Can you download the Komodo source? This would be useful for many of us that don't use Windows or x86 Linux if we can download the source and recompile it for other platforms, like Solaris or PPC Linux.
Anyone have any insights on building software that uses configure scripts?
It appears that most configure scripts don't properly recognize Darwin/MacOS X and will immediately fail to configure.
I just tried building bash 2.04 and found this to be the case. I did however find Apple's config.guess and config.sub files in/usr/libexec and copied them into bash's support directory. configure then wored, but make failed when it tried to link in the malloc library.
When you "buy" a record, tape, CD, etc., you do not have to pay for new media when the old media becomes obsolete.
Take for instance, DVD-A, the new DVD-based audio format that hopefully will obsolete CDs. If I payed for a Beatles CD, I am allowed to create my own DVD-A from the CD under law.
Therefore, I don't have to pay anything to Apple Corps Ltd., the Beatles' record label. But I will have to pay the expense of the software and hardware required to transfer the music to DVD-A. I just can't make copies for other people. (Though there is some precedent for legally giving friends copies.)
Likewise, you are allowed to transfer CD-based music to MP3 format - at least for you own listening.
What's being dealt with in the courts right now is whether you are allowed to distribute your MP3 files to other people who haven't payed a license fee. The current court action does *not* apply to things you do for yourself.
The purpose of deveoping XML is to separate the presentation (art work) by using XSL files for style definition and putting just data in the XML files.
By using good XML schemas and pushing all the design elements to a designer-maintained style sheet (XSL) it makes it easy for programmers to write scripts/programs that can easily dynamically generate XML documents without the messiness of HTML.
XHTML and WML work against the spirit of XML (even though they are instances of XML) by putting style elements within the XML document.
This offers nearly no benefit for the programmer. It's a complete hose!
I agree. When it was publicized that the Eazel guys were the folks that worked at Apple to design the original Mac interface, I was excited.
I thought they were going to rearchitect the UI and do something that would be an imporovement and make the GUI more efficient, intuitive, and faster to use. I thought they were going to do something that's better than Winows and better than MacOS.
But their strategy just seems to be yet another "I dunno what to do. Let's just copy Microsoft." strategy.
How do you convice people to switch from MS Windows when what they'll see is another Windows?
You don't. There has to be something better. We need a UI that mazimizes screen real estate, a UI that gives users automation/scripting capabilities, a UI that's faster to do things and find files and programs.
> The second is, why is the IETF not in control of Kerberos completely, how could it happen that Microsoft made proprietary extension to the protocol?
It's simple to make proprietary extensions to a (formerly) open protocol. Just implement the standards and then change them ever so slightly so that they can break compatibility with standards compatible products. The IETF doesn't have enough money to sue Microsoft and stop them.
Microsoft thinks they're above standards bodies and the law. This is nothing new. You've seen it before:
Their proprietary changes in Internet Explorer that break with W3C standards for HTML.
Their proprietary changes to LDAP in Active Directory.
And their recent proprietary changes to XML in Internet Explorer 5.5.
And I can go on . . .
Microsoft will argue that they are trying to "improve" the standards, but their so called improvements are simply trivial changes to try and seize a standard. Or as many of us like to say: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Just in case it's misinterpreted, I didn't mean to say that Suns and Macs use BIOS and have problems. Rather Suns and Macs boot correctly by using a sophisticated firmware system.
Does this thing use the same boot time firmware that SGI's Windows NT systems use?
If so, then I'd say it's worth the price. Their firmware was nice and had a real understanding of SCSI, could boot off of any drive, and had no stupid 1024 cylinder limit like BIOS systems - like a Sun or Mac.
Sun Microsystems recently started allowing the use of Solaris 8 for free for all uses - including commercial use.
Also the source code to Solaris 8 will be made available within the next month.
Up until now SCO has always been able to dismiss the concept of free OS's. The argument has been that SCO UNIXWare is better than free OS's like Linux, so customers will want to pay for the commercial reliability of an OS like UNIXWare.
But now, if computer users "graduate" from Linux and start to look for a commercial server-class operating system backed by an established company, you have to believe that a lot (if not most all) of those people will choose Sun's Solaris - not UNIXWare.
But for scripting, I always use ksh (on Solaris). Why? The ksh syntax is a superset of the original Bourne Shell, and therefore pretty much a superset of the Bourne Again Shell.
bash primarily adds readline support which makes it super-easy to use interactively. readline doesn't do much for non-interactive scripts.
In the Korn shell, the typeset comand provides a number of extra features for things such as presenting non-decimal numbers, and converting from upper case text to lower case and vice versa.
Another way cool feature of ksh is `|&` which is a way of getting a pipe to a background process. I guess they call it co-processes, but it really make a client/server process. I guess you can also call it a bi-directional pipe. You can then use `read` and `print` to send and receive stuff from the "server" started with `|&`. For example, if I need to do floating point math, I can start `bc` in the background with `|&`.
I think what we need is a ksh with readline support added. Bourne Again Korn Shell! (Maybe spell "Bourne" as "Born)
On the Solaris installation CD, there is a script called "setup_install_server". Put the CD into a machine with enough disk space and run the command as well as related commands to setup IP addresses and stuff for the clients.
Then go to the client and type "-;boot net" at the OpenBoot prompt. Like magic, the installer will start. And you can easily do it simultaneously on multiple machines. No floppies or boot CD's needed on the clients!
For newbies, the command line can be hidden. The Apple Macintosh (including the idiotproof iMac) use OpenFirmware, which is a standardized version of Sun's OpenBoot.
The Mac is proof that consumers don't need to worry about Firmware. Experts can just type a keyboard sequence to enter the firmware prompt.
BIOS sucks. We need a real command line firmware that knows what things like SCSI disks and ethernet cards are!
On any Sun, SGI, Apple Mac, you can bring up a command line in firmware at boot time and truly control the boot process.
On my Sun, I can boot off of any partition on any disk. I can also *really* boot from CD-ROMs (not cheesy El Torito CD's that work by emulating a piece of crap floppy disk).
All I have to do is type "boot cdrom" to boot from CD, "boot net" to boot off of a network boot/install server. I can even create aliases so that I can say "boot linux" to boot off of a Linux partition - even if it's on my sixth SCSI disk in the chain.
I don't need to waste time/money installing stupid tools like System Commander to get the same functionality.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Sun's OpenBoot/OpenFirmware provides many mini-miracles.
SGI (which uses their own firmware) actually built Pentium III computers using a real firmware. And by doing that they were able to defeat the stupid 1024 cylinder limit and other bogus limitations of Wintel PeeCee's.
Active Directory is just around the corner. NDS is probably better, but organizations with a lemming mentality will choose Active Directory over NDS just because its from M$.
Novell needs to go with the Linux momentum and open source NDS. They'll still make boatloads of money on support.
Novell also needs to decouple the NDS server from Netware and let it run entirely on Solaris, Linux, SCO, AIX, etc. if they want to capture new customers. Netware is not gaining any new customers - they're just keeping existing customers.
If money's no object, try the matrix switch from Network Technologies, Inc. I just got one and its very nice and works very easily through an on screen menu. I use it to control a Sun UltraSPARC and 3 x86 boxes and no problem.
Raritan and Rose Electronics are two other companies that are pretty good and get a lot of attention.
I think the Firewire hard drives are expensive because they are not *true* Firewire drives. They are aftermarket modifications to IDE or SCSI hard drives.
In particular one that I saw looked like a notebook computer's hard drive placed in a Firewire "wrapper". The cost is high because you are paying for the original hard drive plus the Firewire circuitry, which is going to be complex.
Now if companies like Seagate, Western Digital, etc started making native FireWire hard drives then the price will be cheaper. In fact, I would guess that the prices would be near those for equivalent IDE hard drives.
The Firewire electronics is a lot simpler than SCSI, requiring fewer chips which should make true Firewire drives cheaper. If you look up prices for Firewire controllers and compare to SCSI you will see a good price difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you download the Komodo source? This would be useful for many of us that don't use Windows or x86 Linux if we can download the source and recompile it for other platforms, like Solaris or PPC Linux.
Does anyone know when Palm, Handspring, etc. will announce ARM based PalmOS devices?
It appears that most configure scripts don't properly recognize Darwin/MacOS X and will immediately fail to configure.
I just tried building bash 2.04 and found this to be the case. I did however find Apple's config.guess and config.sub files in /usr/libexec and copied them into bash's support directory. configure then wored, but make failed when it tried to link in the malloc library.
When you "buy" a record, tape, CD, etc., you do not have to pay for new media when the old media becomes obsolete. Take for instance, DVD-A, the new DVD-based audio format that hopefully will obsolete CDs. If I payed for a Beatles CD, I am allowed to create my own DVD-A from the CD under law. Therefore, I don't have to pay anything to Apple Corps Ltd., the Beatles' record label. But I will have to pay the expense of the software and hardware required to transfer the music to DVD-A. I just can't make copies for other people. (Though there is some precedent for legally giving friends copies.) Likewise, you are allowed to transfer CD-based music to MP3 format - at least for you own listening. What's being dealt with in the courts right now is whether you are allowed to distribute your MP3 files to other people who haven't payed a license fee. The current court action does *not* apply to things you do for yourself.
The purpose of deveoping XML is to separate the presentation (art work) by using XSL files for style definition and putting just data in the XML files.
By using good XML schemas and pushing all the design elements to a designer-maintained style sheet (XSL) it makes it easy for programmers to write scripts/programs that can easily dynamically generate XML documents without the messiness of HTML.
XHTML and WML work against the spirit of XML (even though they are instances of XML) by putting style elements within the XML document.
This offers nearly no benefit for the programmer. It's a complete hose!
I thought they were going to rearchitect the UI and do something that would be an imporovement and make the GUI more efficient, intuitive, and faster to use. I thought they were going to do something that's better than Winows and better than MacOS.
But their strategy just seems to be yet another "I dunno what to do. Let's just copy Microsoft." strategy.
How do you convice people to switch from MS Windows when what they'll see is another Windows?
You don't. There has to be something better. We need a UI that mazimizes screen real estate, a UI that gives users automation/scripting capabilities, a UI that's faster to do things and find files and programs.
It's simple to make proprietary extensions to a (formerly) open protocol. Just implement the standards and then change them ever so slightly so that they can break compatibility with standards compatible products. The IETF doesn't have enough money to sue Microsoft and stop them.
Microsoft thinks they're above standards bodies and the law. This is nothing new. You've seen it before:
Their proprietary changes in Internet Explorer that break with W3C standards for HTML.
Their proprietary changes to LDAP in Active Directory.
And their recent proprietary changes to XML in Internet Explorer 5.5.
And I can go on . . .
Microsoft will argue that they are trying to "improve" the standards, but their so called improvements are simply trivial changes to try and seize a standard. Or as many of us like to say: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Hopefully this time it's not too late.
Just in case it's misinterpreted, I didn't mean to say that Suns and Macs use BIOS and have problems. Rather Suns and Macs boot correctly by using a sophisticated firmware system.
If so, then I'd say it's worth the price. Their firmware was nice and had a real understanding of SCSI, could boot off of any drive, and had no stupid 1024 cylinder limit like BIOS systems - like a Sun or Mac.
Also the source code to Solaris 8 will be made available within the next month.
Up until now SCO has always been able to dismiss the concept of free OS's. The argument has been that SCO UNIXWare is better than free OS's like Linux, so customers will want to pay for the commercial reliability of an OS like UNIXWare.
But now, if computer users "graduate" from Linux and start to look for a commercial server-class operating system backed by an established company, you have to believe that a lot (if not most all) of those people will choose Sun's Solaris - not UNIXWare.
So my question is how will SCO respond to Sun?
But for scripting, I always use ksh (on Solaris). Why? The ksh syntax is a superset of the original Bourne Shell, and therefore pretty much a superset of the Bourne Again Shell.
bash primarily adds readline support which makes it super-easy to use interactively. readline doesn't do much for non-interactive scripts.
In the Korn shell, the typeset comand provides a number of extra features for things such as presenting non-decimal numbers, and converting from upper case text to lower case and vice versa.
Another way cool feature of ksh is `|&` which is a way of getting a pipe to a background process. I guess they call it co-processes, but it really make a client/server process. I guess you can also call it a bi-directional pipe. You can then use `read` and `print` to send and receive stuff from the "server" started with `|&`. For example, if I need to do floating point math, I can start `bc` in the background with `|&`.
I think what we need is a ksh with readline support added. Bourne Again Korn Shell! (Maybe spell "Bourne" as "Born)
Anyone know if you can buy one of these players online somewhere? The "RAITE" brand is not something I've seen in Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.
Then go to the client and type "-;boot net" at the OpenBoot prompt. Like magic, the installer will start. And you can easily do it simultaneously on multiple machines. No floppies or boot CD's needed on the clients!
The Mac is proof that consumers don't need to worry about Firmware. Experts can just type a keyboard sequence to enter the firmware prompt.
On any Sun, SGI, Apple Mac, you can bring up a command line in firmware at boot time and truly control the boot process.
On my Sun, I can boot off of any partition on any disk. I can also *really* boot from CD-ROMs (not cheesy El Torito CD's that work by emulating a piece of crap floppy disk).
All I have to do is type "boot cdrom" to boot from CD, "boot net" to boot off of a network boot/install server. I can even create aliases so that I can say "boot linux" to boot off of a Linux partition - even if it's on my sixth SCSI disk in the chain.
I don't need to waste time/money installing stupid tools like System Commander to get the same functionality.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Sun's OpenBoot/OpenFirmware provides many mini-miracles.
SGI (which uses their own firmware) actually built Pentium III computers using a real firmware. And by doing that they were able to defeat the stupid 1024 cylinder limit and other bogus limitations of Wintel PeeCee's.
Novell needs to go with the Linux momentum and open source NDS. They'll still make boatloads of money on support.
Novell also needs to decouple the NDS server from Netware and let it run entirely on Solaris, Linux, SCO, AIX, etc. if they want to capture new customers. Netware is not gaining any new customers - they're just keeping existing customers.
Raritan and Rose Electronics are two other companies that are pretty good and get a lot of attention.
It's not so bizarre they they all skipped version numbers, but the choice of 7 is strange.
In particular one that I saw looked like a notebook computer's hard drive placed in a Firewire "wrapper". The cost is high because you are paying for the original hard drive plus the Firewire circuitry, which is going to be complex.
Now if companies like Seagate, Western Digital, etc started making native FireWire hard drives then the price will be cheaper. In fact, I would guess that the prices would be near those for equivalent IDE hard drives.
The Firewire electronics is a lot simpler than SCSI, requiring fewer chips which should make true Firewire drives cheaper. If you look up prices for Firewire controllers and compare to SCSI you will see a good price difference.
Last year, Lucent demoed a 1.6 Gpbs chipset.
Oh. And you can run TCP/IP over Firewire! Linux will soon have a Firewire stack. And it's a lot cheaper than SCSI.
Right now you get 400 Mbps with the non-vaporware Firewire, about 35 times faster than the non-vaporware USB that exists today.
Comparing the vaporware USB2 to today's Firewire is like comparing a Pentium to a 286.
But how would one go about learning how to touch type on a Dvorak keyboard? I've never seen classes that teach Dvorak.
Are there any programs like "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" that will teach Dvorak?
What's MS going to open source? The dir command?
Linux does run on it. Check out LinuxPPC and NetBSD.
This doesn't have the new Common UNIX Printing System yet? Or does it?
Just look at OpenBSD. It's open source, yet it's the most secure *nix OS on earth.
Another example is RSA encryption. The source code is available, but that doesn't help you crack the algorithms.