Month: July 2000

Don’t trouble shoot Linux the Windows way.

Some good advice on Choosing a Perl Book.

Is Copyright Dead? Part 1: Let’s Think About It

Some costs obviously are unchanged, but others are radically reduced. The key issue is how these changes relate to underlying assumptions behind copyright. Think about it, and check back next time to see what difference the net has made — in my opinion.

Outlines the history of copyright and the reasons for it’s existance.

Bloated content management tools on the slide on WriteTheWeb

My current choice: Larswm. Why? because, while it sits right on top of X, it doesn’t have all the crap that GUIs normally have. There are two separate problems with the current linux desktop GUIs: 1) performance 2) ease of use

1) X sucks at performance. Someone should make a GL-based X replacement. Don’t worry about legacy cards. Anyone using one will still use X for a while, but the future is GL. This would be small, fast as hell becuase of no legacy, and able to do anything apple can do, maybe better.

2) the window manager is not dependent on X for usability except for anti-aliased fonts and nice effects. hey, guess what? larswm is SIMPLE, it is EASY TO LEARN (given some rough edges are gone), and it WORKS. Sure, I would love anti-aliased fonts while browsing or coding, but we don’t need widgets and wadgets to do work: simple is better!

(an ironic note: larswm is closer to ‘modal’ interface of set-top devices than other window mangers, if ya think about it 🙂

Developing Gnome Application with Python (Part 1)
So you want to design GUIs engel?

osOpinion: X Windows Must Die!

But X cannot live on its own: it needs a Window Manager and a widget toolkit to do anything. More millions of lines of code, layered on top of an already overweight system. GNOME, KDE, even Motif exact a huge performance hit and add further complexity. Worse yet, no one in the Unix community seems to be able to agree on any kind of GUI standard, so you have an explosion of window managers, desktops, file managers, and widget toolkits which are mostly inoperable with each other.

Dealing with the which Window Manger, how to configure, and which widget set to write to is the biggest pain in the butt of Linux/UNIX. So much duplication of effort to achieve the same end result.

Providing Reliable NT Desktop Services by Avoiding NT Server, a good no b.s. what is the best choice.

Free Geeks Want Good Gnus
RMS of GNU fame wants .gnu as a top level domain name (TLD). Why not allow any 2-3 letter TLD? Let registars control up to 3 TLDs.