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A Look at GNOME 2.14
An anonymous reader writes "Gnome has a nice preview of their newest version 2.14 posted which should be hitting the streets around the 15th of March. From the article: "As well as new features and more polish, developers have been working around the clock to squeeze more performance out of the most commonly used applications and libraries. This is a review of some of the most shiny work that has gone into the upcoming GNOME release."
I think you just won the award for the craziest question ever asked on Slashdot. Motif widgets are NOT interchangeable with Qt/Gtk. Those two aren't even interchangeable. Not to mention the fact that Motif is old, crusty, and un-free anyway.
I think we moved past Motif around 1995. I know there are some commercial products that still want to use it, but those guys are few and far between.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
see, I was right
they suck, very hard
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Apple uses the BSD utilities, not the GNU utilities.
#include ".signature"
Yes I have heard of them. That doesn't have anything to do with what he asked, though.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
KDE was pas version 3.0 how long, five years ago ?
Fluendo, the company that controls GStreamer, wants to link their DRM plugins to LGPL code
Yeah, screw them for adding value to GStreamer while leaving the core framework open! How dare they write licensed plugins for MP3 and other formats.
who don't realize that by writing LGPL multimedia code, they might as well be working for the RIAA and MPAA
Yeah, screw those developers for wanting to write a media framework that is open enough to allow closed-source plugins.
Too bad the makes of GTK and GNOME didn't listen. But thank God the makers of Qt and KDE did!
Yeah, thank god that you can't develop a closed-source Qt app without paying Trolltech. We wouldn't want to encourage people to write commercial applications that interoperate wiht the rest of the desktop!
You critisize Microsoft from using proprietary formats to deter interoperability, but when an open-source project makes the decision to allow compatibility with closed-source applications, you jump all over them! VMWare wouldn't use GTK+ if it were GPL, and neither would many of the other commercial Linux apps - we'd be exactly where we were 10 years ago, with every application using its own UI.
So let me get this straight. Some code is released under an open license and a proprietary company uses it line for line and that's perfectly fine legally and karma wise, but an open source project makes their stuff look vaguely like the proprietary company's stuff and it's called ripping it off? That's silly. Which one took more creativity? The verbatim copying or the slight similarities in look and feel which still had to be coded from scratch?
And your post shows how Apple can be a real dick. "We can take code from your project because it's open sourced, but don't you dare make your projects 'look' like ours or we'll sick the lawyers on you". Assholes.
Perhaps, but for desktop Linux they're pretty big steps.
/usr/local/bin, or /usr/bin, or /bin, or /KlaptasticApp/Krabulator or whatever the developer's mood led him to...and scatter its contents around my drive).
Application installation, for example, is probably my #1 irritant at the moment. As soon as I can install and uninstall 90% of the programs I use outside of the command-line, and never EVER have to run "make" again, then I'll be a desktop Linux user again.
Part of this is the evil that is shared libraries and dependencies. I'm sorry, but Windows exited DLLhell years ago - you'd think Linux would be light-years beyond it by 2006.
On the installation front, in fact, it'd be better to emulate the "ease" model of OS X, where most apps are distributed as special archives, and I simply drag the app (distributed as a disk image which mounts by double-clicking) into a folder of my choosing (which also means that I don't have to dive into the make file or do a find to figure out that "make install" decided to install the app into
Apple and innovation?
Apple is regarded by its supporters to be an innovative and forwardlooking company. They claim Apple innovated most things from the GUI to having popularized the USB port. Almost always the supporters make the innovation claims with restrictions like "in the field of personal computing", "over the entire product line", "affordable solution" and "as a standard feature". They also like to blur the vision when equaling "popularized" and "introducing" with "inventing". Apple supporters always maximizes the importance of Apples involvment in an innovation (even if it's very slim) and at the same time downplay any other companies involvement.
Case in point "USB":
When the supporters speak about how innovative Apple is they talk about how Apple popularized USB. In reality Apple had absolutely nothing to do with the technical creation of USB. Intel invented USB as an answer to Apples pay-per-port licencing of firewire. Apple was one of the first companies to use USB but strictly (or not so strictly) speaking that isn't innovation. They just used an ff the shelf product that where innovated for the PC market.
The same can be said for a lot of products Apple supporters claim Apple innvented, of course with "additional restrictions" (see above). Some of these innovations are: Audio, SCSI, Ethernet, long file names and Floppy drives. In reality Apple innvovated none of those products.
A nice page for looking at these "innovations" is an older wikipedia page describing the Macintosh on which of course Mac users gone totaly mad in describing the Macintosh as a very innovative platform. Almost all of claimed innovations are in fact just off the shelf products licenced from other companies or already old products used in a slightly different manner by Apple. The wikipedia page has since been revised and is now more in line with what Macintosh actually brought to the table of computing.
It is however true that Apple are fast at picking up new technologies invented outside Apple and as a result the Macintosh is a faster evolving platform than the PC. This is a design decision made by Apple to keep the Macintosh computer intressting and "fresh". This however has some lowdowns. Every five year or so the Macintosh developers and users have to adapt to a completely new platform or a new operation system (68k->PPC, legacy MacOs->OS X, PPC->x86, soon x86->x86-64). In the PC world this would be suicide, too much money are tied up in legacy technologies. Macintosh are mostly used by home users and small companies who don't need a homogen environment, or have so few computers and programs they can invest in new technology every so often. The PC platform is used by everybody, small and large. It would be almost impoosible to "twist and turn" the Apple way. Intel tried to introduce Itanuium for 64bit computing but in the end had to back down to a backward compatible x86 sollution.
All in all, when the dust has settled. After decades of innovation and jumping beetween CPU families the Macintosh has transformed to nothing less than an ordinary PC, at least in hardware. Linux x86 booted within a month of the x86 Macintosh release using the standard EFI bootloader and Gentoo Linux distribution. It's also probable Windows vista will boot out of the box on the Macintosh without Microsoft putting any effort in testing on the platform. On all important fronts the innovation by Apple has been nothing short of a straight copy of the PC platform. On the software side half of Apples operating system is also of the shelf available parts from different open source projects. That isn't innovation.
The PC platform have already gone x86-64 (Linux is already fully functional both as a server and desktop) and it's a good bet Apple will soon copy this too.