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451

Living Room / Re: Microsoft's proposed new user interface

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 01, 2007, 03:41 PM »

Yes, that guy is also mentioned in the third page of the article, along with a demonstration video of his technology. He doesn't comment about Microsoft's invention, but at least he gets the credit

That's good. Let us hope there will be no patent war.

452

Post New Requests Here / Re: DONE: a self-scrolling, BPM adjustable html/notepad/text file gizmo

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 01, 2007, 06:56 AM »

Hey, jimi, I forgot to ask you this, on your PC where it won't run, do you get an error of a missing DLL?

My buddy JoTo recently brought to my attention that the msvc crt library isn't statically linked into the exe, so it is very possible that you get an error when it isn't installed on the system. I am going to either include this dll with the application in future versions, or offer a separate download for it on the site.

453

Living Room / Re: Microsoft's proposed new user interface

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 01, 2007, 02:24 AM »

Obligatory,... sorry

454

Living Room / Re: Microsoft's proposed new user interface

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 01, 2007, 01:55 AM »

Some grad student at mit came up with this first:

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/
http://video.google....74&q=touchscreen

I guess microsoft stole, i mean, 'borrowed' the idea, or gave the guy some cash so they could write the software for it.

455

Post New Requests Here / Re: DONE: a self-scrolling, BPM adjustable html/notepad/text file gizmo

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 01, 2007, 01:27 AM »

Hi Fred Nerd

I just tried to download and unzip the v1.1.1 version for windows, and it worked for me. Maybe you should try different zip software?

If you absolutely can't get it to work at all, I can always upload the uncompressed .exe just for you

The source code and wxWidgets can be compiled with most C++ compilers including: gcc, microsoft visual c++ (visual studio), cygwin/gcc, mingw, digital mars, and maybe bcb (borland c++)(not sure about that last one).

To compile the BPMNotepad source, you need to first download and compile the wxWidgets source.

456

Living Room / Crazy modem/router on the rebound

« Last post by Gothi[c] on June 01, 2007, 01:08 AM »

Last friday I noticed my modem/router (an actiontec GT704-WG) was acting strange. It's port-forwarding wasn't working as it should anymore, all in all, it seemed it's NAT was completely broken.

The next morning I walk up to the computer, and notice the Internet isn't working at all anymore. - I look at the modem, and it has it's status light solid red. (Not good,- the manual sais that when the red status light remains solid, there is a hardware or firmware problem.) I tried rebooting it, unplugging it, plugging it back in, anything I could think of, It wouldn't boot up, and the web interface wasn't accessible anymore.

At that point anyone else would have trashed the thing and bought a new one, but since I don't have a tree growing $100 bills, and also, since I didn't have anything better to do with my internet being down, I was a bit more persistent.

After lots of fiddling and trying, I noticed that my computer would get an IP about 2 seconds after I power on the router, and lose it again about 5 seconds later. This ip was 192.168.0.127.

I thought that was kind of strange, and interesting, so I set a static IP and disabled dhcp on my network settings, and i tried probing some ports during that 5 second window, and found out there was an FTP server accessible!

The ftp server announced itself as 'adam2'. My router's name isn't Adam, and I don't know anyone named Adam, so I went to a friends house to borrow their internet and do some googling. It turns out this is the routers bootloader, which gives you a 5 second window after startup to upload firmware.

[Select]

$ ftp 192.168.0.1
Connected to 192.168.0.1.
220 ADAM2 FTP Server ready.

That was great news! It ment two things:
1) My router wasn't fubar.
2) I was able to try something that might fix it: replace/repair the firmware

Of course, It wasn't that easy. The Adam2 boot loader defines a set of environment variables to define the memory range of several partitions. (A kernel, file system, boot loader, boot loader settings, and some unknown partition labeled from mtd0 through mtd4) And the original firmware image of the manifacturer (Actiontec) is just one image file, not 2 or 5 image files. I tried splitting the image in several parts using the partition layout memory address numbers in the boot loader, but that didn't seem to work. I could upload the firmware but it wouldn't boot.

With no easy way to upload the firmware image of the manifacturer through the adam2 ftp interface, I was almost back at square one, but it just required some more persistense.

The OpenWRT project has a page on the Actiontec 701, which is appearantly a modem/router similar to mine (but without wireless).
On that same page it has some information about the router, and it mentions the router uses the AR7 architecture.

It turns out D-Link has a router running on that very same architecture (the DSL-G604T) and unlike Actiontec, D-link provides a recovery utility to replace the firmware through the ftp interface, using ONE image file.

I ran the utility and it uploaded D-Link firmware to my actiontec modem, I figured, maybe the web-interface will work, if I'm lucky, and I can use that to upload the original Actiontec firmware, or just replace the d-link image with the actiontec one in the recovery utility.

It turned out I didn't even have to, because, appearantly, the D-Link software is running with no problems on my Actiontec router, eventhough it has completely different hardware. I can now get back on-line, use NAT and port forwarding, even wireless works. All features in the web-interface work etc,...

This D-Link software seems to have more features(see screenshot) in it's web-interface than I've ever seen in a modem/router; so why would I replace the original buggy and featureless actiontec firmware if the D-link firmware works just as well?

It turns out I was rather lucky the D-Link firmware even boots, since the device it was written for has at least twice as much memory as my Actiontec piece of junk.

The memory constraint had me worried, so I did a small stress test by calling on my VoIP while downloading stuff (probably not the best test one could do, it's not like p2p) and it worked fine. But at least now if I ever encounter problems I can revert back to the original firmware. (Though I'd like to avoid it if possible)

The original Actiontec firmware hasn't been maintained or updated since 2005 and it is full of bugs. One of the most annoying bugs is that it wants to log every dns-request without ever deleting/cycling the cache. When the memory is full, the firmware craches. Using any p2p app for 5 mins will do that. There is a temporary fix (by telnetting to the modem and disabling the caching), but it gets lost after reboot. So that's why I'd rather keep the D-Link firmware if I don't have any problems with it (so far so good)

457

Living Room / Re: Why don't you pay for software?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 11:22 PM »

Welcome, mikiem, and thanks for your great post, insights and story!
You bring up some good points and some typical issues.

458

Living Room / Re: Why don't you pay for software?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 08:25 PM »

If you are serious does this philosophy apply to all intellectual pursuits?
-Carol Haynes (May 26, 2007, 06:57 PM)

yes

If it does then how does any business model work when nobody can earn a living at anything?

Noone should 'earn a living'. Living is our birth right, it doesn't need to be earned. The way the world works now, the system is completely defunctional and wrong. I'm not saying anyone has come up with a better one yet (someone may or may not have), but that doesn't make it less wrong. Now we just have legalized slavery. If you don't work in whatever field that brings in money, you can't survive.

Example: A designer designs a car, another designer designs a production line to produce it, engineers design the machine to run the production line and the processing plant to produce the raw materials, a mining engineer designs a method for extracting ore to supply the production process. All of these people are producing intellectual ideas just a programmers do - should none of these people get paid for their work - or is it all done for love and they work in MacDonalds to support their 'hobby'?

The designer of the car's production should optionally donate to the designer if he can, the miners should donate to the mining engineer if they can for making their job easyer, etc,... "if they can" being the keyphrase.

Would you suggest that a factory worker should work for love of it?

Ideally, yes. He shouldn't be forced to do so otherwise. For money or no money.

But this is completely off topic, I just wanted to throw in my

because the crowd was weighing in only one direction, and there are plenty of other viewpoints out there, mine is just one of them. And it's probably not perfect, I'm no where near claiming to have all the answers, but I do have a sense of right and wrong. And people not being able to get goods because they don't have the money is wrong, and people having to work to be able to live is wrong. Money is probably just wrong all together, since it's only led to greed, wars, suffering, and destruction.

459

Living Room / Re: allergic to computer monitor

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 02:35 PM »

Wow, that's amazing. I never heared of that before.
I think being allergic to computers sounds like about the worsed disease I could ever get in my life

460

Living Room / Re: Why don't you pay for software?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 02:23 PM »

With that rationale, all programmers would have to be hobbyists or independently wealthy.
-mrainey (May 26, 2007, 02:00 PM)

That sounds about right. Either 'hobbyist' programmers or educational researchers, or actually (barely) making it on donations. Ethically, I think that is the only valid option.

Practically, since corporate control is here and isn't going anywhere soon, it is -ok- as long as users have a choice between payware and a free(not must in monetary value, but also having the freedom to copy/alter,...) alternative. And sometimes you can't just barely make it on donations, and you have to look for alternatives, then you can either work for a company that you know doesn't sell to end users but other corperations or is a governement contractor, then at least you're only feeding the beast that feeds the beast. But that doesn't make payware morally less wrong in my book.

I'm not saying there should be no reward for the effort, i'm saying giving the reward shouldn't be ENFORCED upon the user.
Yes,- this sounds naive and counts on the goodwill of people, but if you want people to be nicer in the world, you might as wel BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE.

Anyway, this is completely off topic, and I think i'm going to stfu about it

about the article:

From the replies, I think one can tell that the majority of the people that don't pay for payware software are young people or people with not enough monetary assets to invest in software. Businesses have to buy their software, and people who have the money, tend to spend it too. I'm not saying there isn't any piracy in businesses and i'm not saying people with money don't pirate, but these don't account for the majority of the figures.

461

Developer's Corner / Re: secure automated backup on *nix.

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 01:39 PM »

Instructions to back up and replace a MySQL database:

Say for example, you have a database called "donationcoder". You should have the folder /var/lib/mysql/donationcoder
That's the folder you will want to backup, so use a configuration file similar to this one:

[Select]

backup: /var/lib/mysql/donationcoders
logfile: /var/log/backups/bpmnotepad

except files: *.d
except files: *.o

enable email: yes
email: [email protected]

To replace a backup:

- If the database doesn't exist yet, create a new empty database with the name of the database you backed up.
- If the database already exists, first delete all the old data in it. (or issue rm -fr /var/lib/mysql/mydatabase/*)
Now just extract the archive to /var/lib/mysql and it will nicely replace all tables and data from the backup.

462

Developer's Corner / Re: secure automated backup on *nix.

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 01:30 PM »

You can also have the script email you the backups, instead of uploading them over scp, by using a config file like this:

[Select]

backup: /home/gothic/development/projects/bpmnotepad
logfile: /var/log/backups/bpmnotepad

except files: *.d
except files: *.o

enable email: yes
email: [email protected]

463

Living Room / Re: Why don't you pay for software?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 01:20 PM »

The reward is/shoud be the joy of working on the software, and sharing it with people.

The argument of 'greed' on the users part can very easily be reversed to the developer side as well.

That's the last i'm going to say about it.

464

Living Room / Re: Why don't you pay for software?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 03:09 AM »

No one should make money off software. Work at mc donalds and code / contribute to projects in your spare time. (or use a donationware model, don't FORCE payment and ownership) it is a BASIC right to copy/modify/run software as you wish, because software is NOT property, software = ideas and creativity, and limiting ideas and creativity with ownership is always a bad idea. That is the ethical truth.

The practical truth is, that sometimes it's nice to get paid for what you like to do (and if you don't like to do it, you shouldn't be doing it). But that doesn't make it ethically correct. I'm sorry but I just don't believe in ownership of software.

More on topic: Paying for software should be done out of sympathy, goodwill, brotherhood with the developer, not because you have to, just to have the 'privilege' to use the software.

* Gothi[c] ducks and hides

465

Developer's Corner / secure automated backup on *nix.

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 26, 2007, 01:50 AM »

After having lost months of work on various projects(ironically one of them was a backup tool) due to HD crashes and such, I wrote a little Bash shell script that will automatically archive a directory (and all it's sub-folders) and upload it via secure copy (scp) to a remote shell account. I figured I would share this with my dc buddies in case any one can use it.

It reads a simple configuration file in which you can configure a few things, including files to EXCLUDE from the backup. (for example: object files and other garbage files generated while compiling a program).

I will post step-by-step instructions on how to use this, but first, here is the script:

Code: Text [Select]

#!/bin/bash
 
###########################################################################################
#                                                                                         #
# Simple secure automatic backup script by Gothi[c]                                       #
# https://www.donationcoder.com                                                            #
#                                                                                         #
# Takes 1 argument: settings file                                                         #
#                                                                                         #
# Settings file can have the following directives:                                        #
#                                                                                         #
# - backup (which folder to back up)                                                      #
# - scphostname (scp remote machine host name)                                            #
# - scpusername (scp username on remote machine)                                          #
# - scpdestdir (scp destination folder on remote machine)(optional)                       #
# - except files (which files to exclude from the backup) (can have multiple directives)  #
# - logfile (where to log events)                                                         #
# - scpdestfile (optional filename on remote server, if not specified one will be         #
#                generated based on the current date)                                     #
# - enable scp (whether or not to enable scp upload of backups)                           #
# - enable email (whether or not to enable emailing backups)                              #
# - email (email address to send backups to, if enabled)                                  #
# - sendmail (optional)(path to the sendmail program, used to send email)                 #
#                                                                                         #
# Requires following GNU utilities to be installed (these are present on about any GNU    #
# system): cat,sed,grep,tar,bzip2                                                         #
#                                                                                         #
# Requires following GNU utilities to be installed for scp uploading: scp (openssh)       #
#                                                                                         #
# Requires following GNU utilities to be installed for emailing: sendmail, uuencode       #
#                                                                                         #
###########################################################################################
 
#### first check the sanity of our user. ####
 
if [ ! -n "$1" ]; then
  echo "ERROR: Missing settings file argument."
  echo "Usage: $0 settingsfile".
  exit $E_BADARGS
fi  
 
#### check if settings file is readable ####
 
if [ ! -r "$1" ]; then
  echo "ERROR: Could not read provided settings file: $1."
  echo "Please ensure the file exists and that you have read permissions to it."
  exit $E_BADARGS
fi
 
#### init variables ####
 
SETTINGS_FILE=$1
LOCAL_SRC_FOLDER=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "backup:" | sed -e 's/backup:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
ARCHIVE_FILENAME=`basename $LOCAL_SRC_FOLDER`-`date +%F`.tar.bz2
REMOTE_HOSTNAME=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "scphostname:" | sed -e 's/scphostname:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
REMOTE_USERNAME=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "scpusername:" | sed -e 's/scpusername:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
REMOTE_DIRECTORY=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "scpdestdir:" | sed -e 's/scpdestdir:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
REMOTE_FILENAME=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "scpdestfile:" | sed -e 's/scpdestfile:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
LOG_FILE=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "logfile:" | sed -e 's/logfile:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
EXCEPTIONS=( `cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "except files:" | sed -e 's/except files:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//' | sed ':a;N;$!ba;$s/\(.*\)\n/\1 /'` )
EMAIL=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "email:" | sed -e 's/email:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
SCP_ENABLED=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "enable scp:" | sed -e 's/enable scp:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
EMAIL_ENABLED=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "enable email:" | sed -e 's/enable email:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
PROG_SENDMAIL=`cat $SETTINGS_FILE | grep "sendmail:" | sed -e 's/sendmail:\( \)\?//g' | sed -e 's/\( \)\+//'`
 
#### create archive ####
 
TAR_COMMAND="-cvjf /tmp/$ARCHIVE_FILENAME $LOCAL_SRC_FOLDER"
for exception in $(seq 0 $((${#EXCEPTIONS[@]} - 1))); do
  TAR_COMMAND="$TAR_COMMAND --exclude ${EXCEPTIONS[$exception]}"
done
tar $TAR_COMMAND &> /dev/null
 
#### scp upload ####
 
if test "$SCP_ENABLED" != ""; then
  if test "$REMOTE_FILENAME" = ""; then
    SCP_REMOTE_FILE="."
  else
    SCP_REMOTE_FILE=$REMOTE_FILENAME
  fi
  SCP_COMMAND="/tmp/$ARCHIVE_FILENAME $REMOTE_USERNAME@$REMOTE_HOSTNAME:.$REMOTE_DIRECTORY/$SCP_REMOTE_FILE"
  scp $SCP_COMMAND &> /dev/null
fi
 
#### email upload ####
echo "email enabled = $EMAIL_ENABLED"
if test "$EMAIL_ENABLED" != ""; then
  echo "email enabled"
  if test "$PROG_SENDMAIL" = ""; then
    PROG_SENDMAIL="sendmail"
  fi
  if test "$EMAIL" != ""; then
    cat /tmp/$ARCHIVE_FILENAME | uuencode /tmp/$ARCHIVE_FILENAME | ${PROG_SENDMAIL} $EMAIL
    echo "email sent"
  fi
fi
 
#### delete temporary archive file ####
 
rm /tmp/$ARCHIVE_FILENAME
 
#### logging ####
 
if test "$LOG_FILE" != ""; then
  touch $LOG_FILE
  if [ -w $LOG_FILE ]; then
    THE_DATE=`date +%F`
    THE_TIME=`date +%T`
    echo "[$THE_DATE] ($THE_TIME): Completed backup for $SETTINGS_FILE." >> $LOG_FILE
  fi
fi
 
exit 0

(you can download it here)

Here is how I recommend you set it up:

Download the script above and copy it to your /usr/local/bin -or- /usr/bin -or- /bin directory
Make sure you can execute it, just type autobackup (i am assuming in this guide that you saved the script under that filename) and hit enter, you should get something like: "ERROR: Missing settings file argument." Which is good news, it means the script executes and is in our execute path. (if you get a command not found error, try moving the script to a different bin directory (eg: /bin)) (also note that you need to be root to write into these folders)

You may or may not have to chmod it (chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/autobackup) (replace /usr/local/bin with your bindir)
Decide where you want to store the configuration files, a good place would be /etc/backups.
In this guide I will use as example, a project called bpmnotepad of which i want to keep a daily, weekly, and monthly backup.

So I am going to create the configuration files bpmnotepad-daily, bpmnotepad-weekly and bpmnotepad-monthly.

First I need to create the /etc/backups directory, so as root, "cd /etc" and then "mkdir backups" (without the quotes of course)

I will want to run these backups as my regular user (eg: the user gothic) so i am changing the ownership of that folder with "chown gothic /etc/backups" so the user gothic can read and write that folder. (maybe also make sure to chmod it, just in case your default permissions are restrictive (rare though) using the command "chmod +rw /etc/backups"
I also want my backed up files to not just be dumped into the home folder on the remote machine where I have shell access, so I am going to ssh connect to the remote machine and create a backups folder in the home directory on the remote machine. (ssh [email protected], then mkdir ~/backups) (the ~ tilde is a shortcut to your home directory)
We also don't want scp to prompt us for a password, for this to work securely, we'll have to upload our public ssh key to the remote server and tell it to trust us. If you don't have a public ssh key yet, you can create one by running the command "ssh-keygen -t dsa" on your LOCAL machine, then paste the contents of the generated PUBLIC key file on the remote machine into the file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys To test if you no longer need the password, disconnect from the remote machine, and re-establish an ssh connection (ssh user@hostname) and it should not prompt you for a password. If you are having problems with this step, there is an exellent tutorial here

Now here are the example configuration files for our bpmnotepad project, which will go in /etc/backups:

/etc/backups/bpmnotepad-daily

[Select]

backup: /home/gothic/development/projects/bpmnotepad
logfile: /var/log/backups/bpmnotepad

except files: *.d
except files: *.o

enable scp: yes
scphostname: linkerror.com
scpusername: linkerr
scpdestdir: /backups
scpdestfile: bpmnotepad-daily.tar.bz2

/etc/backups/bpmnotepad-weekly

[Select]

/etc/backups/bpmnotepad-monthly

[Select]

As you can see, the only thing that changes in the different files is the remote filename, so we keep 3 copies at all times, which are overwritten with each scheduled backup. Also don't forget to edit the 'backup' line and have it point to the folder where your project or folder you want to have backed up is located. also notice the 'except files' lines, these tell us that i don't want any files with the .d or .o extention in my backup (c++ object files), these lines are optional, you can add as many exception file masks as you want.
The destdir and destfile lines are also optional. When destfile is not given, a filename will be generated from the name of your project/to_backup folder + the date of the backup. (also see information in the script header)

The logfile line is also optional, i forgot to mention this earlier, if you want to keep a logfile, you can create a directory /var/log/backups (follow the same steps as you did to create the /etc/backup directory, but apply to /var/log instead of /etc) -OR- just make it log to some file in your home directory, put whatever you want. or just remove the logfile line.

Now we should have everything set up for our backups. Before we make them run automatically, we should test if it actually works. To do so, in the context of our example, we would issue the following command:

autobackup /etc/backups/bpmnotepad-daily

( the script takes only 1 argument (the configuration file to use) )

If everything went well, the script should pause for a while (depending on how much you have to backup, it can take a while), and then return back to the prompt. The script is NOT verbose and will not give you any output when successful (as is the GNU standard). There will only be output when errors have occured.

After the command finishes, doublecheck on the remote server if the backup file was created.
If the above test was successful, we can now do the actual scheduling part. For this we will use cron.
create a new temporary file, and put something like this in it:

0 1 * * * autobackup /etc/backups/bpmnotepad-dayly
0 1 * * 1 autobackup /etc/backups/bpmnotepad-weekly
0 1 1 * * autobackup /etc/backups/bpmnotepad-monthly

The syntax of this is:
minute_of_hour hour_of_day day_of_month month_of_year day_of_week command_to_run
(the example backs up every day at 1 AM for the daily backup, every monday at 1am for the weekly backup and every 1st day of the month at 1am for the monthly backup)
(more information on this here)

After creating the temporary file run the command:

crontab tmpfile

(where tmpfile = the temporary file you just created)

That's it, now we are set up for automated backups over a secure connection. I know it seems like alot and the above guide may be intimidating to look at, but the only reason why it's so long is because I've tried to be very elaborate.

I hope someone else besides me can make some use of it

I'll put this script + guide up on my website at some point.

_{(ps: sorry it isn't an ahk script, i'll leave that to skrommel, but us *nix geeks are allowed some fun every now and then too )}

466

Living Room / Re: 'Big Brother' Google ?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 24, 2007, 06:55 AM »

Nevermind their intentions, governements can FORCE information out of them. Which would be fine if all governements in the world were perfect, but they aren't, and even if they were there's no guarantee that they forever will be. If the information is there, it's only waiting to be abused.

467

Living Room / Re: 'Big Brother' Google ?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 24, 2007, 03:20 AM »

Bah, I knew it all along

But since yahoo wants to do the same,
what should a privacy-geek, tinfoil-hat-wearing citizen like myself use to search anymore these days?

I don't trust msn search, and ask.com either,... I guess I'll have to build my own darn spider/search engine.

468

Developer's Corner / Re: Why Ruby is so great and why I'll pass and wait for the next big thing..

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 24, 2007, 03:16 AM »

Great post!

I'm afriad I'm in the same camp, and I agree 100%,...
I actually bit through the apple and spent a week exploring ruby and rails, by the end of it, the syntax was driving me crazy. I think they want code to look like plain English, but code doesn't look like plain English for a reason. Eventually, I told myself 'never again. Ruby isn't for me'.

469

Developer's Corner / Re: Temple of the Sun: Sun presents a game & contest for developers

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 17, 2007, 11:36 AM »

Interesting PR stunt

470

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Tolipo - todo list for programmers

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 16, 2007, 06:39 PM »

Thanks

471

Announce Your Software/Service/Product / Re: Tolipo - todo list for programmers

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 16, 2007, 10:17 AM »

1.1 now aviable from: http://linkerror.com...ion=download;lang=en

472

Living Room / Re: Microsoft takes on the free world

« Last post by Gothi[c] on May 14, 2007, 07:41 AM »

hahaha 235,... is that all they could come up with? I mean, given that they even attempted to copyright stuff like 'double clicking'... I'm sure, just like their 'double click' patent, these are full of prior art and vague definitions. If Xerox patented their windowing interface which Apple and then Microsoft stole, they could easily sue Microsoft, Apple, and most of the software world; but do they? No, because any sane person would know that it would be like sueing someone for using a fork or knife.

In all likeleyhood this is just a PR stunt, trying to scare users into thinking that using OSS = piracy. Either way, I think it will hurt them more than help them in the long run,... Users don't like to be incriminated.

473

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 29, 2007, 10:11 PM »

Welcome to the site DrJtoo!

That's quite an amazing story you've got there!
Sounds like the store you bought your Vista copy from is partially in fault by not being willing to reimburse you. But even if they would, it sounds like a horrible experience!

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General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 27, 2007, 10:47 PM »

but trying to explain how to do those to my technically challeged sister? Yikes. She can manage it... Given enough time...

The thing about the GUI is that while it still may take longer to perform some tasks, it leaves less questions in the user's mind. "C:\" or "$:" is very intimidating. The learning curve, and the fear of the learning curve is the problem. Sure - anyone can learn to use gcc, and it's a very powerful tool, but ask your mother to do that kind of thing.

Getting things done for most people shouldn't really involve the learning curve that a lot of software requires - to be fair that applies to both command line and GUI - but there is less pressure with a GUI.
-Renegade (April 27, 2007, 10:14 PM)

I'm not sure if one is more intimidating than the other when you're used to it. And that's the key I guess,... back in the DOS days, 10 year old kids knew how to install and run a game ( I know most of my friends and me did

), and so did most other people, which usually involved several commandline commands. Nobody thought it was all that intimidating back then?

A good GUI may have a less steep learning curve, but some complicated GUI's i'm sure can be just as intimidating to a new user than a series of commandline commands, I'm sure.

Not everyone agreed with the switch, I remember I was very upset when they dropped normal access to real dos in windows, which is about when I started getting more into GNU/Linux.

Again, for software, the requirements for LiVes:

* mplayer 0.90rc1+ compiled with jpeg/png support (version 1.0pre8+ recommended)
* ImageMagick 5+
* perl 5+
* gtk+ 2.8+
* libjpeg62
* gdk-pixbuf-loaders
* sox
* python 2.3.4+ (recommended)
* SDL (recommended)
* mencoder 1.0-pre5+ (recommended)
* libmjpeg-tools (recommended)
* libtheora (recommended)
* libjack/jackit (recommended)
* xmms (optional)
* cdda2wav (optional)

Wow. Tell me that's not going to scare the Hell out of people! "libtheora"? "sox"? Ummm... English please? For 99% of people this kind of stuff is simply terrifying and essentially renders the software unusable. The next part:

Well, normally you wouldn't have to worry about all these dependencies. An "apt-get lives" (or the equivalent for your distro) should automatically fetch everything you need. (and it does.)

It's pretty hard to claim that Ubuntu and *nix are ready for the mass market. While it may work well for those that are already over the learning curve, the masses simply won't tolerate that. Can anyone say "Mac" or "iPod"? They're easy and get things done for people.

As stated above, back in the DOS days noone had a problem, I don't know if it's a matter of ubuntu being 'ready', it's more a matter of the market changing, so in a way the market isn't ready and not the other way around. For the current market, I'd say it's pretty close, but for it to be adopted, OEM's will have to start pre-installing it as default OS instead of windows, which will never happen.
The sad truth is, that in these things, what matters isn't the product or even what the user wants, it all comes down to marketing and eliminating competition.

Hopefully we'll see improvements to user-friendliness and the like so that it truly has mass market appeal, but until then, all the Ubuntu hype will remain just that. Hype.

I agree with you there, I'm getting a bit sick about hearing from ubuntu, while there's so many other just as good distro's out there, but oh well. I'm also sick of people trying to convert people. Everyone should just use what they like best. I understand that people need to be educated about the choices out there, but as pointed out before, that doesn't really matter, the masses don't even want choice, they just want whatever they are used to, which is what they initially get when they get their PC, which is what the OEM's preinstall,... They want what their neightbours, schools, friends have.

I don't mean to be adversarial here. I'm just trying to point out that the (mass) market hasn't and won't accept the current offerings. The people here in this forum are very far from being representative of the mass market.

Don't want to be adversarial either, I just felt compelled to offer the view from the other camp since I don't want *nix visitors to donationcoder to be scared away, thinking we'll chop of their heads with a big MS axe :p

Like pointed out before, markets change, software changes, there will always be a mainstream and underdogs where users with specialty needs find a home.

475

General Software Discussion / Re: Ubuntu Linux vs. Windows Vista

« Last post by Gothi[c] on April 27, 2007, 09:17 PM »

Here I just don't see how Open Office is a real replacement for Microsoft Office. OO is an office suite. MS Office is an office suite and development platform. There's no comparison.

If you look deeper into OO, you'll see that it's also a development platform, it has a broad api and you can write java scripts/plugins for it, documentation lacks a bit though.

Jahshaka is still very far from being a real replacement for a commercial video editor like Liquid.

Cinerella, Kino, LiVes, Blender,... ?

There is nothing for any Linux platform that compares to ProTools.

I haven't tried ProTools yet, but for professional audio ardour is pretty good.

We're lazy. We all want nice GUIs that make our life easier. It's never about the software - it's always about getting a task done with the software.

I'm lazy, which is why I use commandline software. It lets me do multiple tasks with one command or keybinding that would take several mouseclicks, windows and dialogs in a GUI. It's all about what you're used to, one is not inferior to the other, there's no need to start bashing one or the other.

There are more friendly apps now for *nix, but there's still a "software" mentality that seems to go with a lot of it instead of the "let's get stuff done" mentality that is exemplified by the Mac.

Seems you just answered your own question about what I ment by different philosophy. To us commandline folks, GUI apps are unfriendly and frustrating. To you GUI folks, it's the other way around. This 'mentality' is what if causing friction with something you're used to, since many people in the GNU/linux community are comming from a commandline based way of working. It is now that we are seeing some migration of users with different mindsets (eg: windows users) trying to make the jump to GNU/Linux, now that there's some more windowsish applications on Linux, and they get dissapointed when they see that many things still follow that different way of doing things.

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