No, apparently you just don't understand how they work. (And by the way, it's Ruby-GNOME2, not the other way around.) The "front end" is GNOME or GTK+. The front end talks to Ruby, which runs in an interpreter (which acts as the server, or back end). In a web application, the front end (HTML + JavaScript) communicates with the server, which is running Ruby on the back end. The interface (GNOME, GTK, HTML) is front end, the server side is back end. Get it now?
So you can't write an interface (sometimes called a front-end) to something in Ruby... you can only describe the interface in Ruby and have it interpreted by Gnome? Holy shit! It's like how I don't READ books, I just read the words INSIDE THEM!:):)
Pretty much, yeah. You said it, I didn't. When was the last time you gave it a real try?
Jaunty Jackalope. It was pathetic, the reviewers must have been on Ecstasy when they called it better than Mac OS X or Windows 7. I was really impressed by its almost 1990's way of handling screen resolution and multiple displays... until it didn't work at all.
The EFF fights unethical practices on the part of the recording industry and others, who illegally abuse the law and intimidate people... often innocent people. They are not defending and have not defended the illegal downloading of files, and it remains to be seen that any of the people in question do. I have already covered this argument, but I will repeat myself anyway: these are two different things, and you seem to have difficulty telling them apart.
I have never met a linux user who does not have a dragon's cave of pirated media... and I have met a fucking lot of linux users. I love how you treat this like some sort of proper debate... it's so delightfully naive! You must be new to the internet.
You have no idea what I have done and what I have not, and insulting me does not forward your argument any. If you actually have one.
Zing! Pop! Swoosh! Well, I can tell you're not a REAL developer because you're using linux. That means you're probably working in the web sphere. Have fun when your venture capital wears out.
That's pretty funny. Microsoft lost money last quarter for the first time in its existence. Why? It wasn't just the slow economy. Hint: Vista, OS X, Linux, Open Office.
Everyone lost money. EVERYONE. The world economy crashed, you dolt. How can you possibly ignore that minor detail? Sun took a nose dive, also- the ones who develop openoffice. Apple might be the only major tech company that kept its head up. In fact, you are correct about OS X being part of the reason Microsoft lost money. Just because it's sitting on a sort of wacky UNIX compatibility layer wrapped around a hybrid kernel doesn't make a product of F/OSS, though. Everything redeeming about Mac OS X is closed source. They are stealing market share from Microsoft, but for all the right reasons. Linux, meanwhile, has ballooned to a frightening 1% of the market share!! Windows server is actually winning back Linux market share, too.
No, you go have your fun. Using this computer full-time, for both home and work, it has crashed maybe 3 or 4 times in the last year and a half, and in every case, that was caused by trying to do something in Windows, running in a VM. I'm doing just fine, thanks.
Really? My Vista box has never crashed, and I run hardcore graphics shit like maya. Neither has my Mac OS X laptop either... I had Ubuntu go down a couple times in the short time I was using it though. It was really exciting. Blast from the past!
Well enough, in fact, that I do not feel compelled to answer you after this. This is a waste of my time.
As for "wasting time on... crap", FOSS is responsible for Linux, as well as a great number of very capable and professional programs, like Open Office for just one example... The fact that free software can rival Microsoft for quality (best them, really, when it comes to operating systems) at literally no cost to users, goes a long way toward demonstrating that it isn't "crap".
Well, I know you're not a system design engineer... and certainly not in touch with modern application development. Anyone who calls OpenOffice.org "professional" definitely isn't familiar with human interface design or modern feature sets... what did this awesome code you open-sourced do... did it echo "hello world"?
I have some news for you: the Democratic "movement" is full of cheats, crooks, and liars... but so is the Republican "movement".
Are you a libertarian? Ha! Is this a joke? How much time are you willing to waste proving my stereotypes correct by example?
I have been following the EFF for at least 15 years now. The "subculture" you mention is against the abuse of "intellectual property" by corporate bullies who have managed to get the legislature to distort the laws in their favor.
And the daisy chain continues...
These people do not advocate the illegal downloading of files.
...but they sure do fight tooth and nail to defend those who do!
Your connecting me to Nazi attitudes is offensive, sir.
And your inability to connect the manifest and latent functions of groups is sad...
This is called an Ad Hominem attack, and it does your argument no good.
It makes my argument way more fun to read and write, though. I will keep to my guns.
Sorry, but you don't write a "frontend" in Ruby. Ruby runs on the server.
Oh, so I guess I was just imagining GNOME2-Ruby and Ruby/GTK+. I obviously have a very loose grip on reality if I could find it in myself to see linux as crappy or archaic, seeing as it's basically a poorly adapted 1970's era operating system that pretends to be Windows or Mac occasionally and fails miserably at both... yet users will still always find themselves editing text files to get basic tasks done. That is so advanced that I cannot even comprehend it. I think I just reached nirvana... I hope that didn't crash your X session.
I only use bittorrent on my work computer to download linux distros and other legal content. Happy now?
I prophecized your arrival.
1) Support for MP3 playback and encoding. What's illegal about that?
MP3 is in terrible legal gray zone... do you think firms like Microsoft, Apple, and Sun pay licensing costs to Frauenhoffer IIS because they're just sillier than Canonical? Why do you think no one packages it with their distribution? I suggest you read up on wikipedia for this... because it's the main reason for the existence of OGG, WMA, and AAC.
Otherwise, I don't want to dig through the licenses to point out to you why some of this stuff is in the gray... if you're in the United States, you are likely violating some sort of patents somewhere in using these things. You've conveniently failed to mention plenty of the video codecs that package provides.
Seriously, if you're not playing your music and videos in Real Player or something, I guarantee you are violating someone's copyright or patent.
"FOSS", or Free and Open Source Software, is a kind of software. I know... I have written some.
Holy crap! I am in the midst of someone who has written a crappy alternative to some commercial piece of software using a trendy language... or perhaps even a crappy driver for an archaic monolithic kernel!
You may see a correlation between the two, but you are misusing the acronym. Plain and simple. FOSS and F/OSS have nothing to do with downloading files.
The free software movement is full of pirates, libertarians, and college students... well, it's really more of a venn diagram than anything else. Who else would waste so much time on this sort of crap and produce so little in valuable or marketable results?
You don't have to take it from me, though. Just check out the focus of Groklaw or the EFF... open source, software patents, Microsoft, RIAA & MPAA. The fixation is there and slashdot examples this as well. All these things are under the umbrella of the same subculture.
Or maybe we can just look at things your way. It's not like the Nazi's were anti-semitic, since that wasn't the focus of the party. It's not like drug dealers use drugs, because that's not part of dealing drugs... and Free software advocates don't write good software because that's not what the movement is about.. it's about FREE software.
Now go write a slow, ugly frontend for something in Ruby.
"F/OSS" refers to kinds of software. It has nothing to do with downloading.
It's also a cultural movement. Most people posting on slashdot belong to this subculture, so the general opinion on slashdot is usually representative of the F/OSS subculture.
If you don't see any connection between culture surrounding the pirate bay and the F/OSS culture, then your football helmet is probably on too tight.
Well done for proving the RIAA / MPAA right, boys. You're a true help to the cause.
But they are right in that regard... I mean, come on. Let's not kid ourselves. I think this is an example where people just make-believe that bittorrent is some sort of misunderstood technology that is just being painted negatively by some evil group of corporate baddies. Everyone uses bittorrent to pirate media. I am sure some Freetard will pop on and say "I only use it to download linux distros and Creative Commons licensed music"-- but I guarantee you this douche is in the minority.
There is no misunderstanding here: people get upset over the fate of TPB and mininova because they like their free shit, whether or not it's legal. People are opportunistic first and idealistic later only when legitimizing their opportunism. It's why the first package many people install in their Ubuntu distro is ubuntu-restricted-extras, despite the fact that they know it's mostly illegal.
Let's be honest with ourselves, the F/OSS community is a bunch of leeches. But we are proud of that in some defiant "get off my lawn" way.
What's wrong with the National Weather Service? Part of NOAA.
Let's be more practical- the NWS is analyzing a lot of radar data and such and running short range models while climate analysts run models of a very different nature that use hundreds of years of data. Since this is all in the same basket, suppose the same people who were looking for data just ran a 10,000 year everything model each time they needed a weather forecast (so we've got our oceanic currents, precipitation, nitrogen cycle, etc.)... it's not the same thing. You need a collection of people who are funded and supported to organize all these models that are coming from various academic and commercial entities.
Right now, these organizations are trying to share data internationally and fight the government for grant money to keep the research going(so the government already funds this) so they can reach some point of centralization- it's about more than glory. We here in Illinois are trying to figure out how shifting climate and weather patterns will affect our water and nitrogen cycle for crop growing... it's important because we're growing a large chunk of the world's corn and soy... and if you back out into the region, we're growing a large chunk of the world's food. The entire agricultural system here runs like a finely-tuned machine tweaked to follow the yearly weather and rain. When these things change, the side effects will reach the rest of the country. It becomes a national problem.
For this reason, I believe that national resources should be pooled for climate modeling and the centralization of climate data... if only to provide more iron to process data and more server space for everyone to store our data. Here at UIUC, the NCSA time we have to run these models is not cheap and not sufficient to provide the sort of results the government needs.
Furthermore, centralization of climate research would better allow research groups to specialize their models so one main organization might have the time, expertise, and funding to unify the results. The clock is really ticking on results, here. The world isn't going to burn up or have its oceans boil over or anything, but if we see crop growth effected by inconsistent and unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change, it's going to become a problem for our market and then the third world market, which eventually becomes geopolitical conflicts.
Short answer: yes, it is very much the federal government's problem and a keen example of where government centralization would be beneficial. Anyone who says that some other department can just "pick it up" has no idea how complex climate modeling is... you have to model EVERYTHING from the soil to the sky to the estimated economic growth of nations and regions and their carbon impact.
This really a rather complex statement. While it's true that no other consumer desktop operating system has quite the level of security and anti-exploit code, etc... Linux and Mac simply exist in a safer world. Perhaps one of the safest aspects of a linux system is that you're almost always running trusted code from a verified repository. This means that you really don't have to test the mettle of a linux installation (and thank god you don't) besides the fact that the level of incompatibility between linux systems provides a level of security through obscurity. Now, common images such as OpenWRT or (eventually) default Ubuntu installs may eventually be targeted, but right now they're simply not.
If someone is trying to take over your machine remotely, you're probably better off with Vista. If you're an idiot, you're probably better off with linux, where it's more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot by running insecure code as administrator.
From the results of the recent pwn2own competitions, I would say that Apple is going to eat a lot of security crow as they get just a tad bit more popular. I think Mac OS X will prove to be comically insecure when people start attacking it.
Or if you're making a paper for school, why not just use LaTeX? Produces better looking output, autoupdates your reference numbers for you, Bibliography handling is still the easiest yet, typing mathematic symbols and formulae is infinitely easier than any other word processor on the market, etc etc. (Ok, I'll stop derailing this now with fanboyisms).
I'd be lying if I said I hadn't tried that. Maybe I am just not smart enough for unix or something, but I've sort of come to like spelling/grammar check and good WYSWYG. Office 2007 handles so much of the headache for you it's just crazy... bibliography is as easy as adding the fields to a simple gui app and then clicking generate bibliography.
If it's easier than that, I must have been using a different LaTeX.
And if you go over each of the official build services, you will find that one of the big differences between go-oo.org, StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org vanilla is simply build engineering. Specifically, if they're building with cygwin, it provides some major performance issues. Although Windows has some native POSIX support, you don't use it quite the same way as you do in Linux or Solaris- rather than accounting for these differences, OOo uses a POSIX emulation layer in order to avoid extra work. Despite the fact that Windows is the primary platform for distribution, it's simply too much trouble for Sun or Novell to screw with it. I know Novell is trying to move their build service (go-oo) into a straight GCC cross-compile solution, so the speed issue will not get any better on Windows.
My point is that this is built with Visual Studio 2005 as more or less a standard Windows application, not a Vista/7 application- it's not using the NT 6+ API's, so it's invalid as a true performance test. This would be similar to us testing Microsoft Office 2003 (I don't think OOo is quite feature comparable to 2007) on Windows vs. Wine and then declaring that Windows is the hands down superior platform.
So let's talk about Platform inequities. The Microsoft optimizing C compiler is a better compiler than GCC-- but GCC is really not half bad anymore. Visual Studio's really superior because of its debugging, refactoring, and profiling tools, not so much JUST its compiler. I think this is part of why Firefox runs faster in Wine than in native Linux. In fact, by writing your application in like vim and debugging with gdb then just using Visual Studio as a build slave, you're really getting the short end of the stick in both directions. But I digress, a native unix application like OOo is a native unix application, and I wouldn't expect you to get tremendously better success in Windows unless you're running it on Interix or something. Of course, that's not to say Windows doesn't do unix tasks like NFS better than UNIX, just that it doesn't necessarily run direct unix code better.
But this is all fluff, the fact of the matter is that OOo is not a Windows application and most people are Windows users, so let's look at some logical alternatives:
So... if you're running Windows and you just need to type a paper for school for free/cheap.... why not just use Softmaker Office 2006... or Softmaker Office 2008 if you have 20 bucks. Just use Office 2007 if you're doing long reports- the bibliography handling alone will make the 60 bucks to get it through ultimate steal worthwhile when writing something long and arduous. Consider the time you save on formatting and grammar checking and such over a semester or two- it's worth it. If you're paying thousands a year for your education, the least you can do is not waste time with shitty office software.
Personally, I use OOo on my linux netbook and Softmaker Office 2006 on my Windows box and just keep my documents in ODF. It's the cheap-ass pro solution.
Maybe we should consider not using a bunch of ridiculous and frivolous web-based application crap like ajax in order to serve information and images.
I mean, if we're going to nitpick, isn't the entirety of web 2.0 sort of retarded? We complain about web standards and yet no one is willing to write things in a simple and expressive enough manner that old or low end hardware such as cell phones are relevant to the mainstream web. Maybe URL's aren't really the big problem here.
Hell, if we are translating this to energy use, imagine how much electricity would be saved if everyone stopped using inefficient and expensive languages like Ruby... cities worth.
Why don't we stop serving video in flash and go back to simplistic plugin players or *gasp*... Java! If we want to cut bandwidth, look to the past and narrowband.
If we want to cut energy or bandwidth use, it's quite simple. The modern web is full of ridiculous waste.
...the stuff you listed, some of which I never encountered at any time, has been sorted out in 4.2...
This is unacceptable in terms of release engineering. You don't release alpha code as "release". KDE 4.0 was supposed to be release quality. Even Vista, crappy as it was, was feature complete on release.
Put some screenshots side by side and you will see that the Windows 7 taskbar in its current state looks very KDE like, rather than Vista like.
What? Are you comparing its large launcher icons to the iconbar? It's far more of a mashup of an OS X dock and a Vista start menu. I am firm on this: it's Apple, not KDE. Don't forget that the icon bar has more complex application interaction, like active status graphics like download bars and such. You really need to try Windows 7 before you go comparing it to KDE 4. I've been periodically trying KDE 4- it seems to me more like it's a pretty face on a fairly empty shell. It just doesn't feel as rich as OS X or Windows 7.
it functions in a very original, customizable way that doesn't borrow from somewhere else.
KDE 4. This is where Microsoft apparently borrowed their ideas this time.
What from KDE 4 is in Windows 7? Seriously? The only UI concepts I see shared are ones that KDE 4 stole from Vista and Windows 7 inherited.
Here are some subtle differences to help the mentally impaired:
1) Windows 7 does not crash whenenver you look at it funny. Applications more often than not close cleanly when the user wants them to, instead of just randomly throwing a SIGSEGV.
2) Windows 7 has latent functionality- meaning that you will find the UI interacting with applications in a contextual fashion, instead of just providing a taskbar interface that looks attractive, but actually is just a glorified launcher.
3) Your systray is not full of graphically corrupted garbage in Windows 7.
4) Your system will not randomly shoot to 100% cpu usage for mysterious causes in Windows 7 (but that doesn't mean applications won't do this).
5) Windows 7 has a fully documented application development API- and it's actually complete! This means that Windows 7 provides features that aren't simply planned or imaginary. This should be a dead giveaway if you're used to KDE 4.
I suppose when you see an Aston Martin driving down the street you're like "OMG THAT LOOKS JUST LIKE A FORD TAURUS". Well, you're right... they're both cars. Is this just because some braindead aussies thought KDE 4 was Windows 7 on the street. Well.. why not. It's got a start menu on the bottom with a button in the bottom left, icons on the desktop, looks pretty shiny and reflective. To the average user, it might as well be Windows... but you just wait until they try to get something done with KDE 4. If Microsoft tried to sell anything like that as a product, they would go out of business. It would make Vista look like a glorious success- for them to steal from KDE 4 would be like a bakery stealing cow shit from a nearby ranch to decorate their cakes.
How is the existence of Google Docs hurting your freedom? Nobody forced you to use it- it's not even like Windows, which comes on almost every mainstream PC... it's a goddamn web application. You navigate to it- you choose to view it. When you start trying to enforce your standards on assorted web parties to which you are connecting, are you fighting freedom or oppressing organizations with unnecessary wasted time and image capital through an outrageous social movement...
I mean... if you don't like how Google Docs serves its javascript.. why don't you just not go there?
If you're some sort of insane jackass who doesn't even use a goddamn browser let alone understand business, economics, or software engineering (see: RMS), you can just use a proxy server. Next time Stallman wants to masturbate, we'd all appreciate it if he'd close the door.
This is why page load performance is not that important. I view most pages minutes after I open them. Memory management is much more important.
Right- IE 8 really shines for if you're doing serial browsing, not parallel browsing.
Like Firefox, does the browser gradually slow down and have to be regularly re-started?
Not yet today. I think it might be an artifact of all the process isolation. It's currently got about 8 tabs open and is going at about 200+ mb of RAM. I haven't closed it since I wrote it this morning. I'm still using it. I would go so far as to say that it doesn't bleed RAM like Firefox or Safari.
I am not a linux/firefox fanboy, so I am going to assess this browser fairly and try to answer a few questions brought up on this thread. Since I am probably the only user here running Windows by choice, so I consider this a duty. Furthermore, I am an Opera user, so my expectations for speed and performance are totally insane and unreasonable.
First off, what's wrong:
* I am using IE 8 to write this comment and I am already missing my integrated spel chekkar.
* All the fun browser hacks I use to test new browsers are not working still, so the standards support of this release is the same as before. Of course, you won't see too much upper level DOM and advanced CSS on the part of web people actually use.
* The tabs seem to open really slow, but I believe it is actually process isolating its tabs now. The memory use per tab is about 10-30 mb, which is around if not slightly below where Chrome is on this system.
* Acid 3: 12/100
What's right:
* The page loads are brutally fast- faster than Opera 10 in some cases. For instance, MSNBC and BBC News, two of my favorite sites pop up at crazy speed. However, Slashdot --which is specifically engineered to run poorly on every new release of IE (it's very firefox-quirky)-- comes up quite slowly. When I first saw the page load charts that Microsoft put out, my first response was that there was a good reason Opera wasn't on that chart- but IE did a fantastic job of playing to the most popular websites. Keep this in mind if you are either a facebook user or stalking your kids on facebook.
* If you only use IE to download firefox, you will be happy to know that the mozilla webpage loads faster on IE than any other browser, firefox included.
Conclusion:
The overall interface of the browser is quite nice. If you're used to using Firefox, this is actually much faster and handles its memory better and such. However, Firefox is not a particularly fast or well designed browser. The interface will feel sluggish if you're used to Opera or Chrome. As an Opera user, my idea of browsing the web involves launching through pages at break-neck speed middle-clicking links as I go along and loading about 20-30 tabs at a time. I have a feeling my computer would explode if I did that with IE 8. However, the same could be said for Firefox 3.
The article is quite correct in saying that this browser is very fast and correct for the real web which most people browse- and that's something that should be noted. It seems as though Firefox has gotten so obsessed with javascript benchmarks and other such fluff that it's let its real world performance slide to the extent that it's now being challenged by IE.
Since IE is still totally unchallenged by other browsers in terms of enterprise features like advanced group policy, this new release of IE will simply mean that browsing the web at work/school will be a lot less lame and obnoxious... but considering the state of the economy, you should be all be working very very hard right now.
If you have any questions or challenges for IE 8 and don't run windows or ie 8, let me know and I will give you the results.
One has to weigh the push M$ has put behind cultivating coders who feel comfortable doing things in DX (with the advantage of support from M$), versus the shops that have the luxury to tool around in GL (id software and a few others).
It's interesting you say luxury there because it takes a lot less time and resources to develop a game for Windows due to superior API's and vastly superior development and testing tools. It's not like game developers are brainwashed or anything- they're just time and budget constrained. Games are tremendously complex and extremely resource intensive, it takes a very consistent and sane environment to do complex modern games.
You're welcome to mod me down, but this is a huge gap in the linux development ecosystem that someone should take seriously. I recommend doing this through the mono project or java because of their nice development tools and consistent environments.
Until the open source world has something comparable to DirectX or Visual Studio or something (if you mention SDL or gdb, I will laugh at you) it might be in their benefit to keep cultivating the wine project to stay on-board with games. Even Apple is behind in this category, and they have REAL development tools (in fact, many new games are getting ported to mac through the Wine-derivative Transgaming Cider). This is one category where Microsoft is leading in more than just OEM-pressure, unfortunately.
If it's cheaper to stay with a Microsoft-based infrastructure, then stay with that. Creating massive infrastructure-wide group policies that go from desktop to web browser is sort of a windows thing. If you're going to maintain security policies in a linux-based system, you better be prepared to start thinking in Unix- that means remembering that you're using a network-based system, not a locally-oriented system on a network.
If you're setting an IT infrastructure, the costs you're cutting on licensing will probably bite you in either support, security, training, or usability/productivity. There's no such thing as free software, I'm sorry.
So you're saying that basically Microsoft is keeping down the sort of research and innovation necessary to develop a as-yet unfathomed and undeveloped product? So, the reason that this major superior solution hasn't yet competed with Microsoft is that it doesn't exist yet because Microsoft exists?
That's pretty existential, but I see your point. I don't want to talk about monopolistic behavior anymore, you're right, it's legally a monopoly-- I just don't think there's enough talent and creativity out there for people to make something *new* despite that. I am not saying Microsoft isn't a monopoly; I just don't think it's the big chokehold keeping innovation down-- there's way too strong of a software counterculture.
I won't even bother talking about what I mean by innovation, though, because you seem to think Linux is modern, so it's pointless:
By definition, it is.
What definition is that? I am having trouble thinking of modern kernels in the open source realm... like maybe L4 or Coyotos? Maybe. Linux is about a decade or so behind similar closed source solutions. I mean this in that whenever they write up about some new feature like "hurray! pre-emptive multi-tasking!"... it's really not that impressive. For instance, they actually claim that there is a realtime version of linux-- that's incompetent to the point of being dangerous. I think we just have different expectations for modern systems, you and I. I mean, in a shallow desktop sense, AmigaOS or BeOS are probably the best semi-recent examples of "modern".
I doubt it, Xe would have performed a "hostile takeover' by now.
Yeah, probably.
Linux has always been used in appliances and on servers and it is doing fine in both applications. It's starting to gain on mobiles and netbooks. It's not "getting bad" from a market perspective anyway
I meant it's getting less bad. It's getting to the point where it's commercially viable for desktop systems, but only on the low end. That's what I mean. It hasn't always been used-- appliances used systems like vxworks or qnx or something before linux and servers were running unix and bsd before that. I don't think linux has ever been impressive from a technical standpoint. All of its strength is cultural- it has a wealth of time and drivers devoted to it because of its messily open nature but it lacks any semblance of modern architecture or any sort of intelligent design, for that matter. It's basically grown organically.
First, Apple is the UNIX world these days.
Maybe in the server world... you mean XNU as in XNU is Not Unix? I do believe the BSD cruft in the system is more or less a compatibility layer... and perhaps a networking stack. It's only taken as much unix as is convenient. All of their closed source stuff, their compositing window system and cocoa and core* and such are all quite modern and well thought out. NeXT is only Unixy if you want to look at it like that- above the antiquated backend is a well designed and fairly modern desktop experience- not going to say anything special about their kernel, though. It's well controlled- that's what's important.
Having worked in developing products based upon UNIX OS's I can say it is by far the best choice for many markets and was, in fact, demanded by many customers. Just because you don't understand those market realities doesn't make them silly.
Yes, it's cheap. I know. There's nothing cheaper than tossing together a linux interface for a device- and everyone knows how to use it that's taken a 100 level CS course. It's a very easy almost casual sort of systems engineering... extremely wasteful on resources, though. I think purpose-built systems would save a lot of hardware resources... but that's dirt cheap because of China. I think it's cheap and practical to use unix systems on devices for the same reason it's cheap and practical to have a trucking economy in t
I'm sorry, I just keep seeing all these snide remarks about monopoly abuse and I am just not seeing it. I think that's the real story of the 90's, but it's hardly relevant today. The state of things now is that the market is basically a dry well. Windows is okay but brutally uncool, Apple is doing great, and Linux is getting to the point where it isn't so ridiculously bad that no one will even run it for free-- but they're so far behind their competition they're clearly not innovating.
What amazing open source innovation is currently being held down by the evil Microsoft conspiracy? Somebody please enlighten me. I think Linux is doing a splendid job filling the gap of bottom end desktop experience and creating a reason for commercial operating systems to improve quality and cut costs, but beyond that, it's really a pretty poor example of innovation.
This isn't like people not being allowed to make phones like with Bell, so don't get me wrong- I simply don't think of Microsoft like that. Anyone can make computer hardware and software and yet here we are using like 3 different systems, all of them shoddy, running processors that hardware emulate this old x86 architecture. The desktop world is just not that creative or advanced. Anyone can make an operating system and somehow they don't-- it's like Microsoft is Bell selling phones, and it's legal for everyone else to make phones... but only Apple is making them and everyone else is just trying to push pinecones with strings attached. Why won't anyone use these pinecones? They convey audio from point A to point B and they're free.
Yeah they only have a vastly superior product and have for many years and it has netted them what 20%? Yeah, sounds like the market is working great.
Firefox is awful. I mean, seriously terrible. They're really driven by the fact that IE is worse. I think it is a fantastic example that people were so fed up, that they left IE and made their own crappy browser. We'll see if the greater market can create some interesting and new before Microsoft wakes up and starts throwing research and resources at it.
I see Microsoft widely praised here when they take actions like improving Web standards or creating really innovative technologies. I see them widely decried when they illegally undermine markets, or stifle innovation, or make really poor design decisions, or file frivolous lawsuits.
You must be reading a different website. I only see the latter, even in situations like this where they're just creating a fairly open flash clone.
Last it was discussed, the consensus seemed to be hybrid kernels merging micro and macro elements were pretty much everywhere.
Are you kidding me? People here think the linux kernel is an example of modern operating system design.
That's quite an overstatement but more people here have been personally affected by MS's broken junk, so emotions can run high. Objectively, their abuse has done more to hold back numerous computer fields than any other, single company. We'd likely be a decade ahead of where we are now with Web technologies (for example) if MS had been split to move IE to a different company.
... you really think the Unix world would have forged forward with lots of new innovations? Without competitive bodies like Microsoft and Apple around, people do jack. They implement worse is better solutions and enjoy making systems so unuable that they get to be computer gods. This issue was discussed in the 70's at great length... making a hostile computing world where only people with insane attention spans can succeed. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amiga were different because they thought compuers should be usable... people still hate them for that.
I'm not suggesting anyone implement anything in any particular technology. I'm mentioning that MS's actions in promoting Silverlight are probably illegal and this is evid
Sigh. You can't win on technical merits if a monopoly is leveraged against you. That's the whole point. You create a better solution using cool new HTML 5. It is open and standard and innovative and cutting edge. MS refuses to implement the technology in IE, making the only way to get it to work on IE Silverlight. Because MS can force feed IE to the entire Windows using populace and you have no ability to do the same with another browser, your solution loses... despite being technically better.
Who supports HTML 5? It's not even a complete standard. So it's hardly specified much less implemented. Are you honestly suggesting a non-existent solution vs. an existent and supported one?
What are you talking about? MS is the only one likely to end up in court over this issue, not Vortal or Adobe (unless Vortal broke their contract or local laws in the process of using Silverlight)
RTFA. The Portugal Free Software Wingbat club is challenging it to a governing body.
Yeah, just make a better technological solution just like we did to overcome IBM's monopoly influence... except antitrust regulators had to step in and restrict IBM's practices, if you know your computing history. You know, the same laws that make what MS is doing illegal and prevents better solutions from winning. You don't seem to understand antitrust issues very well.
This is a rather unique situation- you see, the open source platform kind of sucks. It pushes absolutely godawful technology from the 70's and 80's and gets by based on its ability to run a web browser. Apple is a great example of the fact that there's more to this than monopoly- they are gaining market share by making a better product, not by forcing their product to be bundled in a court of law. Firefox gained market share by actually beating IE 6, and then IE 7 to a lesser extent, and even IE 8, to an even lesser extent. Still: no monopoly could stop technical excellence, because the competition is hardly held down.
Free market capitalism is free market, monopoly control is technically socialism- not that I don't support it. For instance, the solution I am backing here is open source and developed by Novell, not Microsoft. Sometimes you need a large technology firm to push innovation.
Web standards have been artificially held back by one particular monopolist. Previous to MS's gaining control of the browser market, they were advancing quite rapidly.
Actually, there's really no official reason that the w3c is in charge of the web- it's just a group of businesses. It's only recently been a web of standards- for the most part, those standards are pushed by various other companies who pull strings in the coalition. The web standards are a tremendous and unreadable mess, hardly a productized development platform. So, while IE was basically 95% of browsers, MSDN was more of an example of web standards documentation than the w3c. But I suppose if I just keep calling myself the pope, it's only a matter of time before I become the pope.
You must be right. There can be no other answer. Might I suggest you try another forum, like Digg?
Hurray, so I can deal with Apple zealots instead of open source zealots.
I'm so sorry your brilliance is persecuted by all those jealous moderators. Obviously they are biased.
The moderators are just other people like you, who think like you. It's user moderated, and the users on this site are mostly idiots- not engineers, designers, or developers; just sysadmins and web trash. They're pro linux because it's what they know and anti-microsoft because it's what they hate. For the most part, like the rest of the GNU/FSF/Linux/UNIX pile, it's just an anti-technology, anti-innovation cult full of people with outdated skills who want to keep their jobs maintaining their poorly engineered systems. I mean, this is a site where people maintain tha
No doubt that is true. Have you violated the same patents that Microsoft is now suing over? I have. My pockets aren't big enough for them to worry about, but if everyone who has small pockets makes something an industry standard, then they'll go after those with bigger pockets who use the standard, just because its a standard. And we'll all end up paying more for anything that uses it. So for us with small pockets, its in our own long term interest to not use it. Unless of course, the short term benefit outweighs the long term penalty.
Well, isn't that a bit dramatic? I mean, unlike SCO or the RIAA, or Alcatel-Lucent, or whatever- Microsoft is still quite profitable serving consumers instead of fighting them. They get money by selling products still... imagine that. Maybe the industry is just running out of ideas but is still hungry for money? I don't see anything new coming out of unixland, that's for sure.
Slashdot is not homogenous, but a lot of people are very vocal about MS. MS has given them good reason. This is primarily a computing forum and MS has done more damage to various parts of the computing industry via their criminal acts than pretty much any other company. Had Slashdot been around during the bad old days you'd have been claiming it was just an anti-IBM site.
Okay, so this basically makes my point. It's a technology solution. You guys obviously have way better solutions... why don't you just make a better product? It seems open source is just hopelessly choked by unix retardedness.
Who's promoting Flash? This could be done in Java or javascript even using all open Web standards. Failing that, Flash is not being promoted by a criminal organization whose trust gives them direct, financial incentive to break compatibility with other versions. Finally, Adobe pushing the proprietary Flash upon the industry is not illegal since they aren't abusing a monopoly in another market to do it.
Right, what a lame rationalization. Of course, suddenly proprietary junk is okay.
Is it cheaper to use proper development tools and actually get some work done using adobe or Microsoft stuff, or to fight off the horde or morons who attack you in court? Decisions, decisions.
I'd say if MS is beating them without breaking the law... which is highly unlikely if you understand antitrust law. Even then it is debatable.
Oh I see- as far as I can tell it sounds like the crowd here represent the group trying to win a market battle with litigation instead of technical merits. Can't make a better profit so you just dub the competition criminal? Design by committee has always and will always lag behind, web standards like javascript vs tuned solutions like flash and silverlight is just another sterling example of this.
Okay, other people clued you in about this.
No, it was just other random zealots posting on my comment. I maintain that I made a good point, that's why it's considered "flamebait"-- this is not a community of good ideas or linux platform strength, but fanboy anger.
Silverlight is basically an organized reimplementation of flash/javascript/HTML. If they tried to sue over it, they'd probably lose. One thing is for certain: you live in a far more frightening world than I do... and for that, I pity you.
Then once it is nice and entrenched MS will kill silverlight for OSX, just like IE for OSX.
Of course, that's not only a paranoid assumption, but a retarded business practice. I mean, they'll just get eaten by flash. I hate to break this to you... but I think the purpose of silverlight is to market development tools, not the windows platform.
Aside from that, I think silverlight 3.0+ will eventually prove to be a far better online game development platform, which pleases me.
If Microsoft ever did that to Mac, Moonlight would just start supporting mac anyway- which would be helpful for that grey period where flash would just completely destroy them, making their entire investment a waste.
I think Moonlight/Mono provides a far likelier chance of there being open source dynamic web content creation tools than flash would ever allow- and that's also a positive.
I think what happened with IE is simply that Safari totally surpassed it, rendering the product moot. It became a waste of time to push it, so it was easier to simply support a mac-specific browser than keep maintaining their web platform on mac. It's not really that evil... just pragmatic.
Only silverlight 1.0, that site users 2.0. When moonlight gets to that silverlight will probably be 3.0.
Whenever the fabled "Year of the linux desktop comes", that will slow adoption of future silverlight versions, maintaining the deployments with Moonlight's versioning instead.
Slashdot Mirror
No, apparently you just don't understand how they work. (And by the way, it's Ruby-GNOME2, not the other way around.) The "front end" is GNOME or GTK+. The front end talks to Ruby, which runs in an interpreter (which acts as the server, or back end). In a web application, the front end (HTML + JavaScript) communicates with the server, which is running Ruby on the back end. The interface (GNOME, GTK, HTML) is front end, the server side is back end. Get it now?
So you can't write an interface (sometimes called a front-end) to something in Ruby... you can only describe the interface in Ruby and have it interpreted by Gnome? Holy shit! It's like how I don't READ books, I just read the words INSIDE THEM! :) :)
Pretty much, yeah. You said it, I didn't. When was the last time you gave it a real try?
Jaunty Jackalope. It was pathetic, the reviewers must have been on Ecstasy when they called it better than Mac OS X or Windows 7. I was really impressed by its almost 1990's way of handling screen resolution and multiple displays... until it didn't work at all.
The EFF fights unethical practices on the part of the recording industry and others, who illegally abuse the law and intimidate people... often innocent people. They are not defending and have not defended the illegal downloading of files, and it remains to be seen that any of the people in question do. I have already covered this argument, but I will repeat myself anyway: these are two different things, and you seem to have difficulty telling them apart.
I have never met a linux user who does not have a dragon's cave of pirated media... and I have met a fucking lot of linux users. I love how you treat this like some sort of proper debate... it's so delightfully naive! You must be new to the internet.
You have no idea what I have done and what I have not, and insulting me does not forward your argument any. If you actually have one.
Zing! Pop! Swoosh! Well, I can tell you're not a REAL developer because you're using linux. That means you're probably working in the web sphere. Have fun when your venture capital wears out.
That's pretty funny. Microsoft lost money last quarter for the first time in its existence. Why? It wasn't just the slow economy. Hint: Vista, OS X, Linux, Open Office.
Everyone lost money. EVERYONE. The world economy crashed, you dolt. How can you possibly ignore that minor detail? Sun took a nose dive, also- the ones who develop openoffice. Apple might be the only major tech company that kept its head up. In fact, you are correct about OS X being part of the reason Microsoft lost money. Just because it's sitting on a sort of wacky UNIX compatibility layer wrapped around a hybrid kernel doesn't make a product of F/OSS, though. Everything redeeming about Mac OS X is closed source. They are stealing market share from Microsoft, but for all the right reasons. Linux, meanwhile, has ballooned to a frightening 1% of the market share!! Windows server is actually winning back Linux market share, too.
No, you go have your fun. Using this computer full-time, for both home and work, it has crashed maybe 3 or 4 times in the last year and a half, and in every case, that was caused by trying to do something in Windows, running in a VM. I'm doing just fine, thanks.
Really? My Vista box has never crashed, and I run hardcore graphics shit like maya. Neither has my Mac OS X laptop either... I had Ubuntu go down a couple times in the short time I was using it though. It was really exciting. Blast from the past!
Well enough, in fact, that I do not feel compelled to answer you after this. This is a waste of my time.
Way to be a girl about it... oh SHIIIII--
As for "wasting time on ... crap", FOSS is responsible for Linux, as well as a great number of very capable and professional programs, like Open Office for just one example... The fact that free software can rival Microsoft for quality (best them, really, when it comes to operating systems) at literally no cost to users, goes a long way toward demonstrating that it isn't "crap".
Well, I know you're not a system design engineer... and certainly not in touch with modern application development. Anyone who calls OpenOffice.org "professional" definitely isn't familiar with human interface design or modern feature sets... what did this awesome code you open-sourced do... did it echo "hello world"?
I have some news for you: the Democratic "movement" is full of cheats, crooks, and liars... but so is the Republican "movement".
Are you a libertarian? Ha! Is this a joke? How much time are you willing to waste proving my stereotypes correct by example?
I have been following the EFF for at least 15 years now. The "subculture" you mention is against the abuse of "intellectual property" by corporate bullies who have managed to get the legislature to distort the laws in their favor.
And the daisy chain continues...
These people do not advocate the illegal downloading of files.
...but they sure do fight tooth and nail to defend those who do!
Your connecting me to Nazi attitudes is offensive, sir.
And your inability to connect the manifest and latent functions of groups is sad...
This is called an Ad Hominem attack, and it does your argument no good.
It makes my argument way more fun to read and write, though. I will keep to my guns.
Sorry, but you don't write a "frontend" in Ruby. Ruby runs on the server.
Oh, so I guess I was just imagining GNOME2-Ruby and Ruby/GTK+. I obviously have a very loose grip on reality if I could find it in myself to see linux as crappy or archaic, seeing as it's basically a poorly adapted 1970's era operating system that pretends to be Windows or Mac occasionally and fails miserably at both... yet users will still always find themselves editing text files to get basic tasks done. That is so advanced that I cannot even comprehend it. I think I just reached nirvana... I hope that didn't crash your X session.
I only use bittorrent on my work computer to download linux distros and other legal content. Happy now?
I prophecized your arrival.
1) Support for MP3 playback and encoding. What's illegal about that?
MP3 is in terrible legal gray zone... do you think firms like Microsoft, Apple, and Sun pay licensing costs to Frauenhoffer IIS because they're just sillier than Canonical? Why do you think no one packages it with their distribution? I suggest you read up on wikipedia for this... because it's the main reason for the existence of OGG, WMA, and AAC.
Otherwise, I don't want to dig through the licenses to point out to you why some of this stuff is in the gray... if you're in the United States, you are likely violating some sort of patents somewhere in using these things. You've conveniently failed to mention plenty of the video codecs that package provides.
Seriously, if you're not playing your music and videos in Real Player or something, I guarantee you are violating someone's copyright or patent.
"FOSS", or Free and Open Source Software, is a kind of software. I know... I have written some.
Holy crap! I am in the midst of someone who has written a crappy alternative to some commercial piece of software using a trendy language... or perhaps even a crappy driver for an archaic monolithic kernel!
You may see a correlation between the two, but you are misusing the acronym. Plain and simple. FOSS and F/OSS have nothing to do with downloading files.
The free software movement is full of pirates, libertarians, and college students... well, it's really more of a venn diagram than anything else. Who else would waste so much time on this sort of crap and produce so little in valuable or marketable results?
You don't have to take it from me, though. Just check out the focus of Groklaw or the EFF... open source, software patents, Microsoft, RIAA & MPAA. The fixation is there and slashdot examples this as well. All these things are under the umbrella of the same subculture.
Or maybe we can just look at things your way. It's not like the Nazi's were anti-semitic, since that wasn't the focus of the party. It's not like drug dealers use drugs, because that's not part of dealing drugs... and Free software advocates don't write good software because that's not what the movement is about.. it's about FREE software.
Now go write a slow, ugly frontend for something in Ruby.
"F/OSS" refers to kinds of software. It has nothing to do with downloading.
It's also a cultural movement. Most people posting on slashdot belong to this subculture, so the general opinion on slashdot is usually representative of the F/OSS subculture.
If you don't see any connection between culture surrounding the pirate bay and the F/OSS culture, then your football helmet is probably on too tight.
Well done for proving the RIAA / MPAA right, boys. You're a true help to the cause.
But they are right in that regard... I mean, come on. Let's not kid ourselves. I think this is an example where people just make-believe that bittorrent is some sort of misunderstood technology that is just being painted negatively by some evil group of corporate baddies. Everyone uses bittorrent to pirate media. I am sure some Freetard will pop on and say "I only use it to download linux distros and Creative Commons licensed music"-- but I guarantee you this douche is in the minority.
There is no misunderstanding here: people get upset over the fate of TPB and mininova because they like their free shit, whether or not it's legal. People are opportunistic first and idealistic later only when legitimizing their opportunism. It's why the first package many people install in their Ubuntu distro is ubuntu-restricted-extras, despite the fact that they know it's mostly illegal.
Let's be honest with ourselves, the F/OSS community is a bunch of leeches. But we are proud of that in some defiant "get off my lawn" way.
What's wrong with the National Weather Service? Part of NOAA.
Let's be more practical- the NWS is analyzing a lot of radar data and such and running short range models while climate analysts run models of a very different nature that use hundreds of years of data. Since this is all in the same basket, suppose the same people who were looking for data just ran a 10,000 year everything model each time they needed a weather forecast (so we've got our oceanic currents, precipitation, nitrogen cycle, etc.)... it's not the same thing. You need a collection of people who are funded and supported to organize all these models that are coming from various academic and commercial entities.
Right now, these organizations are trying to share data internationally and fight the government for grant money to keep the research going(so the government already funds this) so they can reach some point of centralization- it's about more than glory. We here in Illinois are trying to figure out how shifting climate and weather patterns will affect our water and nitrogen cycle for crop growing... it's important because we're growing a large chunk of the world's corn and soy... and if you back out into the region, we're growing a large chunk of the world's food. The entire agricultural system here runs like a finely-tuned machine tweaked to follow the yearly weather and rain. When these things change, the side effects will reach the rest of the country. It becomes a national problem.
For this reason, I believe that national resources should be pooled for climate modeling and the centralization of climate data... if only to provide more iron to process data and more server space for everyone to store our data. Here at UIUC, the NCSA time we have to run these models is not cheap and not sufficient to provide the sort of results the government needs.
Furthermore, centralization of climate research would better allow research groups to specialize their models so one main organization might have the time, expertise, and funding to unify the results. The clock is really ticking on results, here. The world isn't going to burn up or have its oceans boil over or anything, but if we see crop growth effected by inconsistent and unpredictable weather patterns due to climate change, it's going to become a problem for our market and then the third world market, which eventually becomes geopolitical conflicts.
Short answer: yes, it is very much the federal government's problem and a keen example of where government centralization would be beneficial. Anyone who says that some other department can just "pick it up" has no idea how complex climate modeling is... you have to model EVERYTHING from the soil to the sky to the estimated economic growth of nations and regions and their carbon impact.
This really a rather complex statement. While it's true that no other consumer desktop operating system has quite the level of security and anti-exploit code, etc... Linux and Mac simply exist in a safer world. Perhaps one of the safest aspects of a linux system is that you're almost always running trusted code from a verified repository. This means that you really don't have to test the mettle of a linux installation (and thank god you don't) besides the fact that the level of incompatibility between linux systems provides a level of security through obscurity. Now, common images such as OpenWRT or (eventually) default Ubuntu installs may eventually be targeted, but right now they're simply not.
If someone is trying to take over your machine remotely, you're probably better off with Vista. If you're an idiot, you're probably better off with linux, where it's more difficult to shoot yourself in the foot by running insecure code as administrator.
From the results of the recent pwn2own competitions, I would say that Apple is going to eat a lot of security crow as they get just a tad bit more popular. I think Mac OS X will prove to be comically insecure when people start attacking it.
Or if you're making a paper for school, why not just use LaTeX? Produces better looking output, autoupdates your reference numbers for you, Bibliography handling is still the easiest yet, typing mathematic symbols and formulae is infinitely easier than any other word processor on the market, etc etc. (Ok, I'll stop derailing this now with fanboyisms).
I'd be lying if I said I hadn't tried that. Maybe I am just not smart enough for unix or something, but I've sort of come to like spelling/grammar check and good WYSWYG. Office 2007 handles so much of the headache for you it's just crazy... bibliography is as easy as adding the fields to a simple gui app and then clicking generate bibliography.
If it's easier than that, I must have been using a different LaTeX.
OpenOffice.org is a unix application rigged into running on Windows, sort of like Pidgin or GIMP on Windows.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Windows
And if you go over each of the official build services, you will find that one of the big differences between go-oo.org, StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org vanilla is simply build engineering. Specifically, if they're building with cygwin, it provides some major performance issues. Although Windows has some native POSIX support, you don't use it quite the same way as you do in Linux or Solaris- rather than accounting for these differences, OOo uses a POSIX emulation layer in order to avoid extra work. Despite the fact that Windows is the primary platform for distribution, it's simply too much trouble for Sun or Novell to screw with it. I know Novell is trying to move their build service (go-oo) into a straight GCC cross-compile solution, so the speed issue will not get any better on Windows.
My point is that this is built with Visual Studio 2005 as more or less a standard Windows application, not a Vista/7 application- it's not using the NT 6+ API's, so it's invalid as a true performance test. This would be similar to us testing Microsoft Office 2003 (I don't think OOo is quite feature comparable to 2007) on Windows vs. Wine and then declaring that Windows is the hands down superior platform.
So let's talk about Platform inequities. The Microsoft optimizing C compiler is a better compiler than GCC-- but GCC is really not half bad anymore. Visual Studio's really superior because of its debugging, refactoring, and profiling tools, not so much JUST its compiler. I think this is part of why Firefox runs faster in Wine than in native Linux. In fact, by writing your application in like vim and debugging with gdb then just using Visual Studio as a build slave, you're really getting the short end of the stick in both directions. But I digress, a native unix application like OOo is a native unix application, and I wouldn't expect you to get tremendously better success in Windows unless you're running it on Interix or something. Of course, that's not to say Windows doesn't do unix tasks like NFS better than UNIX, just that it doesn't necessarily run direct unix code better.
But this is all fluff, the fact of the matter is that OOo is not a Windows application and most people are Windows users, so let's look at some logical alternatives:
So... if you're running Windows and you just need to type a paper for school for free/cheap.... why not just use Softmaker Office 2006... or Softmaker Office 2008 if you have 20 bucks. Just use Office 2007 if you're doing long reports- the bibliography handling alone will make the 60 bucks to get it through ultimate steal worthwhile when writing something long and arduous. Consider the time you save on formatting and grammar checking and such over a semester or two- it's worth it. If you're paying thousands a year for your education, the least you can do is not waste time with shitty office software.
Personally, I use OOo on my linux netbook and Softmaker Office 2006 on my Windows box and just keep my documents in ODF. It's the cheap-ass pro solution.
Maybe we should consider not using a bunch of ridiculous and frivolous web-based application crap like ajax in order to serve information and images.
I mean, if we're going to nitpick, isn't the entirety of web 2.0 sort of retarded? We complain about web standards and yet no one is willing to write things in a simple and expressive enough manner that old or low end hardware such as cell phones are relevant to the mainstream web. Maybe URL's aren't really the big problem here.
Hell, if we are translating this to energy use, imagine how much electricity would be saved if everyone stopped using inefficient and expensive languages like Ruby... cities worth.
Why don't we stop serving video in flash and go back to simplistic plugin players or *gasp* ... Java! If we want to cut bandwidth, look to the past and narrowband.
If we want to cut energy or bandwidth use, it's quite simple. The modern web is full of ridiculous waste.
This is unacceptable in terms of release engineering. You don't release alpha code as "release". KDE 4.0 was supposed to be release quality. Even Vista, crappy as it was, was feature complete on release.
Put some screenshots side by side and you will see that the Windows 7 taskbar in its current state looks very KDE like, rather than Vista like.
What? Are you comparing its large launcher icons to the iconbar? It's far more of a mashup of an OS X dock and a Vista start menu. I am firm on this: it's Apple, not KDE. Don't forget that the icon bar has more complex application interaction, like active status graphics like download bars and such. You really need to try Windows 7 before you go comparing it to KDE 4. I've been periodically trying KDE 4- it seems to me more like it's a pretty face on a fairly empty shell. It just doesn't feel as rich as OS X or Windows 7.
it functions in a very original, customizable way that doesn't borrow from somewhere else.
How did that change from KDE 3?
KDE 4. This is where Microsoft apparently borrowed their ideas this time.
What from KDE 4 is in Windows 7? Seriously? The only UI concepts I see shared are ones that KDE 4 stole from Vista and Windows 7 inherited.
Here are some subtle differences to help the mentally impaired:
1) Windows 7 does not crash whenenver you look at it funny. Applications more often than not close cleanly when the user wants them to, instead of just randomly throwing a SIGSEGV.
2) Windows 7 has latent functionality- meaning that you will find the UI interacting with applications in a contextual fashion, instead of just providing a taskbar interface that looks attractive, but actually is just a glorified launcher.
3) Your systray is not full of graphically corrupted garbage in Windows 7.
4) Your system will not randomly shoot to 100% cpu usage for mysterious causes in Windows 7 (but that doesn't mean applications won't do this).
5) Windows 7 has a fully documented application development API- and it's actually complete! This means that Windows 7 provides features that aren't simply planned or imaginary. This should be a dead giveaway if you're used to KDE 4.
I suppose when you see an Aston Martin driving down the street you're like "OMG THAT LOOKS JUST LIKE A FORD TAURUS". Well, you're right... they're both cars. Is this just because some braindead aussies thought KDE 4 was Windows 7 on the street. Well.. why not. It's got a start menu on the bottom with a button in the bottom left, icons on the desktop, looks pretty shiny and reflective. To the average user, it might as well be Windows... but you just wait until they try to get something done with KDE 4. If Microsoft tried to sell anything like that as a product, they would go out of business. It would make Vista look like a glorious success- for them to steal from KDE 4 would be like a bakery stealing cow shit from a nearby ranch to decorate their cakes.
How is the existence of Google Docs hurting your freedom? Nobody forced you to use it- it's not even like Windows, which comes on almost every mainstream PC... it's a goddamn web application. You navigate to it- you choose to view it. When you start trying to enforce your standards on assorted web parties to which you are connecting, are you fighting freedom or oppressing organizations with unnecessary wasted time and image capital through an outrageous social movement...
I mean... if you don't like how Google Docs serves its javascript.. why don't you just not go there?
If you're some sort of insane jackass who doesn't even use a goddamn browser let alone understand business, economics, or software engineering (see: RMS), you can just use a proxy server. Next time Stallman wants to masturbate, we'd all appreciate it if he'd close the door.
This is why page load performance is not that important. I view most pages minutes after I open them. Memory management is much more important.
Right- IE 8 really shines for if you're doing serial browsing, not parallel browsing.
Like Firefox, does the browser gradually slow down and have to be regularly re-started?
Not yet today. I think it might be an artifact of all the process isolation. It's currently got about 8 tabs open and is going at about 200+ mb of RAM. I haven't closed it since I wrote it this morning. I'm still using it. I would go so far as to say that it doesn't bleed RAM like Firefox or Safari.
I am not a linux/firefox fanboy, so I am going to assess this browser fairly and try to answer a few questions brought up on this thread. Since I am probably the only user here running Windows by choice, so I consider this a duty. Furthermore, I am an Opera user, so my expectations for speed and performance are totally insane and unreasonable.
First off, what's wrong:
* I am using IE 8 to write this comment and I am already missing my integrated spel chekkar.
* All the fun browser hacks I use to test new browsers are not working still, so the standards support of this release is the same as before. Of course, you won't see too much upper level DOM and advanced CSS on the part of web people actually use.
* The tabs seem to open really slow, but I believe it is actually process isolating its tabs now. The memory use per tab is about 10-30 mb, which is around if not slightly below where Chrome is on this system.
* Acid 3: 12/100
What's right:
* The page loads are brutally fast- faster than Opera 10 in some cases. For instance, MSNBC and BBC News, two of my favorite sites pop up at crazy speed. However, Slashdot --which is specifically engineered to run poorly on every new release of IE (it's very firefox-quirky)-- comes up quite slowly. When I first saw the page load charts that Microsoft put out, my first response was that there was a good reason Opera wasn't on that chart- but IE did a fantastic job of playing to the most popular websites. Keep this in mind if you are either a facebook user or stalking your kids on facebook.
* If you only use IE to download firefox, you will be happy to know that the mozilla webpage loads faster on IE than any other browser, firefox included.
Conclusion:
The overall interface of the browser is quite nice. If you're used to using Firefox, this is actually much faster and handles its memory better and such. However, Firefox is not a particularly fast or well designed browser. The interface will feel sluggish if you're used to Opera or Chrome. As an Opera user, my idea of browsing the web involves launching through pages at break-neck speed middle-clicking links as I go along and loading about 20-30 tabs at a time. I have a feeling my computer would explode if I did that with IE 8. However, the same could be said for Firefox 3.
The article is quite correct in saying that this browser is very fast and correct for the real web which most people browse- and that's something that should be noted. It seems as though Firefox has gotten so obsessed with javascript benchmarks and other such fluff that it's let its real world performance slide to the extent that it's now being challenged by IE.
Since IE is still totally unchallenged by other browsers in terms of enterprise features like advanced group policy, this new release of IE will simply mean that browsing the web at work/school will be a lot less lame and obnoxious... but considering the state of the economy, you should be all be working very very hard right now.
If you have any questions or challenges for IE 8 and don't run windows or ie 8, let me know and I will give you the results.
One has to weigh the push M$ has put behind cultivating coders who feel comfortable doing things in DX (with the advantage of support from M$), versus the shops that have the luxury to tool around in GL (id software and a few others).
It's interesting you say luxury there because it takes a lot less time and resources to develop a game for Windows due to superior API's and vastly superior development and testing tools. It's not like game developers are brainwashed or anything- they're just time and budget constrained. Games are tremendously complex and extremely resource intensive, it takes a very consistent and sane environment to do complex modern games.
You're welcome to mod me down, but this is a huge gap in the linux development ecosystem that someone should take seriously. I recommend doing this through the mono project or java because of their nice development tools and consistent environments.
Until the open source world has something comparable to DirectX or Visual Studio or something (if you mention SDL or gdb, I will laugh at you) it might be in their benefit to keep cultivating the wine project to stay on-board with games. Even Apple is behind in this category, and they have REAL development tools (in fact, many new games are getting ported to mac through the Wine-derivative Transgaming Cider). This is one category where Microsoft is leading in more than just OEM-pressure, unfortunately.
If it's cheaper to stay with a Microsoft-based infrastructure, then stay with that. Creating massive infrastructure-wide group policies that go from desktop to web browser is sort of a windows thing. If you're going to maintain security policies in a linux-based system, you better be prepared to start thinking in Unix- that means remembering that you're using a network-based system, not a locally-oriented system on a network.
If you're setting an IT infrastructure, the costs you're cutting on licensing will probably bite you in either support, security, training, or usability/productivity. There's no such thing as free software, I'm sorry.
So you're saying that basically Microsoft is keeping down the sort of research and innovation necessary to develop a as-yet unfathomed and undeveloped product? So, the reason that this major superior solution hasn't yet competed with Microsoft is that it doesn't exist yet because Microsoft exists?
That's pretty existential, but I see your point. I don't want to talk about monopolistic behavior anymore, you're right, it's legally a monopoly-- I just don't think there's enough talent and creativity out there for people to make something *new* despite that. I am not saying Microsoft isn't a monopoly; I just don't think it's the big chokehold keeping innovation down-- there's way too strong of a software counterculture.
I won't even bother talking about what I mean by innovation, though, because you seem to think Linux is modern, so it's pointless:
By definition, it is.
What definition is that? I am having trouble thinking of modern kernels in the open source realm... like maybe L4 or Coyotos? Maybe. Linux is about a decade or so behind similar closed source solutions. I mean this in that whenever they write up about some new feature like "hurray! pre-emptive multi-tasking!"... it's really not that impressive. For instance, they actually claim that there is a realtime version of linux-- that's incompetent to the point of being dangerous. I think we just have different expectations for modern systems, you and I. I mean, in a shallow desktop sense, AmigaOS or BeOS are probably the best semi-recent examples of "modern".
I doubt it, Xe would have performed a "hostile takeover' by now.
Yeah, probably.
Linux has always been used in appliances and on servers and it is doing fine in both applications. It's starting to gain on mobiles and netbooks. It's not "getting bad" from a market perspective anyway
I meant it's getting less bad. It's getting to the point where it's commercially viable for desktop systems, but only on the low end. That's what I mean. It hasn't always been used-- appliances used systems like vxworks or qnx or something before linux and servers were running unix and bsd before that. I don't think linux has ever been impressive from a technical standpoint. All of its strength is cultural- it has a wealth of time and drivers devoted to it because of its messily open nature but it lacks any semblance of modern architecture or any sort of intelligent design, for that matter. It's basically grown organically.
First, Apple is the UNIX world these days.
Maybe in the server world... you mean XNU as in XNU is Not Unix? I do believe the BSD cruft in the system is more or less a compatibility layer... and perhaps a networking stack. It's only taken as much unix as is convenient. All of their closed source stuff, their compositing window system and cocoa and core* and such are all quite modern and well thought out. NeXT is only Unixy if you want to look at it like that- above the antiquated backend is a well designed and fairly modern desktop experience- not going to say anything special about their kernel, though. It's well controlled- that's what's important.
Having worked in developing products based upon UNIX OS's I can say it is by far the best choice for many markets and was, in fact, demanded by many customers. Just because you don't understand those market realities doesn't make them silly.
Yes, it's cheap. I know. There's nothing cheaper than tossing together a linux interface for a device- and everyone knows how to use it that's taken a 100 level CS course. It's a very easy almost casual sort of systems engineering... extremely wasteful on resources, though. I think purpose-built systems would save a lot of hardware resources... but that's dirt cheap because of China. I think it's cheap and practical to use unix systems on devices for the same reason it's cheap and practical to have a trucking economy in t
I'm sorry, I just keep seeing all these snide remarks about monopoly abuse and I am just not seeing it. I think that's the real story of the 90's, but it's hardly relevant today. The state of things now is that the market is basically a dry well. Windows is okay but brutally uncool, Apple is doing great, and Linux is getting to the point where it isn't so ridiculously bad that no one will even run it for free-- but they're so far behind their competition they're clearly not innovating.
What amazing open source innovation is currently being held down by the evil Microsoft conspiracy? Somebody please enlighten me. I think Linux is doing a splendid job filling the gap of bottom end desktop experience and creating a reason for commercial operating systems to improve quality and cut costs, but beyond that, it's really a pretty poor example of innovation.
This isn't like people not being allowed to make phones like with Bell, so don't get me wrong- I simply don't think of Microsoft like that. Anyone can make computer hardware and software and yet here we are using like 3 different systems, all of them shoddy, running processors that hardware emulate this old x86 architecture. The desktop world is just not that creative or advanced. Anyone can make an operating system and somehow they don't-- it's like Microsoft is Bell selling phones, and it's legal for everyone else to make phones... but only Apple is making them and everyone else is just trying to push pinecones with strings attached. Why won't anyone use these pinecones? They convey audio from point A to point B and they're free.
Yeah they only have a vastly superior product and have for many years and it has netted them what 20%? Yeah, sounds like the market is working great.
Firefox is awful. I mean, seriously terrible. They're really driven by the fact that IE is worse. I think it is a fantastic example that people were so fed up, that they left IE and made their own crappy browser. We'll see if the greater market can create some interesting and new before Microsoft wakes up and starts throwing research and resources at it.
I see Microsoft widely praised here when they take actions like improving Web standards or creating really innovative technologies. I see them widely decried when they illegally undermine markets, or stifle innovation, or make really poor design decisions, or file frivolous lawsuits.
You must be reading a different website. I only see the latter, even in situations like this where they're just creating a fairly open flash clone.
Last it was discussed, the consensus seemed to be hybrid kernels merging micro and macro elements were pretty much everywhere.
Are you kidding me? People here think the linux kernel is an example of modern operating system design.
That's quite an overstatement but more people here have been personally affected by MS's broken junk, so emotions can run high. Objectively, their abuse has done more to hold back numerous computer fields than any other, single company. We'd likely be a decade ahead of where we are now with Web technologies (for example) if MS had been split to move IE to a different company.
... you really think the Unix world would have forged forward with lots of new innovations? Without competitive bodies like Microsoft and Apple around, people do jack. They implement worse is better solutions and enjoy making systems so unuable that they get to be computer gods. This issue was discussed in the 70's at great length... making a hostile computing world where only people with insane attention spans can succeed. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amiga were different because they thought compuers should be usable... people still hate them for that.
I'm not suggesting anyone implement anything in any particular technology. I'm mentioning that MS's actions in promoting Silverlight are probably illegal and this is evid
Sigh. You can't win on technical merits if a monopoly is leveraged against you. That's the whole point. You create a better solution using cool new HTML 5. It is open and standard and innovative and cutting edge. MS refuses to implement the technology in IE, making the only way to get it to work on IE Silverlight. Because MS can force feed IE to the entire Windows using populace and you have no ability to do the same with another browser, your solution loses... despite being technically better.
Who supports HTML 5? It's not even a complete standard. So it's hardly specified much less implemented. Are you honestly suggesting a non-existent solution vs. an existent and supported one?
What are you talking about? MS is the only one likely to end up in court over this issue, not Vortal or Adobe (unless Vortal broke their contract or local laws in the process of using Silverlight)
RTFA. The Portugal Free Software Wingbat club is challenging it to a governing body.
Yeah, just make a better technological solution just like we did to overcome IBM's monopoly influence... except antitrust regulators had to step in and restrict IBM's practices, if you know your computing history. You know, the same laws that make what MS is doing illegal and prevents better solutions from winning. You don't seem to understand antitrust issues very well.
This is a rather unique situation- you see, the open source platform kind of sucks. It pushes absolutely godawful technology from the 70's and 80's and gets by based on its ability to run a web browser. Apple is a great example of the fact that there's more to this than monopoly- they are gaining market share by making a better product, not by forcing their product to be bundled in a court of law. Firefox gained market share by actually beating IE 6, and then IE 7 to a lesser extent, and even IE 8, to an even lesser extent. Still: no monopoly could stop technical excellence, because the competition is hardly held down.
Free market capitalism is free market, monopoly control is technically socialism- not that I don't support it. For instance, the solution I am backing here is open source and developed by Novell, not Microsoft. Sometimes you need a large technology firm to push innovation.
Web standards have been artificially held back by one particular monopolist. Previous to MS's gaining control of the browser market, they were advancing quite rapidly.
Actually, there's really no official reason that the w3c is in charge of the web- it's just a group of businesses. It's only recently been a web of standards- for the most part, those standards are pushed by various other companies who pull strings in the coalition. The web standards are a tremendous and unreadable mess, hardly a productized development platform. So, while IE was basically 95% of browsers, MSDN was more of an example of web standards documentation than the w3c. But I suppose if I just keep calling myself the pope, it's only a matter of time before I become the pope.
You must be right. There can be no other answer. Might I suggest you try another forum, like Digg?
Hurray, so I can deal with Apple zealots instead of open source zealots.
I'm so sorry your brilliance is persecuted by all those jealous moderators. Obviously they are biased.
The moderators are just other people like you, who think like you. It's user moderated, and the users on this site are mostly idiots- not engineers, designers, or developers; just sysadmins and web trash. They're pro linux because it's what they know and anti-microsoft because it's what they hate. For the most part, like the rest of the GNU/FSF/Linux/UNIX pile, it's just an anti-technology, anti-innovation cult full of people with outdated skills who want to keep their jobs maintaining their poorly engineered systems. I mean, this is a site where people maintain tha
No doubt that is true. Have you violated the same patents that Microsoft is now suing over? I have. My pockets aren't big enough for them to worry about, but if everyone who has small pockets makes something an industry standard, then they'll go after those with bigger pockets who use the standard, just because its a standard. And we'll all end up paying more for anything that uses it. So for us with small pockets, its in our own long term interest to not use it. Unless of course, the short term benefit outweighs the long term penalty.
Well, isn't that a bit dramatic? I mean, unlike SCO or the RIAA, or Alcatel-Lucent, or whatever- Microsoft is still quite profitable serving consumers instead of fighting them. They get money by selling products still... imagine that. Maybe the industry is just running out of ideas but is still hungry for money? I don't see anything new coming out of unixland, that's for sure.
Slashdot is not homogenous, but a lot of people are very vocal about MS. MS has given them good reason. This is primarily a computing forum and MS has done more damage to various parts of the computing industry via their criminal acts than pretty much any other company. Had Slashdot been around during the bad old days you'd have been claiming it was just an anti-IBM site.
Okay, so this basically makes my point. It's a technology solution. You guys obviously have way better solutions... why don't you just make a better product? It seems open source is just hopelessly choked by unix retardedness.
Who's promoting Flash? This could be done in Java or javascript even using all open Web standards. Failing that, Flash is not being promoted by a criminal organization whose trust gives them direct, financial incentive to break compatibility with other versions. Finally, Adobe pushing the proprietary Flash upon the industry is not illegal since they aren't abusing a monopoly in another market to do it.
Right, what a lame rationalization. Of course, suddenly proprietary junk is okay.
Is it cheaper to use proper development tools and actually get some work done using adobe or Microsoft stuff, or to fight off the horde or morons who attack you in court? Decisions, decisions.
I'd say if MS is beating them without breaking the law... which is highly unlikely if you understand antitrust law. Even then it is debatable.
Oh I see- as far as I can tell it sounds like the crowd here represent the group trying to win a market battle with litigation instead of technical merits. Can't make a better profit so you just dub the competition criminal? Design by committee has always and will always lag behind, web standards like javascript vs tuned solutions like flash and silverlight is just another sterling example of this.
Okay, other people clued you in about this.
No, it was just other random zealots posting on my comment. I maintain that I made a good point, that's why it's considered "flamebait"-- this is not a community of good ideas or linux platform strength, but fanboy anger.
Don't want to get sued.
Silverlight is basically an organized reimplementation of flash/javascript/HTML. If they tried to sue over it, they'd probably lose. One thing is for certain: you live in a far more frightening world than I do... and for that, I pity you.
Then once it is nice and entrenched MS will kill silverlight for OSX, just like IE for OSX.
Of course, that's not only a paranoid assumption, but a retarded business practice. I mean, they'll just get eaten by flash. I hate to break this to you... but I think the purpose of silverlight is to market development tools, not the windows platform.
Aside from that, I think silverlight 3.0+ will eventually prove to be a far better online game development platform, which pleases me.
If Microsoft ever did that to Mac, Moonlight would just start supporting mac anyway- which would be helpful for that grey period where flash would just completely destroy them, making their entire investment a waste.
I think Moonlight/Mono provides a far likelier chance of there being open source dynamic web content creation tools than flash would ever allow- and that's also a positive.
I think what happened with IE is simply that Safari totally surpassed it, rendering the product moot. It became a waste of time to push it, so it was easier to simply support a mac-specific browser than keep maintaining their web platform on mac. It's not really that evil... just pragmatic.
Only silverlight 1.0, that site users 2.0. When moonlight gets to that silverlight will probably be 3.0.
Whenever the fabled "Year of the linux desktop comes", that will slow adoption of future silverlight versions, maintaining the deployments with Moonlight's versioning instead.