insightful but didn't have any mod points to say so.
I recently thought i'd try abandoning Mandrake and switched to Suse (9.3) as well). I read the good reviews and thought Novell's backing might have done it some good. Oh what a mistake that was. As you said, there was virtually no multimedia support. Then in my case, after doing the automatic updates my NVIDIA 3D drivers would refuse to install. Curiously too, Everything seemed significantly slower. Apps would take longer to start and the initial boot time was almost double what it took Mandrake. Granted this is affected somewhat by what services you choose to run but in each case I had it fairly trimmed down. Needless to say, I'm back on Mandrake and it has been working reasonably well.
"The solution here is not to run Windows games, but to find more ways to convince major game developers that they should release ports to linux directly."
Hmnn, lets see. Convince the gaming companys to spend a wad of cash to develop native linux versions of their games for.... 5% of the market?. Of that, knock off half since many only use Linux as a serverside OS. Half that again for all those linux users who have the philosophy that all software must be free(tm). Without real $$$ potential, there's not much to talk about.
I don't think I've seen this mentioned yet... but I think the solar death ray the last James Bond movie was pretty frickin cool. When I saw that, I said to meself... I need to get me one of those.
Reading the comments to this story makes me sad. I just went to see Episode III for the 3rd time today and I'm even more impressed this time around. Then I come to slashdot and all I read is how you all hated this film and everything since the original series has been crap. What I see is that Mr Lucas has really taken a sincere effort to improve... and theres evidence that he listens to his fans (how many lines of Jar Jar dialog were there in this one?). Though not without some flaws, this film has certainly recaptured the magic for me....
but then again- why should I care as I increasingly believe that the dominant crowd here is wrong about a great many things. IE: Not all software should be free, Linux is not superior to Windows (anymore), The RIAA is not evil for pursuing sharers of copyrighted work, oh... and the latest start wars was pretty damn good.
I loved Cyrix back in the day. I remember I quickly and painlessly swapped up my 33Mhz CPU for 66, no other changes needed to my mo-bo. I remember thinking how cool it was that I could do that. They might of even had a 100mhz cpu of the same deal but I don't remember now.
each web server thread calls on the _jspService method but the servlet behind the JSP page is made only once. If you add your own functions and variables outside of the scope of the _jspService method all that stuff seems to get shared between threads running on your web server.
I can count the Java desktop apps I know on one hand. I'm sure theres more but it's pretty much a dead topic for most developers since Swing has sucked for so long. The more I think of it, I see lots of problems with the whole Swing API/programatic approach to building a GUI. Why can't it all be XML based where you just design your GUI elements in document form and load it in.
On a side note, I'm not very happy with JSP these days either. I've been doing dotnet development for a year now and love the idea that each page has an instance of a class behind it. I tried to get back into JSP again lately, but was disgusted to rediscover that all instances of a page are sharing the same object, which is very frustrating and anoying after having done it the other way.
The points you made are valid, but if you are talking about VB6... It's still think it's an aweful language.
VB.net on the other hand is quite nice. I actually like it. My background is in Java and VB.net finally morphed into a language you can do true OOP like the real langauges. I use it at work all the time and aside from syntax differences... it really is a whole lot like Java now.
...from those in the linux community who already insist everthings perfect....from the myriad developers who wanna do it 'their way' rather than supporting a existing project...from all those who are so focused on making Linux 'like windows'... without thinking about making it BETTER than windows....from all the elitist snobs who's answers to newbie questions is RTFA....from all the newgroups you have to subscribe to even ask a question, for project leaders that are to lazy to set up a modern communication portal....for all those distro's you still have to manually tell when you've inserted a CD into the drive... those vi and emacs preaching freaks (sorry couldn't resist:-) Yes they are fine if you like them but don't push them on the rest of us.
I see lots of posts saying "games" are the magic ticket to Linux getting popular. Stop dreaming... it's not gonna happen for a long time. Linux on the desktop is not even remotely near even 10% market share... no sane company is going to put lots of resources into developing games for Linux. Yes there were some flukes where a couple popular games got made but they were hardly profitable. Most of what Linux has for games are done by hobbyist... which is fine for the nostalgic type who like 80's style gaming but will never fail to succeed an impressing most of the gaming public. END OF RANT.
On to what I originally wanted to say... Linux on the desktop could sure use alot of polish in the following ways. Consider:
1) A common control panel. There are a ton of different config tools which vary by distribution. Even on a single distro you can't configure everything from one place- it's often a mix of various config tools and hand editing of config files.
2) Tell the freakin developers to make GOOD intallation binaries and keep them UP TO DATE. Have a common to all distro's install tool that is very easy to use (perhaps a RPM front end). I am a programmer and yes I do know how to compile stuff but when I'm not programming... I'm also a user and feel I should not have to compile anything myself.
3) KDE vs Gnome wars: put an end to it. I know everyone will disagree with me saying 'choice is good'. I agree... but there needs to be a standard. Without a standard alot of manpowers being distributed where it could much be better focused. Perhaps this is the downfall of Linux in general... everyones got freedom so all they choose to work on something different.
I don't think Walmart is doing this for any other reason then they don't want to pay the sticker price for windows. They are not really advocating Linux, more so than just providing something so they can say it has an operating system. Sadly, for any of you who thinks this is a win for Linux... I feel most certain that most of they buyers of these machines will buy it not because of Linux but because of it's fairly low price... wipe the hard drive... and install the pirated copy of Windows they got from the kid next door.
It's great that there is that much support... but I can think of some better things to do with 250000 dollars, such as hiring 5 full-time programmers for a year to work on all those open-source projects that most volunteer programmers don't want to work on... you know the stuff that isn't fun to work on. I'm sure the firefox ads will adopt a few more users, but overall will provide little bang for the buck. As far as advertising, I would have much rather seen a mass-mailing of CD's... just like what has worked for AOL. AOL got so popular because it was just thrown out to people. I don't really think nearly as many people would have gone out and downloaded the software if they had seen an ad or heard about it on TV. People can't be counted on it bite for anything... even if it's free. You have to make it very easy for them and you have to present some kind of prize to make it worth there while.
I am a developer myself, so this post is in no way meant to offend developers. However it's true that developers (generally) do not see things the same way that most users do.
When i ponder what makes Microsoft so successful (aside from the questionably legal business practices) is that their company is not ruled by the developers but by the PHB's of this world. Microsoft invest considerable effort into researching what people are actually doing with their computers. Say what you want about them, they are actually pretty good about listening to their customers when it comes to features. By contrast, Linux developers often concentrate on scratching thier own itches which ultimately only appeal to like minded individuals. I could list several things right now that are not easily possible in Linux right now.
I write software for a small company, and we are very blessed to have a very technically less-literate person on our staff. He is our functional expert and he gives us a lot of great feedback on our UI's. Open source projects should never underestimate the value of such a person.
Since this story hasn't generated much chatter yet, I'll speak up. I cant help but feel somewhat underwhelmed by this past years happenings. There were some highlights, such as the 2.6 kernel finally coming out. But my expectations are far from met.
I saw many mentions of "Linux on the desktop" in this years list... but my personal experience hasn't improved much. I keep hoping for a quantum leap forward but have yet to see it (maybe next year). Some stuff I'm still waiting for:
* I want linux to auto detect my joystick and 3D card (with GL support) without me having to drop into VI and configure stuff (And don't tell me to use emacs!). I DO know how to configure this stuff but frankly I'm getting tired of doing it everytime I install linux.
* A WYSIWYG web application development suite thats *BETTER* than dreamweaver and Visual Studio.net combined. I have high hopes for Quanta but it's still a featherweight for features. Call me a troll if you like but some of the Windows development tools kick A**.
* GAMES... I want some more good games. If 90% of linux games developers would stop making rewrites of 20 year old games and work on something modern it would be a good start.
* One lousy control panel. Is that too much to ask? I use mandrake & KDE. I have a KDE control panel, a mandrake control panel, and others to choose from such as Webmin. Why can I click Start->Settings and have all configuration at one place. Throw in different distro's and this problem multiplies.
* Ditch KDE & Gnome and have all the developers work on the one true desktop (as if) I'm still plagued by inconsistancies between the gnome & kde programs that I use. Not to mention it just looks terrible when some windows are themed and others don't follow suit.
So there you have it, Linux on the desktop really didn't go that far this year IMHO. You can waste your mod points modding this down but a intelligent reply would be much better.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for your balanced assessment of this situation.
Many slashdot readers detest the idea of their own comments being censored... but then whine about when slashdot excercises it's right to post what it bloody well wants on it's front page. They did the same thing with Jon Katz, their doing it with Roland, and when he's gone they'll find another target.
BTW- I think the filters are a fine idea too... The Right to not listen is just as important as the right to speak.
Alas, the time has come for SCO to reap the bitter harvest of the ill will they've planted amidst the unix/linux community. The thought of funding SCO's anti-linux war machine will drive away what few customers they had left. Many will really ponder the question, is there anything OpenServer can do that can be done better by someone else?
I found your comment insightful but didn't have any mod points to say so.
I recently thought i'd try abandoning Mandrake and switched to Suse (9.3) as well). I read the good reviews and thought Novell's backing might have done it some good. Oh what a mistake that was. As you said, there was virtually no multimedia support. Then in my case, after doing the automatic updates my NVIDIA 3D drivers would refuse to install. Curiously too, Everything seemed significantly slower. Apps would take longer to start and the initial boot time was almost double what it took Mandrake. Granted this is affected somewhat by what services you choose to run but in each case I had it fairly trimmed down. Needless to say, I'm back on Mandrake and it has been working reasonably well.
And I for one welcome our new feline masters...
... Or as a result of firing her- everyone else will triple check everything they ever do
"Just how long till someone does this on a large scale, by overselling the dedicated lines, and starts selling true unlimited cell plans?"
Just longer than it takes for some shady lawmakers to sneak in a law to prevent that.
"The solution here is not to run Windows games, but to find more ways to convince major game developers that they should release ports to linux directly."
.... 5% of the market?. Of that, knock off half since many only use Linux as a serverside OS. Half that again for all those linux users who have the philosophy that all software must be free(tm). Without real $$$ potential, there's not much to talk about.
Hmnn, lets see. Convince the gaming companys to spend a wad of cash to develop native linux versions of their games for
I don't think I've seen this mentioned yet... but I think the solar death ray the last James Bond movie was pretty frickin cool. When I saw that, I said to meself... I need to get me one of those.
VR, lets not forget VR.
Reading the comments to this story makes me sad. I just went to see Episode III for the 3rd time today and I'm even more impressed this time around. Then I come to slashdot and all I read is how you all hated this film and everything since the original series has been crap. What I see is that Mr Lucas has really taken a sincere effort to improve... and theres evidence that he listens to his fans (how many lines of Jar Jar dialog were there in this one?). Though not without some flaws, this film has certainly recaptured the magic for me....
but then again- why should I care as I increasingly believe that the dominant crowd here is wrong about a great many things. IE: Not all software should be free, Linux is not superior to Windows (anymore), The RIAA is not evil for pursuing sharers of copyrighted work, oh... and the latest start wars was pretty damn good.
I loved Cyrix back in the day. I remember I quickly and painlessly swapped up my 33Mhz CPU for 66, no other changes needed to my mo-bo. I remember thinking how cool it was that I could do that. They might of even had a 100mhz cpu of the same deal but I don't remember now.
Hmnnn, perhaps I'm missing something but that's not the way I understood it. Here is a page that I think backs up my original statement:
e /j sp_declarations.htm
http://www.imagescript.com/atg/articles/jsp_j2e
each web server thread calls on the _jspService method but the servlet behind the JSP page is made only once. If you add your own functions and variables outside of the scope of the _jspService method all that stuff seems to get shared between threads running on your web server.
I can count the Java desktop apps I know on one hand. I'm sure theres more but it's pretty much a dead topic for most developers since Swing has sucked for so long. The more I think of it, I see lots of problems with the whole Swing API/programatic approach to building a GUI. Why can't it all be XML based where you just design your GUI elements in document form and load it in.
On a side note, I'm not very happy with JSP these days either. I've been doing dotnet development for a year now and love the idea that each page has an instance of a class behind it. I tried to get back into JSP again lately, but was disgusted to rediscover that all instances of a page are sharing the same object, which is very frustrating and anoying after having done it the other way.
We all know the first pioneer of this new tech is going to be the porn industry...
The points you made are valid, but if you are talking about VB6... It's still think it's an aweful language.
VB.net on the other hand is quite nice. I actually like it. My background is in Java and VB.net finally morphed into a language you can do true OOP like the real langauges. I use it at work all the time and aside from syntax differences... it really is a whole lot like Java now.
...from those in the linux community who already insist everthings perfect. ...from the myriad developers who wanna do it 'their way' rather than supporting a existing project ...from all those who are so focused on making Linux 'like windows'... without thinking about making it BETTER than windows. ...from all the elitist snobs who's answers to newbie questions is RTFA. ...from all the newgroups you have to subscribe to even ask a question, for project leaders that are to lazy to set up a modern communication portal. ...for all those distro's you still have to manually tell when you've inserted a CD into the drive ... those vi and emacs preaching freaks (sorry couldn't resist :-) Yes they are fine if you like them but don't push them on the rest of us.
You get the idea...
I see lots of posts saying "games" are the magic ticket to Linux getting popular. Stop dreaming... it's not gonna happen for a long time. Linux on the desktop is not even remotely near even 10% market share... no sane company is going to put lots of resources into developing games for Linux. Yes there were some flukes where a couple popular games got made but they were hardly profitable. Most of what Linux has for games are done by hobbyist... which is fine for the nostalgic type who like 80's style gaming but will never fail to succeed an impressing most of the gaming public. END OF RANT.
On to what I originally wanted to say... Linux on the desktop could sure use alot of polish in the following ways. Consider:
1) A common control panel. There are a ton of different config tools which vary by distribution. Even on a single distro you can't configure everything from one place- it's often a mix of various config tools and hand editing of config files.
2) Tell the freakin developers to make GOOD intallation binaries and keep them UP TO DATE. Have a common to all distro's install tool that is very easy to use (perhaps a RPM front end). I am a programmer and yes I do know how to compile stuff but when I'm not programming... I'm also a user and feel I should not have to compile anything myself.
3) KDE vs Gnome wars: put an end to it. I know everyone will disagree with me saying 'choice is good'. I agree... but there needs to be a standard. Without a standard alot of manpowers being distributed where it could much be better focused. Perhaps this is the downfall of Linux in general... everyones got freedom so all they choose to work on something different.
I could go on but I'll leave it at that for now.
Dude.... get a woman :-)
or at least some good speech recognition software.
Because it's just so easy to mistype goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooogle
I don't think Walmart is doing this for any other reason then they don't want to pay the sticker price for windows. They are not really advocating Linux, more so than just providing something so they can say it has an operating system. Sadly, for any of you who thinks this is a win for Linux... I feel most certain that most of they buyers of these machines will buy it not because of Linux but because of it's fairly low price... wipe the hard drive... and install the pirated copy of Windows they got from the kid next door.
Ditto that,
I've been using HE for a while now too and have no problems at all. I have a pretty simple site... a little PHP- but uptime has been excellent.
It's great that there is that much support... but I can think of some better things to do with 250000 dollars, such as hiring 5 full-time programmers for a year to work on all those open-source projects that most volunteer programmers don't want to work on... you know the stuff that isn't fun to work on. I'm sure the firefox ads will adopt a few more users, but overall will provide little bang for the buck. As far as advertising, I would have much rather seen a mass-mailing of CD's... just like what has worked for AOL. AOL got so popular because it was just thrown out to people. I don't really think nearly as many people would have gone out and downloaded the software if they had seen an ad or heard about it on TV. People can't be counted on it bite for anything... even if it's free. You have to make it very easy for them and you have to present some kind of prize to make it worth there while.
I am a developer myself, so this post is in no way meant to offend developers. However it's true that developers (generally) do not see things the same way that most users do.
When i ponder what makes Microsoft so successful (aside from the questionably legal business practices) is that their company is not ruled by the developers but by the PHB's of this world. Microsoft invest considerable effort into researching what people are actually doing with their computers. Say what you want about them, they are actually pretty good about listening to their customers when it comes to features. By contrast, Linux developers often concentrate on scratching thier own itches which ultimately only appeal to like minded individuals. I could list several things right now that are not easily possible in Linux right now.
I write software for a small company, and we are very blessed to have a very technically less-literate person on our staff. He is our functional expert and he gives us a lot of great feedback on our UI's. Open source projects should never underestimate the value of such a person.
Since this story hasn't generated much chatter yet, I'll speak up. I cant help but feel somewhat underwhelmed by this past years happenings. There were some highlights, such as the 2.6 kernel finally coming out. But my expectations are far from met.
.net combined. I have high hopes for Quanta but it's still a featherweight for features. Call me a troll if you like but some of the Windows development tools kick A**.
I saw many mentions of "Linux on the desktop" in this years list... but my personal experience hasn't improved much. I keep hoping for a quantum leap forward but have yet to see it (maybe next year). Some stuff I'm still waiting for:
* I want linux to auto detect my joystick and 3D card (with GL support) without me having to drop into VI and configure stuff (And don't tell me to use emacs!). I DO know how to configure this stuff but frankly I'm getting tired of doing it everytime I install linux.
* A WYSIWYG web application development suite thats *BETTER* than dreamweaver and Visual Studio
* GAMES... I want some more good games. If 90% of linux games developers would stop making rewrites of 20 year old games and work on something modern it would be a good start.
* One lousy control panel. Is that too much to ask? I use mandrake & KDE. I have a KDE control panel, a mandrake control panel, and others to choose from such as Webmin. Why can I click Start->Settings and have all configuration at one place. Throw in different distro's and this problem multiplies.
* Ditch KDE & Gnome and have all the developers work on the one true desktop (as if) I'm still plagued by inconsistancies between the gnome & kde programs that I use. Not to mention it just looks terrible when some windows are themed and others don't follow suit.
So there you have it, Linux on the desktop really didn't go that far this year IMHO. You can waste your mod points modding this down but a intelligent reply would be much better.
I cast my votes for the following favorites.
Paradroid
Wizball
4th and Inches
Test Drive (the original)
Yie Ar Kung Fu
Commando
I could go on, but those are the ones I remember the most.