And yet Ubuntu doesn't 'just work'. As a Ubuntu user since 6.05, I have to say that for me it does 'just work'.
Why is the bottom panel on my desktop missing about 20% of the time? I have to log out and log back in. Usually it comes back, sometimes it takes 2 logins. I have never had this problem, but it seems your gnome setup has some problems (I'm assuming it's not just your screen resolution not displaying the bottom of the screen).
Why is the application built into Ubuntu to play music named "Movie Player"? It's not, I've never seen Rythmbox (Ubuntu's music player) called "Movie Player". The "Movie Player" (Totem, I think) can play MP3s, but that isn't what it setup as default for music files.
Why do I just get a black square when playing a movie with Movie Player? If I move the window I see the movie playing, but the black box comes back as soon as I drop the window. It sounds like your video card driver hasn't properly implemented video playback in X11.
Why, when I explicity specify I want 2 workspace, does the second workspace disappear and I'm left with one for half of my logins? Even when I do get 2 the second one has no panels at all 75% of the time. Again, I've never had this problem. It seems you have something seriously broken in Gnome. Try creating a new user account and logging in with that and don't change anything with Gnome when you do. If the new account has the same problems, the Gnome install is hosed, re-install it. If the new account is fine, then it's something you did in your account that is causing the problems.
Why can't I Add/Remove certain software from Add/Remove? Why does it even show up on the list with a checkbox if all it is going to is tell me to run Synaptic? I've heard this complaint before, and honestly it sounds like some stupid configuration. I can't say that I've ever actually used Add/Remove, I prefer synaptic for everything, but this seems a legitimate bug.
Why is the Software Update notification so annoying? I know Linux generally makes poor use of screen space, but why is the popup so huge? Why isn't it transparent like every other popup on a modern desktop? Uh, huge? It's tiny for me. What is your screen resolution? Are you running 640x480? Because that might be causing some of your other Gnome display problems. And transparent? The notifications I get on Windows XP aren't transparent. Are you using Compiz or Beryl? Those could cause some of your other problems if your video card can't handle them.
Say I unpack an archive to the desktop and it specifies a directory structure for the files. How come the folder icon is hidden underneath the icon for a drive I mounted a few minutes before? Again, never had this problem. Could be caused by extremely small screen size as I mentioned above.
Why can't the built in Bittorrent client download more than one torrent at a time? Why does it tell me "Error 98" or some other obscure junk if I try? I never had this problem with the default Bittorrent client, but I'll admit that I installed Azureus because I like it better.
I don't want a network connection icon to show up in the system tray, I'm on a machine that is wired all the time, I know it is on a network, I put it there. So take if off, what's so hard about that?
Why are desktop icons so huge? 5000 icon sets, all of them bigger than a breadbox. Icon sets come with different sizes for each icon for different applications. Are you using the biggest size when you don't need it, or again is your screen resolution so low that even 32x32 looks huge?
This is a partial list. Work on these and I will provide another. Worked on, got any more?
I don't mind it as a supplementation as long as it works, but there is going to be some idiot who thinks that this may be a replacement for parents...for which there can NEVER be a real replacement. This isn't some kind of "nanny bot" that is meant to be a care giver for autistic children. This is a simplified human-analog that helps autistic children associate specific facial gestures with specific emotional states, which is something that most autistics don't have an natural understanding of.
By providing a small sub-set of facial gestures that are always used the same way for the same reasons, these children can build that association into their subconscious understanding for future interactions with real people. It's no different than teaching kids to read using small words in short phrases, "see spot run", instead of giving them a dictionary.
I don't understand why anyone would spend their time working on robots to help what are effectively defects. Autistic people, like retards, can't be fixed. Their affliction is permanent. It's not like physical therapy with a cripple, at least they can benefit. I would be more interested in cripple-helping robots than retard babysitting robots. 1.) Autism is treatable with therapy and many autistic children gain a level of functionality where you probably couldn't tell they have autism.
2.) You're a jackass, go die and free up some carbon for useful purposes.
What the heck! How about if I install Google search, disable Windows search, and then some other 3rd party search (without disabling Google search). Then I'd have Google search causing performance issues which is Google's fault? But you could uninstall Google search without breaking anything else. You can't stop Windows search without breaking other parts of Vista. The complaint isn't that there are performance issues running both, it's that disabling the Windows indexer unnecessarily disables other functionality the user would want to keep using, thus making it undesirable to stop the Windows indexer, and making it undesirable to run Google's competing product.
This is just plain stupid. And that IE and Firefox thing is flawed since IE isn't performing system wide services on the background. This is actually quite accurate since it was one of the main reasons Microsoft was penalized. Before the monopoly suit, you couldn't tell programs like Outlook or Office that HTML files or HTTP links should be opened in a different browser, they only opened IE. So even if you wanted to use Netscape, you still needed IE to use the link functions in Outlook or Office. So people were faced with the choice of using two different browsers, or using IE only. As we all know from history, they mostly chose to use only one browser, even before IE became better than Netscape. Going back to search, people are faced with the choice of using two desktop search systems, or using only Windows Search. We all know that history repeats itself.
> * Built in support for virtual machines. Something like java in the kernel
This is what VMI (Virtual machine Interface) does right now in the kernel along with the KVM(kernel virtual machine) and please do not compare and OS with Java stuff. Java do not deserve to be compared to a highly performing kernel. I don't think that's what he was talking about. KVM is used for hardware virtualization, not byte-code execution like the Java VM. That said, I don't understand what having the JVM built into the kernel would accomplish, besides giving slightly improving startup of Java apps and generally forcing the Kernel to consume more memory. It would also give rise to all the known problems of running multiple Java apps within the same VM instance, which is why the standard JVM doesn't do this already. I also don't see why Java can't be compared to an OS kernel, there are several Java-based OS's and specialized processors that run Java byte-code in hardware, so in that setup it's really no different than a kernel written in C.
The problem still remains that in order to keep Google's search from slowing down your system, you have to disable parts of Vista that should not have to be disabled. That is Google's complaint, that Microsoft has designed Vista such that nobody would want to stop the Windows Indexer, and therefore by performance extension, nobody would want to run Google's desktop search. Imagine if you had to remove IE in order for Firefox to work right, would you do it? Or would you just use IE?
You are wrong, I *have* used content searching and I don't see it as a huge leap over searching by file name. Searching my files is searching my files and file name is just a special form of content in my opinion. The fact that searching has been expanded to include what's inside the files instead of just what's in the files directory record is not a major change. If you use desktop search only as an enhanced file search, then it's no surprise that you don't consider it much different. In that sense, you *haven't* really used it in any meaningful sense.
Desktop searches more than just files, and even more than just the content of files. Traditional file search involves reading the file system table. Desktop search involves profiling the contents of files, emails, browser activity and IM sessions plus meta data in media files like Jpeg and MP3. All of this information is cataloged and indexed, usually in a database, for faster searching. Microsoft may have had a small subset of this functionality before, but that doesn't mean they had desktop search before. You may not see the use of it, but after using Beagle for a few months, its one of the things I miss the most when I have to use Windows.
I'll have to concede the AV point to you, since I use neither AV software nor Vista. I'm just going by the AV companies complaints that proceeded Vista's launch.
Then you've never used content searching. With content searching (at least with Beagle) I can search not only file names, but the content of multiple file types, emails, web history, bookmarks, Photos, Music, Videos, IM sessions, etc.
But still I don't see any problem here, at least without further explanation. If you click Start-button you will see "search" option there. What's preventing Google to add "Search using Google" button there? Or is it that Google want's to be the sole search engine and front-end in Windows? The problem is that for people who want to use Google's desktop search on Vista, they have 2 options:
1.) Run both MS and Google indexers, and notice performance issues related to having 2 indexing your hard drive at the same time or 2.) Disable the MS indexer and loose file system search functionality from within Windows Explorer and other Vista components.
Either way, installing Google Desktop Search on Vista now causes an inconvenience for the user, so people are less likely to do so.
Nonsense, of course you can stop it. The 'Windows Search' service is simply one of many non-essential Windows services, and can be stopped or disabled by any user with administrative privileges. If that is the heart of Google's complaint, then they're either dishonest or incompetent. Let me clarify, you can't stop Windows Search service without compromising the functionality of the Vista desktop. This is no different than IE, which could be removed, but then nothing would work right. Disabling Windows Search also disables all of Vista's search boxes, so nobody is actually going to do it.
Explorer has had a search function since Windows 95, so if Google are upset by that, it's a bit late to start complaining now. Windows 95 search functions didn't have adverse technical effects on Google's product offerings, Windows Search does.
The service is called Windows Search. Stop it, disable it. Windows indexer no longer runs. Which would be ideal if it didn't disable all the search functionality within Vista. If Google's search (or Yahoo, or whichever) could replace Windows Search in Vista, then stopping the service would be all that needs to be done. But imagine if you had to disable the file search functions of Windows XP just to make Google Desktop Search run right, who would install it then?
Just because they both have "search" in their name, doesn't mean they're the same product. Window's desktop search is to Win95 file search what Google internet search is to IE bookmark search.
I am not a fan of microsoft-- in fact i refuse to use windows or give my money to microsoft in any way-- but i think that they should have the right to include whatever they want in *their* OS as long as it isn't intentionally crippling another companies product or using anti-competitive practices to steal the market from a competitor. Google's complaint is that Microsoft's desktop indexer cannot be stopped, so running Google's indexer in parallel causes a significant performance decrease (read: crippling other companies product). Also, Microsoft's search is the only one available within windows explorer, directing internet search traffic to Microsoft's Live Search, instead of allowing people to use Google or Yahoo (read: using anti-competitive practives to steal the market from a competitor). It's only slightly more subtle than having IE redirect http://www.google.com/ to http://www.live.com/
And what's wrong with that? It's their damn product. Of COURSE they're going to try to promote it above all else. Do you not do this with your products? Or if you aren't self-employed, does your company not do this? If you don't like it, you're free to use a competitor's product. There is nothing wrong with Microsoft trying to promote their product, and trying to keep their marketshare. The problem comes in when they accomplish this not by keeping their own product better than the competition, but by keeping the competition from getting better than their own product.
In this case, instead of simply making a better desktop search for Windows to compete with Google, Microsoft created a desktop search that interferes with the performance of Google's offering. Similarly, Vista's security lets Microsoft's inferior antivirus run properly, but interferes with the operation of other AV products. Tell me how you, as a consumer, benefit from that.
You can disable Spotlight and install Google search if you want but that's no different from Windows. Actually that is different from Windows, and the heart of Google's complaint. You can't stop Microsoft's indexer from running or remove Microsoft's Desktop Search from Windows Explorer.
Having also been driven to near insanity by JMF I understand your position, but I say just fix JMF instead of creating a new media API that will get dumped and neglected. Most of the problems with JMF are implementation issues, not core to the system. I have great hope for FMJ, but having Sun's support there would sure help. I disagree, requiring the entire JMF just to play media files would be like requiring the entire JAI just to display an image in your app. I would rather they provide a small package for media playback, and then the full JMF for advanced playback and editing. That is what the Media Components are supposed to be.
My greatest new feature, which would easily trump all others, would be heavyweight-lightweight mixing. Right now lightweight Swing can't even render a modern web page, play back any media, provide a decent text editing component, or embed ActiveX or other external frames. All of these things I would consider basic requirements to developing a desktop application on Windows. Being able to mix heavyweight and lightweight would allow one to use a host of technologies in a Swing application that would actually make Java into a fully capable desktop development environment. The rest are just icing. I think work is being done on this as part of the Media Components work. Specifically I remember them saying they're doing that so lightweight widgets can clip areas of the heavyweight playback widget, so it will probably extend to all light vs heavy widgets.
Excerpt from http://weblogs.java.net/blog/chet/archive/2007/05/ media_frenzy.html
Curious readers familiar with lightweight/heavyweight mixing issues in Swing applications might wonder at this point how we will deal with a native player component in a Swing GUI. Good question, thanks for asking. This issue is one of the reasons that we also plan to support mixed heavyweight/lightweight components in Java SE 7. In case I don't write a blog on this feature soon, here's the quick scoop: We can enable this through clipping the heavyweight components against the shapes of the overlaying lightweight components. There are some cases that do not yet work with this mechanism, such as shaped and translucent lightweights, but the system works pretty well in general for other cases.
You are assuming that there is equal demand for Java and C# developers, but a lesser supply of C# developers.
Not quite. I am *projecting* that if people start sounding off that c# has been 'dealt a death blow' while pronouncing that 'java is growing bigger everyday' that the supply of new c# coders will dry up, while the supply of new java coders will boom. True, but as Steve Ballmer knows, as go the developers, so goes the development. Why pay more for a mid-level C# developer, when it would be cheaper to do it in Java with a senior developer? Especially when everyone else is doing it in Java. In your scenario, C# programmers would only be used to support legacy systems, like today's Cobol programmers. Only it will be easier to migrate C# -> Java than Cobol -> anything else. And since C# is so popular among up and coming web-designers, supply will probably out-strip demand for a good long time.
From my own looking around, the average offered pay for Java developers is higher than for.Net developers, which in theory means that Java has a higher demand/supply ration than C#.
That is true today. I'm am looking at the future. I suspect that in this case the elasticity of supply exceeds the elasticity of demand. If Java is the 'big thing', than it will become supply flooded fairly quickly... Maybe some day, but I doubt fairly quickly, even by our industry's speed of change. Java development has really exploded into a market that hasn't existed before, so we don't really know the ultimate capacity.
The point of this rant? Java 7 doesn't excite me in the least. Me and everyone I know are firmly planted in Java 5 (or is it 1.5? I always forget) and we don't appear to be moving to Java 6 (1.6?) -- so why should we care about Java 7 (1.7?). Modular Java and Kernel JVM (JSR 277 & 294) which should improve Applet start time to be comparable to Flash. SwingLabs components, take a look for yourself, these guys are making some nice UI enhancements. Java Application Framework (JSR 296) providing a pre-built framework for common application tasks. Bean Bindings (JSR 295), so you no longer have to write your own update code. JavaFX? I don't know much about this, but it could make GUI development interesting. Media Components, this one I'm especially looking forward to after looking into the abyss of JMF.
That's just to name a few of the technologies that I'm looking forward to. Thinks like generics and the enhanced for loop have also made coding Java a little nicer. I'm just now starting to use Annotations, which combined with reflection is letting me reduce the amount of boiler-place code I have to write. Once people start hacking the GPL'd Java code, you can expect to see a lot more interesting things make their way into the platform.
You are assuming that there is equal demand for Java and C# developers, but a lesser supply of C# developers. What people are seeing on dice and monster is both a higher demand and supply for Java developers compared to C# developers. From my own looking around, the average offered pay for Java developers is higher than for.Net developers, which in theory means that Java has a higher demand/supply ration than C#.
Maybe Java really is more popular, but I've seen a lot more shops using.Net than Java. It may be that.Net has more shops than Java (I don't know), but Java likely has bigger shops which account for more positions within a single shop. After all, you don't run.Net on Sparc, Alpha or Power architectures. With sales reps from Sun, IBM, HP, Bea and Oracle all pushing Java stacks, it shouldn't be surprising that there is more demand for Java developers than for.Net developers.
1.) The very nature of perpetual motion requires the output energy must at least equal the input energy without an increase in entropy. Since such a process is forbidden under thermodynamics, it will always be quoted when someone claims to have violated it.
2.) Even though thermodynamics is quoted in many discussions of evolution, it is only ever by people who do not understand either and who are usually quickly and harshly corrected by people who do, making them less likely to bring it up in future discussions.
They use many statistical algorithms to smooth that out. Believe me, statistics like this go through some pretty complex processes to ensure that they are as accurate at possible.
Slashdot Mirror
By providing a small sub-set of facial gestures that are always used the same way for the same reasons, these children can build that association into their subconscious understanding for future interactions with real people. It's no different than teaching kids to read using small words in short phrases, "see spot run", instead of giving them a dictionary.
2.) You're a jackass, go die and free up some carbon for useful purposes.
I know this was probably a troll, but ZFS is available through FUSE.
This is what VMI (Virtual machine Interface) does right now in the kernel along with the KVM(kernel virtual machine) and please do not compare and OS with Java stuff. Java do not deserve to be compared to a highly performing kernel. I don't think that's what he was talking about. KVM is used for hardware virtualization, not byte-code execution like the Java VM. That said, I don't understand what having the JVM built into the kernel would accomplish, besides giving slightly improving startup of Java apps and generally forcing the Kernel to consume more memory. It would also give rise to all the known problems of running multiple Java apps within the same VM instance, which is why the standard JVM doesn't do this already. I also don't see why Java can't be compared to an OS kernel, there are several Java-based OS's and specialized processors that run Java byte-code in hardware, so in that setup it's really no different than a kernel written in C.
The problem still remains that in order to keep Google's search from slowing down your system, you have to disable parts of Vista that should not have to be disabled. That is Google's complaint, that Microsoft has designed Vista such that nobody would want to stop the Windows Indexer, and therefore by performance extension, nobody would want to run Google's desktop search. Imagine if you had to remove IE in order for Firefox to work right, would you do it? Or would you just use IE?
Desktop searches more than just files, and even more than just the content of files. Traditional file search involves reading the file system table. Desktop search involves profiling the contents of files, emails, browser activity and IM sessions plus meta data in media files like Jpeg and MP3. All of this information is cataloged and indexed, usually in a database, for faster searching. Microsoft may have had a small subset of this functionality before, but that doesn't mean they had desktop search before. You may not see the use of it, but after using Beagle for a few months, its one of the things I miss the most when I have to use Windows.
I'll have to concede the AV point to you, since I use neither AV software nor Vista. I'm just going by the AV companies complaints that proceeded Vista's launch.
Then you've never used content searching. With content searching (at least with Beagle) I can search not only file names, but the content of multiple file types, emails, web history, bookmarks, Photos, Music, Videos, IM sessions, etc.
1.) Run both MS and Google indexers, and notice performance issues related to having 2 indexing your hard drive at the same time
or
2.) Disable the MS indexer and loose file system search functionality from within Windows Explorer and other Vista components.
Either way, installing Google Desktop Search on Vista now causes an inconvenience for the user, so people are less likely to do so.
Just because they both have "search" in their name, doesn't mean they're the same product. Window's desktop search is to Win95 file search what Google internet search is to IE bookmark search.
In this case, instead of simply making a better desktop search for Windows to compete with Google, Microsoft created a desktop search that interferes with the performance of Google's offering. Similarly, Vista's security lets Microsoft's inferior antivirus run properly, but interferes with the operation of other AV products. Tell me how you, as a consumer, benefit from that.
Excerpt from http://weblogs.java.net/blog/chet/archive/2007/05
Not quite. I am *projecting* that if people start sounding off that c# has been 'dealt a death blow' while pronouncing that 'java is growing bigger everyday' that the supply of new c# coders will dry up, while the supply of new java coders will boom. True, but as Steve Ballmer knows, as go the developers, so goes the development. Why pay more for a mid-level C# developer, when it would be cheaper to do it in Java with a senior developer? Especially when everyone else is doing it in Java. In your scenario, C# programmers would only be used to support legacy systems, like today's Cobol programmers. Only it will be easier to migrate C# -> Java than Cobol -> anything else. And since C# is so popular among up and coming web-designers, supply will probably out-strip demand for a good long time. From my own looking around, the average offered pay for Java developers is higher than for
That is true today. I'm am looking at the future. I suspect that in this case the elasticity of supply exceeds the elasticity of demand. If Java is the 'big thing', than it will become supply flooded fairly quickly... Maybe some day, but I doubt fairly quickly, even by our industry's speed of change. Java development has really exploded into a market that hasn't existed before, so we don't really know the ultimate capacity.
There are already several of these available for Java using everything from XML to custom declarative languages like F3.
SwingLabs components, take a look for yourself, these guys are making some nice UI enhancements.
Java Application Framework (JSR 296) providing a pre-built framework for common application tasks.
Bean Bindings (JSR 295), so you no longer have to write your own update code.
JavaFX? I don't know much about this, but it could make GUI development interesting.
Media Components, this one I'm especially looking forward to after looking into the abyss of JMF.
That's just to name a few of the technologies that I'm looking forward to. Thinks like generics and the enhanced for loop have also made coding Java a little nicer. I'm just now starting to use Annotations, which combined with reflection is letting me reduce the amount of boiler-place code I have to write. Once people start hacking the GPL'd Java code, you can expect to see a lot more interesting things make their way into the platform.
Economics 101: Price = Demand/Supply
.Net developers, which in theory means that Java has a higher demand/supply ration than C#.
You are assuming that there is equal demand for Java and C# developers, but a lesser supply of C# developers. What people are seeing on dice and monster is both a higher demand and supply for Java developers compared to C# developers. From my own looking around, the average offered pay for Java developers is higher than for
Mostly for two reasons:
1.) The very nature of perpetual motion requires the output energy must at least equal the input energy without an increase in entropy. Since such a process is forbidden under thermodynamics, it will always be quoted when someone claims to have violated it.
2.) Even though thermodynamics is quoted in many discussions of evolution, it is only ever by people who do not understand either and who are usually quickly and harshly corrected by people who do, making them less likely to bring it up in future discussions.
They use many statistical algorithms to smooth that out. Believe me, statistics like this go through some pretty complex processes to ensure that they are as accurate at possible.