Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
Quoting guy keren, from the post of Sat, 14 Dec: PC Magazine, for example, has done a great job for years, with 22 annual comparisons, per year. One of those comparisons, repeated any year, compared all the printers that were announced that year (more than 100 PER YEAR). These comparisons covered almost anything you can imagine. They were very objective, although some of the competitors advertised in PC-Magazine. and because this kind of thing takes a lot of effort - they only did it for a more important products in their field. and they sell the magazine for money, to a lot of subscribers. and if that comparison was done in the last year, I want it linked from a central directory of comparisons. perhaps then you are approaching the wrong crowd - you should approach the different linux magazines with this suggestion - hopeing they begin it now, and be able to grow the ammount of products tested, as their circulation (as they call it) increases. in the case of a laptop or some PCI card, they can do an objective test, but when it's a software product, it's always the problem of emulating the conditions right for the average user. but there is NO average for database users and other such products... for things i'm not aware of a 'category killer' for, i google, read about a few, cancel most on the bases of their APIs or config file formats, or so, try one or two, and then decide if one is good enough, or i'll write it on my own. i also sometimes just read about tools randomally, assuming that knowing them would probably come handy in the future. so I am thinking of a site where people would: 1. publish their personal recomendation and testimony 2. publish links to the useful posts they ound after a bit of googling (a-la linux-laptop) 3. publish benchmarking tools and suites they may have devised in the case of products that require it, so you can try it against more possible candidates and compare, or save time on writing tests that answer your usage patterns. nothing official, nothing trustworthy, just feedback from fellow users that saves you googeling time by concentrating info, rumors, tips and links. a researcher's helper site. It makes PERFECT sense to pitch the idea to sf.net of freshmeat, since there are many experianced programmers who may like to rave and rant about libraries and tools they have used and why they fit their needs (or gave them fits instead :) Boa semena para voce, Ira. -- You can't handle all that magic Ira Abramov http://ira.abramov.org/email/ This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal. msg23922/pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Eli Marmor wrote: PC Magazine, for example, has done a great job for years, with 22 annual comparisons, per year. One of those comparisons, repeated any year, compared all the printers that were announced that year (more than 100 PER YEAR). These comparisons covered almost anything you can imagine. They were very objective, although some of the competitors advertised in PC-Magazine. and because this kind of thing takes a lot of effort - they only did it for a more important products in their field. and they sell the magazine for money, to a lot of subscribers. perhaps then you are approaching the wrong crowd - you should approach the different linux magazines with this suggestion - hopeing they begin it now, and be able to grow the ammount of products tested, as their circulation (as they call it) increases. If it is a strategic decision for you and/or your company, maybe it will pay to do the research yourself. You have a very good head start cynic Let's go forward: if it's strategic, maybe it will pay to develop it from scratch! /cynic then don't be a perfectionist. there are only a _few_ stategic decisions a company needs to make. most other decisoins are simply tactical decisions, and can be corrected - _if_ the need arises. already. You know of a wide range of products that fit the general description. This is much more than most people start with. List your criteria, search for information about each product and try to grade them based on each criterion. Such comparative tables do help. If nothing else, it will clarify quite a few things for you, and will help you make informed decisions. You can't just harvest details from the Internet and build a check list; You should try all of the choices in order to get a decision. This is the only way to decide which of them is really the easiet. And which of them is really the fastest. But this forces you to download and install all of them learn all of them, etc. well, you don't really have to download and test all of them, not with a full-scale test. when i need something form the open source world, i first try what i know about - if it is good enough, i take it. for things i'm not aware of a 'category killer' for, i google, read about a few, cancel most on the bases of their APIs or config file formats, or so, try one or two, and then decide if one is good enough, or i'll write it on my own. i also sometimes just read about tools randomally, assuming that knowing them would probably come handy in the future. you might argue that with a better tool, i could do what i wanted in less time. but this time is time i already saved by only doing a rather shallow comparison. so there's a trade off here. if you waste too much time on the comparisons, you eventually lose time on doing what you actually want to do. and eventually, what you're measured with is what you bring to the customer in, at the end of the day. -- guy, who taught himself that perfectionism will only make him miserable. For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator. -- nob o. dy = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
Shachar Shemesh wrote: Isn't that what Free Market means? The usual sequence of events is that when you have 10 options for a library, 7-8 of them die out, and you are left with two. That's what happened in the desktop env (anyone still seriously using GNUStep? fvwm?) It's a good thing. Noone likes investing money in a product that doesn't take off, and noone will invest coding efforts (at least, not over time) in a product that noone uses. Very little products can survive without active maintanance (with qmail being the only noteable exception I can think of), and so even in the OpenSource world, if a product is abandoned, it will die out. One thing you should note, however, is that in this world, if a product dies out, you are not left out in the cold when something breaks. I've never said anything against having many choices. The opposite is true. I wrote exactly the same thing that you say. And even the subject says that (the word Blessed). I just wish to have a site that will allow me to choose the right tool for my needs. And that will allow me to know which choices have the best chances to succeed (either because of their features/quality, or because of their back), so I will not stuck into a product that will die, as you wrote. -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] CTO, Founder Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-23-7338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
Eli Marmor wrote: snip religious stuff Chazal said: Kin'at Sofrim Tarbe Hochma. /snip What I really miss in Open Source? What does it lack? Open Source offers almost everything we need. Actually, much more than we need: snip How should I choose my choices? The first choice I make is the distribution. The advantage of using a distribution is that most choices have already been made for you by a team of fairly competent linux users, with default system settings and a series of preconfigured packages. Take MTA's, for example. Redhat uses sendmail, Mandrake's default is postfix, Debian tends to Exim. The more distributions you try, the more you learn to use the different popular alternatives. Other choices are also distribution dependent, like the eternal Gnome/KDE dilemma. In Mandrake 9.0 I prefer KDE. In Redhat 8.0 Gnome works better for me. snip long rant on choices The real need is an objective site that will scan an area by area, and in each area will compare the different choices. Readers will be able to note (like in Slashdot). Maybe even with notes rating like Slashdot (and maybe even using Slashdot's engine, which is Open Source too). This site may be called ReligiousWars.something, and will enjoy a high rating from its first day (because people CARE about religious wars). So contrary to typical Dot.Com initiatives, this one has great chances to succeed. Maybe. Personally, I think religious wars are boring. Let people believe what they may. I rather reach my own conclusions. Cheers, Henry = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
Quoting Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED]: - You need a text editor? - No problem; We have emacs for you, we have vi, etc. Just take one. hehe... a signature I caught the other day on some random mailing list: Emacs is a fine OS, but what it lacks to be able to hold it's own against Linux and Windows is a good text editor. ;-) Gilad, Who uses both vi and Emacs, but for different things -- Gilad Ben-Yossef [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I just wish to have a site that will allow me to choose the right tool for my needs. There is an ongoing thread on comp.lang.c.moderated that started when someone posted a question about the best book to learn C from. He was told to figure out first what it was he wanted to do with (in?) C. The OP said he had a very good idea what he wanted, and that he was not a total novice in programming, and not as clueless as was (in his opinion) implied. Then he was told that the people who had answered him (and there are some luminaries there) didn't know what he wanted, and having hundreds of C books on their bookshelves and having written extensive reviews on dozens of them, they still could not give a specific recommendation without further specific info. At the same time, they know way too much to just recommend KR and be done with it. That's the difficulty. You want the right tool for your specific needs. In order to do that, you need to specify your needs, and then google or otherwise look for recommendations based on your specific criteria. I am no expert in the particular area you are interested in, but I would venture a guess that it is just as difficult to give a catch-all recommendation there as in any other field. And asking for a web site that would deliver what you want is asking for a group of trustworthy, meaning both highly competent and incorruptible, people with wide enough area of expertise to cover a range of criteria. Not that it's impossible, but it strikes me as a very difficult task. If it is a strategic decision for you and/or your company, maybe it will pay to do the research yourself. You have a very good head start already. You know of a wide range of products that fit the general description. This is much more than most people start with. List your criteria, search for information about each product and try to grade them based on each criterion. Such comparative tables do help. If nothing else, it will clarify quite a few things for you, and will help you make informed decisions. Last time I did something of the kind was when I was shopping for a new car a few months ago. In some ways it was a similar situation: I know a few things about cars but I am neither an auto mechanic nor an insurance agent (I consulted with some). There are way too many makes and models out there, and there are many diverse sources of informations, from manufacturers' data to trade magazines to consumer reports on the 'net. After sifting through a lot of information and organizing it as well as I could I took several models on several test drives each, under different conditions. It was a strategic investment for me, so I put in the time and the effort. I wished someone would do the job for me, too. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
On 2002-12-13, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote: hehe... a signature I caught the other day on some random mailing list: Emacs is a fine OS, but what it lacks to be able to hold it's own against Linux and Windows is a good text editor. ;-) I've heard it in a shorter version: (even better IMO :) Emacs is a fine OS, but it lacks a good text editor = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: There is an ongoing thread on comp.lang.c.moderated that started when someone posted a question about the best book to learn C from. He was told to figure out first what it was he wanted to do with (in?) C. The OP said he had a very good idea what he wanted, and that he was not a total novice in programming, and not as clueless as was (in his opinion) implied. Then he was told that the people who had answered him (and there are some luminaries there) didn't know what he wanted, and having hundreds of C books on their bookshelves and having written extensive reviews on dozens of them, they still could not give a specific recommendation without further specific info. At the same time, they know way too much to just recommend KR and be done with it. That's the difficulty. You want the right tool for your specific needs. In order to do that, you need to specify your needs, and then google or otherwise look for recommendations based on your specific criteria. I am no expert in the particular area you are interested in, but I would venture a guess that it is just as difficult to give a catch-all recommendation there as in any other field. As I wrote (and others, as Ira, repeated) we are talking about a comparison with various criterions. So in the case of a database, there will be a row (in the table) called transactions, with a V for PostgreSQL and a 0.5 for MySQL. With detailed comparisons, everybody can choose the right tool for his needs. And asking for a web site that would deliver what you want is asking for a group of trustworthy, meaning both highly competent and incorruptible, people with wide enough area of expertise to cover a range of criteria. Not that it's impossible, but it strikes me as a very difficult task. PC Magazine, for example, has done a great job for years, with 22 annual comparisons, per year. One of those comparisons, repeated any year, compared all the printers that were announced that year (more than 100 PER YEAR). These comparisons covered almost anything you can imagine. They were very objective, although some of the competitors advertised in PC-Magazine. If it is a strategic decision for you and/or your company, maybe it will pay to do the research yourself. You have a very good head start cynic Let's go forward: if it's strategic, maybe it will pay to develop it from scratch! /cynic The same decisions have to be done by MANY companies and organizations, and it's impossible to repeat this effort per company and per an area. already. You know of a wide range of products that fit the general description. This is much more than most people start with. List your criteria, search for information about each product and try to grade them based on each criterion. Such comparative tables do help. If nothing else, it will clarify quite a few things for you, and will help you make informed decisions. You can't just harvest details from the Internet and build a check list; You should try all of the choices in order to get a decision. This is the only way to decide which of them is really the easiet. And which of them is really the fastest. But this forces you to download and install all of them learn all of them, etc. So it makes sense that there will be a site expertizing in doing these comparisons, rather than any of us reinventing the wheel. -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] CTO, Founder Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-23-7338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: You can't just harvest details from the Internet and build a check list; You should try all of the choices in order to get a decision. This is the only way to decide which of them is really the easiet. And which of them is really the fastest. But this forces you to download and install all of them learn all of them, etc. So it makes sense that there will be a site expertizing in doing these comparisons, rather than any of us reinventing the wheel. Indeed. At the same time, it is unlikely that you can go about it without doing some of the job yourself. As a limiting case, consider a situation where speed is you main criterion. How likely are you to find a published benchmark comparison that will be a) directly applicable to your situation, b) trustworthy, c) completely specified so that you know exactly (i.e. to your satisfaction) how the comparison was set up. I seriously doubt you'll find many such cases. Now add to that a second criterion, that will involve analysis of the business prospects of the manufacturer and how the particular product fits the manufacturer's strategic plans. That's a totally different set of expertise. And you want it under one roof on the net. There are companies specializing in this sort of things. they usually charge a lot. -- Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Shachar Shemesh wrote: Eli Marmor wrote: The real thing that is missing, is the opposite one. We have a problem of rich men: too many choices. Isn't that what Free Market means? The usual sequence of events is that when you have 10 options for a library, 7-8 of them die out, and you are left with two. That's what happened in the desktop env (anyone still seriously using GNUStep? fvwm?) Well, ... err... yes. Seems to be people working on it: http://www.gnustep.org/ No to mention: XFCE, UDE, Rox, EDE (the latter two are relatively new. Much after gnome and KDE have become dominant). I've only tried XFCE, and it looks nice. And then there are the less ambitious desktops: the window managers: WindowMaker, IceWM, Black-Box/Flux-Box, FVWM (try 2.4 with the graphical setup module), ion (which I'm currently trying, but have a problem with a number of programs that can't adapto to it. It is quite a desktop obfucator, though) It's a good thing. Noone likes investing money in a product that doesn't take off, and noone will invest coding efforts (at least, not over time) in a product that noone uses. Very little products can survive without active maintanance (with qmail being the only noteable exception I can think of), and so even in the OpenSource world, if a product is abandoned, it will die out. Aparantly maintaining a window manager is relatively little work. Although a good test to see which are maintained is to se how fast they comply to the new window manager specs from http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/wm-spec.html One thing you should note, however, is that in this world, if a product dies out, you are not left out in the cold when something breaks. (As the case of BlackBox shows) -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
On 2002-12-13, Shachar Shemesh wrote: (anyone still seriously using GNUStep? fvwm?) For the record, yes: at home my main wm currently is fvwm2. And a collegue of me at work is actually using twm.. = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
snip religious stuff Chazal said: Kin'at Sofrim Tarbe Hochma. /snip What I really miss in Open Source? What does it lack? Open Source offers almost everything we need. Actually, much more than we need: - You need a text editor? - No problem; We have emacs for you, we have vi, etc. Just take one. - You need a desktop management environment? - No problem; We have KDE, GNOME, etc. - Need a distro? - RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, SuSE, etc. - A database? - MySQL, PostgreSQL, SAP, Interbase, etc. The real thing that is missing, is the opposite one. We have a problem of rich men: too many choices. How should I choose my choices? Should I try all the options and then decide? It's impossible! Should I see what the authors have to say about their own package? They are not objective! For example, I spent this week trying to choose my future CGI C library. This decision is strategic, and I'm not going to migrate from one library to another in the future, so I must choose right. Now, there are at least 10 different Open Source libraries, ranging from GCGI, LibCGI, CGIC, HostCGI, to ECGI, TCGI, libapreq, etc. What should I do I also had to choose a C toolkit for indexed records file. There were NDBM, GDBM, SDBM and Berkeley (finally I chose APR-UTIL abstract library which is built on top of those 4...). Sometimes, there is no best choice vs. worst choice, but a choice for specific cases, vs. a choice for other specific cases. For example, some people claim that if you need transactions, then PostgreSQL is better for you, while if you don't need them, MySQL is better (I don't claim it, but only give (possibly wrong) example). There are about hundred (100) areas where competing Open Source packages compete with each other, and in each of these areas there are 2, 3, 4 and sometime even 7-10 competing packages. There is even no problem to find all these packages: freshmeat.net does a great job. SourceForge may help too, as well as Google and others. The real need is an objective site that will scan an area by area, and in each area will compare the different choices. Readers will be able to note (like in Slashdot). Maybe even with notes rating like Slashdot (and maybe even using Slashdot's engine, which is Open Source too). This site may be called ReligiousWars.something, and will enjoy a high rating from its first day (because people CARE about religious wars). So contrary to typical Dot.Com initiatives, this one has great chances to succeed. Somebody to take the glove? I give up any royalties or options (except for $.02)... -- Eli Marmor [EMAIL PROTECTED] CTO, Founder Netmask (El-Mar) Internet Technologies Ltd. __ Tel.: +972-9-766-1020 8 Yad-Harutzim St. Fax.: +972-9-766-1314 P.O.B. 7004 Mobile: +972-50-23-7338 Kfar-Saba 44641, Israel = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Blessed Religious Wars [Was: Mandrake 9.0 is fantastic]
Eli Marmor wrote: The real thing that is missing, is the opposite one. We have a problem of rich men: too many choices. Isn't that what Free Market means? The usual sequence of events is that when you have 10 options for a library, 7-8 of them die out, and you are left with two. That's what happened in the desktop env (anyone still seriously using GNUStep? fvwm?) It's a good thing. Noone likes investing money in a product that doesn't take off, and noone will invest coding efforts (at least, not over time) in a product that noone uses. Very little products can survive without active maintanance (with qmail being the only noteable exception I can think of), and so even in the OpenSource world, if a product is abandoned, it will die out. One thing you should note, however, is that in this world, if a product dies out, you are not left out in the cold when something breaks. Shachar = To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word unsubscribe in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
