>Ubuntu is the universal default for anyone who wants a desktop system that Just Works.
On the one hand, you say that lack of a standard target is not a problem. And then you say that there *is* a standard, Ubuntu. Better than nothing, I guess, except there's not much reason for Ubuntu to be that choice. At least not according to my experiences with it. But it's not bad - I'll live with it if I have to.
>Sounds like you haven't heard of the Linux Standard Base [wikipedia.org].
Of course, I've heard of the LSB. I've also heard how spectacularly unsuccessful it's been at being enough of a standard for ISV's to target.
Look, Linux is a work in progress. Probably always will be. It'd just be nice if, as various differences shake out to the point of irrelevance, distros would start to adopt as 'standard practices' whatever works and is widespread enough.
If Ubuntu's momentum can make that happen faster, great. Not my choice, but hey, I admit to being part of the problem too.
And it's not as though developers aren't trying. It's just that to read your average Slashdotter, you'd think that they shouldn't be, lest they stifle the great freedom of choice that got Linux onto.1% of the world's desktops.
You keep missing my point - intentionally, I think. I want Apple to *have* to port iTunes to Linux. Do you think they *wanted* to port it to Windows?
And if a third-party effort was superior to Apple's, well they we're all free to use it. In fact, I *do* use Amarok to access my iPod when I'm running Linux. I just don't use it to update the iPod, since at one point I read that that could render it unusable. And don't bother pointing me to the workaround for that - I can find it if I need to. That's not my point.
Mandatory Quicktime? Who said anything about manditory or Quicktime? Or using it if it *were* installed?
My point - for the third time - Linux could easily surpass Mac0S in marketshare, except that nobody's seriously pursuing it. And that's fine. Just shut up about the 'year of the Linux desktop' if you're actively working against it. And if you don't realize you're actively working against it, that's just sad.
>Psst, that's mostly unnecessary, unless you're purchasing music off of iTunes
Yes, I know that. But since I already have my XP partition, and because y'know what, I just want to listen to the thing, and because iTunes makes it really easy to get podcasts from various sources. (yeah, amarok probably does too - I kinda like Songbird too).
Anyway, thanks for the help, but do you really think I was writing about iTunes? The issue isn't finding piecemeal workarounds for all the proprietary stuff in our lives. Ths issue is making Linux a mainstream (enough) platform that it doesn't matter. Let Apple figure out how to make iTunes work with Linux - why should I have to? Linux is far enough along, and if it were on a trajectory to large-scale desktop adoption, Apple would have to support it (well, maybe not Apple, but you get the picture...).
Sorry folks, Linus essentially conceded this just yesterday. There will never be a 'year of the Linux desktop' because there will never be a single Linux desktop. Nobody seems to want it - or even to want to try to get as close as possible. Not the various distros, not Linus, not a hell of a lot of Linux fans.
Of course ISV's still want it. Businesses with a need for low-cost IT want it. I want it. So do [some of] you.
But Linus has a point. Yes folks, it is true that diversity is one of our strengths. It has been responsible for Linux becoming as good as it is as quickly as it has (and that's pretty damn good, and pretty damn quick). But let's face up to the downside of that strangth. Incompatible distros and a chaotic development cycle are non-starters as far as mainstream desktops are concerned. ISV's won't target you - ISV's can't target you. But most desktop users still want at least some 3rd party software that's not available from their distro's repositories.
I want it, and so, probably do you. Well, actually I don't want it so bad. I don't run TurboTax or Quicken (though my partner does run them via dual-boot on my machine). I don't run Photoshop or 3D games. But if Flash weren't there, I'd bail. Well, maybe not. Still, you get my point. My desktop essentially is an internet appliance. And (don't shoot me) I was given an iPod for my birthday a few years ago, and I actually like it - and dual-boot to Windows to maintain it. Even used it as an excuse to upgrade to an XP-based box so I could maintain it (linux worked fine on my old 1998-vintage PC before that).
For now, we in appliance land are lucky that there are enough non-desktop'y devices that can use linux that hardware gets at least grudging support from manufacturers. Better where the device applications are more obvious.
I'll end with what should be an obvious point. Why do you think Vista has failed so spectacularly? Because XP is still completely useable 8 years into its life cycle. Of course, if it weren't, then Windows may well have failed too. Backward compatibility is Windows' biggest strength - perhaps its only strength compared to the competition. And Linux will never have it, because it's creators don't want it, or don't understand why it's important, or just don't care. They're having a grand old time rewriting KDE and GNOME from the ground up every 2 years.
The difference between the layers of different distributions is _profound_
And that's part of the problem. Linus may be right that there are good reasons for multiple distros to exist. But that doesn't mean there are good reasons for them to store the same files in different locations.
One of the downsides of multiple distros is their tendency to do *everything* differently. At one point, that was probably a good thing. Experimentation and competition may be the best way to learn how to do things optimally. And in any case, in FOSS, there's no way to prevent it.
But at some point, certain things have been shaken out to the point that they're more or less equivalent, and it would be a good thing for the multiple desktop distros (after all, that's what we're talking about here) to agree to agree.
Beyond that, where competition is still producing some benefits, diverge away. But at least try to limit it to situations where it makes sense.
Microsoft may not have 'destroyed' Netscape, but they did destroy Netscape's business model. That's the reason there was no Netscape 5.0. And there was one and only one reason Microsoft entered the browser market in the first place. They saw the browser as an alternative platform, and they wanted to make sure that as that platform grew it was Windows-only (or Windows-mostly).
There's no reason to include IE in Windows these days, except for to continue to support non-standard sites that require it. And the sooner sites stop requiring IE, the better. In fact, Opera's business model doesn't really need for people to use their browser on Windows machines either.
It's not about desktop applications or even web browsers per se and not allowing a monopolist to corrupt those standards in order to advance their monopoly interests. It's about following true standards in a networked world. As long as WWW standards are followed, Opera's mobile business can succeed just as well as if they were bundled with Windows.
That's why arguments like 'why not force brand X file browser onto Windows as well' are red herrings. Using Windows explorer instead of XTree will have no effect on your ability to communicate with the outside world or vice versa.
A more interesting example would be desktop search. Using Microsoft's vs. Google's, searches for desktop stuff shouldn't really matter, except that both attempt to combine desktop and internet search results, and to use info gleaned from the desktop to improve their network search algorithms. At least part of Microsoft's motivation with desktop search is to harm Google and weaken them as a competitor in another area.
I'm sure the military got great value on their $600 toilet seats. An excretory experience second to none. But if you're asking me to foot the bill, your ass can sit on the $19.95 job.
While 'the best tool for the job' might actually provide a little extra productivity for a power user, forcing the entire population to use an expensive tool to write the occasional memo will counteract any such gains pretty quickly.
Ideally, they'd demand a fully-compliant ODF office suite and then have the choice to give high-volume users a slightly better tool if they need it. But locking everyone into MS proprietary file formats throws that option out the window.
And besides, Office should be the easiest major desktop component to replace (browser based stuff doesn't count).
It's functionality is well-defined, and OOo provides most, if not all, for most users. And it's probably the most expensive component for which you can say that. Yeah, it's not perfect. But at some point, you've got to make a cost/benefit analysis, including the ongoing costs of not switching and becoming even further entrenched. I hate it when people flatly argue OOo is infeasible because of missing feature X or Y - or 'pain point' Z. Yeah, but there are millions to be saved, and in at least some cases, that's more important.
Of course, when you drop Office, you're also dropping Outlook, so Exchange has got to go to. But that's even more of a commodity.
Switching to Linux is harder, because you have to figure out if any oddball Windows apps are being used. But switching to OOo gets you most of the cost savings, and at least gets you started on a path where the OS can ultimately be swapped out.
No, BSD isn't dead, but a BSD user can still feel right at home with a familiar POSIX environment on Linux, Unix and even OS/X.
Yes, standards matter - at least ones that are visible to users.
If Linux hadn't followed POSIX, it would have gotten exactly nowhere. That's why it's nuts that the various desktop environments went as far as they did down the 'roll your own' routes. As far as their UI libs are concerned, there's no getting around it. But even the KDE and GNOME core folks recognize that they need to be able to share common dialogs, etc. It's just that they recognized it too late to build it in from the start.
Interesting that there was an article here just the other day about how Sony has no interest in making or selling Linux laptops or netbooks.
I wonder why not. It's easy to forget that they use Linux in other products and even offer it on the PS3. So why not netbooks? Is it a matter of just avoiding the low-end, low margin segments of the market? It couldn't be any love for Microsoft, could it?
Just because third world countries can't afford to match our enviromental and labor regulatory regimes doesn't justify our corporations exporting jobs to them with no regulatory framework at all.
We could certainly spread many of the benefits of globalization without allowing our industries to export jobs to people desperate enough to do them effectively for nothing. Something like a global minimum wage might work, along with global minumum environmental standards. The kind of thing the UN or the WTO ought to be good for (and don't just take that as an invitation to bash the UN - we're talking in theory here).
There's no reason that this process has to be all or nothing, except for the fact that US corporations want it that way, and US politicians are willing to do their bidding. An effective middle ground approach might even foster some semblance of a middle class in those countries that could afford to buy some of what we would still manufacture (where the savings would no longer justify the export of the jobs).
Your Japan analogy isn't quite apt either. Japan developed its industry independently, with traditional tarrifs in place. It did not just provide a cheap, dirty place for foreign industry to move in all but name... and then to move from there to the next desperate place once it's all used up.
>...In fact, outside Apple, most digital music players will not play AAC. All will play MP3 however
which begs the question, why don't they all play AAC? They all seem to play MP3 and WMA. Is there a royalty involved in adding AAC support? Likewise, is there a royalty for WMA?
It seems that, now that iTunes is going non-DRM AAC, it'd make sense for all players to support AAC before they'd support WMA.
On a similar note, it was a pain finding the codecs to get non-DRM AAC to play on my Linux box too - at least it was a pain to figure out which non-free libraries I needed to use along with with xine (and then later gstreamer) as needed by the various Linux distros I've used. Again, most of the difficulty comes because the distros are afraid to provide these (or even point you to them) for fear of patent suits.
I assume these are just aspects of the larger software patent/royalty situation. So when are these problems going to start going away now that software seems to be getting a little less patentable?
>... his statement "the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability" suggests to me that he is working for a non-profit, not-for-profit, or similar organization.
Unfortunately, that quote could easily apply to a major share of American (if not worldwide) businesses. One legacy of the pyramid scheme that Wall Street has become is that many nice, profitable small businesses have been bought up by idiots whose only skills are to concoct a 'business plan' that makes sense to the bigger idiots that buy them.
Profit? Who needs it as long as the next great thing is always in development and just around the corner... and the company gets sold before the lies are uncovered.
Eventually you realize that you've been a bit of an idiot too - believing that rational arguments and good technology can win the day in what are essentially mergers and acquisitions firms, not software houses.
The company I work for has gone through this literally 6 times since I've been there. If it weren't for liking the day-to-day work, and the salary, I'd have been out of there years ago. But then, where would I have gone...
What remains to be seen is whether the current global economic collapse will topple these houses of cards too.
Reading this post, it's obvious that the 'choice is good' mantra is so simplistic as to be useless.
When it comes down to desktop environments, if you need to know all these details to choose best of breed apps from various desktops, you're essentially gonna end up picking one or the other desktop and living with its deficiencies. That's a choice of sorts, but hardly optimal.
That isn't to say that both KDE and GNOME are not better than they would otherwise have been without the other as competition to spur them along - though Windows and OS/X ought to provide competition enough for that...
But seriously. The advantages of competing development have been reaped, and we're left with the problems. Various incompatibilities and no logical target for any new app. KDE, GNOME and freedesktop need to work together toward a new goal. Define a set of shared services that all underlying toolkits can rely on for common dialogs, themes, etc. Ultimately produce a desktop on which there are no visible differences between a GTK app and a QT app. Or as close as you can get.
The ultimate question is whether there's something about FOSS that makes such cooperation impossible. Obviously, nobody can be forced to respect any kind of dictated standard - though it seems like within the desktops, devs do respect the standards. Yes somebody could always fork off yet another desktop, but ultimately if the GNOME and KDE muckety-mucks could agree to cooperate, they could more or less impose their decisions on the rest of us. And about now, that sounds okay - as long as it works like KDE;)
As it is, we're ending up letting Ubuntu (a good, but not great distro) make our decisions for us. Even somebody like Jeremy Allison ends up pretty unenthusiastically 'endorsing' GNOME because he figures Ubuntu is the new 'standard target'. But he doesn't sound thrilled...
>Well, no, actually -- remember how Firefox used to leak memory? A lot of that was actually memory fragmentation. And RAM has exactly as much seek time as an SSD -- that is, none at all.
Memory fragmentation's a different issue. Individual memory allocations need to be contiguous, so if you're memory's fragmented into lots of small chunks, each large allocation will need to grab a new chunk.
Files don't need to be contiguous, so that can't happen. And, since SSD solves the seek time problem, fragmenting them isn't much of a performance hit either.
In fact, maybe apps like Firefox could use memory-mapped files for large allocations on an SSD-based system to eliminate the need for contiguous memory allocations in the first place.
The problem with Virtual PC on the G5 is that it needs to emulate the X86 application code plus the Windows OS.
Since most apps strike a pretty reasonable balance between application logic and library calls, most emulators only need to emulate a relatively small portion of the code. They can drop down into native implementations as soon as the app calls library code. That's why script languages are viable at all.
Where I work, we had a large set of applications written in assembler (don't ask) for an '80s vintage minicomputer that was discontinued. Rather then junk the whole thing, we wrote a machine emulator and reimplemented key libraries in C on unix. The result was faster than the original minis, since modern unix hardware was so much faster and the app/library mix was skewed toward the native libraries.
I think one of the problems with traditional desktop Java apps was that major libraries (like Swing?) were not available on all platforms as native code. Again, that leaves you essentially emulating the application plus the platform, which shouldn't be necessary. Don't know if that's still an issue with Java. Certainly Eclipse seems to perform pretty well (once it starts up)...
People always claim that FOSS (usually they just mean Linux, and in particular the KDE and GNOME desktops) just copies Microsoft and/or Apple, so "where's the innovation".
Well, this is where. FOSS made it possible for Asus and Dell to think about instant on computing. With Windows, you'd only have it if Microsoft came up with the idea. With Linux, anyone is free to come up with the idea. Even people not associated with Linux development per se.
That's what open source innovation is about. Providing the freedom to innovate. Yes Linux is still playing catchup (to a limited extent these days) in matching mainstream desktop functionality and in keeping up with all the closed de-facto 'standards' that keep appearing due to the fact that the marketplace is still a heavily distorted Monopoly dominated one.
So don't expect a new desktop paradigm (which most people probably don't even want). But expect a host of new devices (EeePC, Android, TiVo, etc) made possible by the true open source innovation - freedom to reuse.
The problem isn't that Mono prevents migration from Windows. To the extent that apps are built targeting.NET, Mono obviously helps migrate those apps.
But at the same time, if developers are targeting.NET under the illusion that they'll get easy portability, then there are probably better solutions. QT comes to mind, not to mention Java.
It seems like Mono will never provide complete portability. The article talks about percentages of the code that will work under Mono, the assumption being that the developer will need to make tweaks to get a Linux version. I'd bet there'd be cases where they'd have to do tweaks to get a Mac version too. At that point, what's the advantage to using an interpreted language over a nice C++ framework like QT?
Bottom line - If portability is the goal, Mono might just muddy the waters. Why not work to build something truly portable with whatever perceived advantages of.NET built in?
The main benefit of cloud computing is its thin client approach. Client side just needs a web browser. To the extent that a generic, standards-compliant web browser works, that means that the cloud computing model is also platform-neutral. From a development point of view, it makes great sense. You build something, and can deploy it in any configuration from servers on the Internet 'cloud' to internal corporate servers.
Why can't that be even further extended to support a single-user server running on a desktop PC? That essentially would give you the ultimate in deployment flexibility from a single code base.
Of course, you then have to factor in the fact that (current) web-based app functionality doesn't measure up to desktop apps. Also, deploying a 'cloud' on your desktop PC seems a little nasty - traditionally a web server and app isn't a nicely shrink-wrappable quantity. But maybe one day there will be an open source 'portable, zero-admin, web app environment' that could be easily used for such deployments.
Then again, maybe Google Gears or XUL-based apps like Songbird already provide much of this benefit. Real desktop apps built with web technologies so they can be repurposed as cloud apps where appropriate...
>People have been arguing about which text editor is better since before there was a Linux...
Perhaps, but nobody's suggesting that anybody build large commercial apps using vi or Emacs as an application framework. That said, people (including in this thread) are asking the likes of Oracle to support multiple Linux distros. At that point, havint the kind of silly 'vi vs. emacs' argument you mention as harmless is anything but.
Until something like the LSB really takes hold, Linux will be great for
1. open source stuff distros can include in their distro-specific repositories. 2. Non-gui stuff, where the libraries *are already* largely standardized. 3. Low-level gui stuff (coded at the X11 level) like Flash, which doesn't need lots of specific desktop libraries around. 4. Statically linked stuff, like Acrobat and OOo that can be released with no dependecies.
That's a lot of stuff. Enough to run a nice EEEpc. But not enough for the general Quicken-using public to use.
Hell, even Firefox has so many desktop toolkit dependencies that it needs to be integrated and released by the distros, whereas Opera can put out a statically-linked QT-level version that works for most distros. I'd like Firefox to be releasable that way too. I hate it that my otherwise fantastic Mandriva 2008-1 system can't be (easily) upgraded to Firefox 3. With a stable GTK+ implementation, standardized across distros, that would be a snap. But it doesn't look like we'll ever get there... or that we're even trying.
I agree that this is (or ought to be patentable), but isn't there prior art for "take something that traditionally was deployed in 2 dimentions and array it 3 dimensionally to gain a huge increasd in surface area".
Ultimately, how different is this from "take a process that used to be done on paper and deploy it on a computer network for enhanced efficiency"?
Somehow, the realization of the 'product' as a physical thing makes it fell alright to me. So what, other than the zero cost of replication makes software that different?
To me, it's mostly the motivation... i.e. to prevent interoperability. Software's all about standards, and patent-based monopolies just screw up the whole ecosystem. Is there something analogous in the world of physical inventions?
What made the Republican read like a Nazi convention is the fact that the crowds would cheer anything put out to them. If the tone sounded sufficiently 'American' they were on their feet cheering.
Whether it was hateful, sarcastic, dishonest stuff about the Democrats, Palin's pregnant daughter or McCain telling them that THEY had failed for 8 years. Didn't matter. As long as the inflection, followed by a cheering crowd, made for an impression of 'enthusiasm', they were cheering away.
Very little content. Much of it misleading or outright dishonest. But lots of cheering.
Scary
P.S. The Dems had a lot of showbiz unity too, but they are in fact unified in their policy proposals. And, of course, they haven't gone all Orwellian with language in any way comparable to the 'up is down' Republicans.
I don't care how good Silverlight is, if there's a multiplatform alternative that's reasonable, you should use it.
Microsoft may or may not create good software in some instances. The problem is that only Microsoft has the nerve (and the Monopoly clout) to produce a new Internet streaming protocol and not make it available on all the major platforms. And Linux is one of the majors these days - with all the linux cellphones, netbooks, etc. Hell, desktop Linux use may be getting close to Macintosh levels.
If Microsoft wants to make their websites proprietary, let them. If they want to compete with Flash, do it - but be aware that doing it requires that they do it on at least all the platforms Flash supports.
That said, nobody intending to reach a large audience should use protocols that are not as universally available as possible. It defeats the purpose. Microsoft can get away with limited platform support only because NBC, the DNC, etc are willing to use their stuff without Linux support.
That said, the DNC probably farmed this out and has no idea of the issues involved.
Actually, the software barrier to entry has proven much harder to overcome than the hardware one.
AMD went from obscurity to near dominance in some segments and part way back in a comparitively short time. It seems the X86 platform is just simpler to clone than the Windows/Office/IE-specific web platform.
Linux and OOo have made amazing strides, but are still not 'plug in replacements' in the way that AMD is for Intel.
What'dya wanna bet that this is really just a new, better platform for deploying apps to a thin client a la Citrix?
Replace the fat, buggy Windows desktop with a new, proprietary thin client and host those traditional Windows apps on a server (not necessarily owned by Microsoft) with per-seat pricing.
Solves a lot of the deployment (and maybe, security) problems with the current MS architecture. And Microsoft still gets the lock-in and per-seat licensing.
Sure, you can kind of do this today, but Citrix doesn't really scale that well. So, if they can build a new platform designed to work this way, could they really make a go of it? Plus, doesn't Citrix get a cut now? Isn't it about time for Microsoft to stab their 'partner' in the back?
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>Ubuntu is the universal default for anyone who wants a desktop system that Just Works.
On the one hand, you say that lack of a standard target is not a problem. And then you say that there *is* a standard, Ubuntu. Better than nothing, I guess, except there's not much reason for Ubuntu to be that choice. At least not according to my experiences with it. But it's not bad - I'll live with it if I have to.
>Sounds like you haven't heard of the Linux Standard Base [wikipedia.org].
Of course, I've heard of the LSB. I've also heard how spectacularly unsuccessful it's been at being enough of a standard for ISV's to target.
Look, Linux is a work in progress. Probably always will be. It'd just be nice if, as various differences shake out to the point of irrelevance, distros would start to adopt as 'standard practices' whatever works and is widespread enough.
If Ubuntu's momentum can make that happen faster, great. Not my choice, but hey, I admit to being part of the problem too.
And it's not as though developers aren't trying. It's just that to read your average Slashdotter, you'd think that they shouldn't be, lest they stifle the great freedom of choice that got Linux onto .1% of the world's desktops.
You keep missing my point - intentionally, I think. I want Apple to *have* to port iTunes to Linux. Do you think they *wanted* to port it to Windows?
And if a third-party effort was superior to Apple's, well they we're all free to use it. In fact, I *do* use Amarok to access my iPod when I'm running Linux. I just don't use it to update the iPod, since at one point I read that that could render it unusable. And don't bother pointing me to the workaround for that - I can find it if I need to. That's not my point.
Mandatory Quicktime? Who said anything about manditory or Quicktime? Or using it if it *were* installed?
My point - for the third time - Linux could easily surpass Mac0S in marketshare, except that nobody's seriously pursuing it. And that's fine. Just shut up about the 'year of the Linux desktop' if you're actively working against it. And if you don't realize you're actively working against it, that's just sad.
>Psst, that's mostly unnecessary, unless you're purchasing music off of iTunes
Yes, I know that. But since I already have my XP partition, and because y'know what, I just want to listen to the thing, and because iTunes makes it really easy to get podcasts from various sources. (yeah, amarok probably does too - I kinda like Songbird too).
Anyway, thanks for the help, but do you really think I was writing about iTunes? The issue isn't finding piecemeal workarounds for all the proprietary stuff in our lives. Ths issue is making Linux a mainstream (enough) platform that it doesn't matter. Let Apple figure out how to make iTunes work with Linux - why should I have to? Linux is far enough along, and if it were on a trajectory to large-scale desktop adoption, Apple would have to support it (well, maybe not Apple, but you get the picture...).
Sorry folks, Linus essentially conceded this just yesterday. There will never be a 'year of the Linux desktop' because there will never be a single Linux desktop. Nobody seems to want it - or even to want to try to get as close as possible. Not the various distros, not Linus, not a hell of a lot of Linux fans.
Of course ISV's still want it. Businesses with a need for low-cost IT want it. I want it. So do [some of] you.
But Linus has a point. Yes folks, it is true that diversity is one of our strengths. It has been responsible for Linux becoming as good as it is as quickly as it has (and that's pretty damn good, and pretty damn quick). But let's face up to the downside of that strangth. Incompatible distros and a chaotic development cycle are non-starters as far as mainstream desktops are concerned. ISV's won't target you - ISV's can't target you. But most desktop users still want at least some 3rd party software that's not available from their distro's repositories.
I want it, and so, probably do you. Well, actually I don't want it so bad. I don't run TurboTax or Quicken (though my partner does run them via dual-boot on my machine). I don't run Photoshop or 3D games. But if Flash weren't there, I'd bail. Well, maybe not. Still, you get my point. My desktop essentially is an internet appliance. And (don't shoot me) I was given an iPod for my birthday a few years ago, and I actually like it - and dual-boot to Windows to maintain it. Even used it as an excuse to upgrade to an XP-based box so I could maintain it (linux worked fine on my old 1998-vintage PC before that).
For now, we in appliance land are lucky that there are enough non-desktop'y devices that can use linux that hardware gets at least grudging support from manufacturers. Better where the device applications are more obvious.
I'll end with what should be an obvious point. Why do you think Vista has failed so spectacularly? Because XP is still completely useable 8 years into its life cycle. Of course, if it weren't, then Windows may well have failed too. Backward compatibility is Windows' biggest strength - perhaps its only strength compared to the competition. And Linux will never have it, because it's creators don't want it, or don't understand why it's important, or just don't care. They're having a grand old time rewriting KDE and GNOME from the ground up every 2 years.
The difference between the layers of different distributions is _profound_
And that's part of the problem. Linus may be right that there are good reasons for multiple distros to exist. But that doesn't mean there are good reasons for them to store the same files in different locations.
One of the downsides of multiple distros is their tendency to do *everything* differently. At one point, that was probably a good thing. Experimentation and competition may be the best way to learn how to do things optimally. And in any case, in FOSS, there's no way to prevent it.
But at some point, certain things have been shaken out to the point that they're more or less equivalent, and it would be a good thing for the multiple desktop distros (after all, that's what we're talking about here) to agree to agree.
Beyond that, where competition is still producing some benefits, diverge away. But at least try to limit it to situations where it makes sense.
Microsoft may not have 'destroyed' Netscape, but they did destroy Netscape's business model. That's the reason there was no Netscape 5.0. And there was one and only one reason Microsoft entered the browser market in the first place. They saw the browser as an alternative platform, and they wanted to make sure that as that platform grew it was Windows-only (or Windows-mostly).
There's no reason to include IE in Windows these days, except for to continue to support non-standard sites that require it. And the sooner sites stop requiring IE, the better. In fact, Opera's business model doesn't really need for people to use their browser on Windows machines either.
It's not about desktop applications or even web browsers per se and not allowing a monopolist to corrupt those standards in order to advance their monopoly interests. It's about following true standards in a networked world. As long as WWW standards are followed, Opera's mobile business can succeed just as well as if they were bundled with Windows.
That's why arguments like 'why not force brand X file browser onto Windows as well' are red herrings. Using Windows explorer instead of XTree will have no effect on your ability to communicate with the outside world or vice versa.
A more interesting example would be desktop search. Using Microsoft's vs. Google's, searches for desktop stuff shouldn't really matter, except that both attempt to combine desktop and internet search results, and to use info gleaned from the desktop to improve their network search algorithms. At least part of Microsoft's motivation with desktop search is to harm Google and weaken them as a competitor in another area.
I'm sure the military got great value on their $600 toilet seats. An excretory experience second to none. But if you're asking me to foot the bill, your ass can sit on the $19.95 job.
While 'the best tool for the job' might actually provide a little extra productivity for a power user, forcing the entire population to use an expensive tool to write the occasional memo will counteract any such gains pretty quickly.
Ideally, they'd demand a fully-compliant ODF office suite and then have the choice to give high-volume users a slightly better tool if they need it. But locking everyone into MS proprietary file formats throws that option out the window.
And besides, Office should be the easiest major desktop component to replace (browser based stuff doesn't count).
It's functionality is well-defined, and OOo provides most, if not all, for most users. And it's probably the most expensive component for which you can say that. Yeah, it's not perfect. But at some point, you've got to make a cost/benefit analysis, including the ongoing costs of not switching and becoming even further entrenched. I hate it when people flatly argue OOo is infeasible because of missing feature X or Y - or 'pain point' Z. Yeah, but there are millions to be saved, and in at least some cases, that's more important.
Of course, when you drop Office, you're also dropping Outlook, so Exchange has got to go to. But that's even more of a commodity.
Switching to Linux is harder, because you have to figure out if any oddball Windows apps are being used. But switching to OOo gets you most of the cost savings, and at least gets you started on a path where the OS can ultimately be swapped out.
No, BSD isn't dead, but a BSD user can still feel right at home with a familiar POSIX environment on Linux, Unix and even OS/X.
Yes, standards matter - at least ones that are visible to users.
If Linux hadn't followed POSIX, it would have gotten exactly nowhere. That's why it's nuts that the various desktop environments went as far as they did down the 'roll your own' routes. As far as their UI libs are concerned, there's no getting around it. But even the KDE and GNOME core folks recognize that they need to be able to share common dialogs, etc. It's just that they recognized it too late to build it in from the start.
Interesting that there was an article here just the other day about how Sony has no interest in making or selling Linux laptops or netbooks.
I wonder why not. It's easy to forget that they use Linux in other products and even offer it on the PS3. So why not netbooks? Is it a matter of just avoiding the low-end, low margin segments of the market? It couldn't be any love for Microsoft, could it?
Just because third world countries can't afford to match our enviromental and labor regulatory regimes doesn't justify our corporations exporting jobs to them with no regulatory framework at all.
We could certainly spread many of the benefits of globalization without allowing our industries to export jobs to people desperate enough to do them effectively for nothing. Something like a global minimum wage might work, along with global minumum environmental standards. The kind of thing the UN or the WTO ought to be good for (and don't just take that as an invitation to bash the UN - we're talking in theory here).
There's no reason that this process has to be all or nothing, except for the fact that US corporations want it that way, and US politicians are willing to do their bidding. An effective middle ground approach might even foster some semblance of a middle class in those countries that could afford to buy some of what we would still manufacture (where the savings would no longer justify the export of the jobs).
Your Japan analogy isn't quite apt either. Japan developed its industry independently, with traditional tarrifs in place. It did not just provide a cheap, dirty place for foreign industry to move in all but name... and then to move from there to the next desperate place once it's all used up.
>...In fact, outside Apple, most digital music players will not play AAC. All will play MP3 however
which begs the question, why don't they all play AAC? They all seem to play MP3 and WMA. Is there a royalty involved in adding AAC support? Likewise, is there a royalty for WMA?
It seems that, now that iTunes is going non-DRM AAC, it'd make sense for all players to support AAC before they'd support WMA.
On a similar note, it was a pain finding the codecs to get non-DRM AAC to play on my Linux box too - at least it was a pain to figure out which non-free libraries I needed to use along with with xine (and then later gstreamer) as needed by the various Linux distros I've used. Again, most of the difficulty comes because the distros are afraid to provide these (or even point you to them) for fear of patent suits.
I assume these are just aspects of the larger software patent/royalty situation. So when are these problems going to start going away now that software seems to be getting a little less patentable?
>... his statement "the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability" suggests to me that he is working for a non-profit, not-for-profit, or similar organization.
Unfortunately, that quote could easily apply to a major share of American (if not worldwide) businesses. One legacy of the pyramid scheme that Wall Street has become is that many nice, profitable small businesses have been bought up by idiots whose only skills are to concoct a 'business plan' that makes sense to the bigger idiots that buy them.
Profit? Who needs it as long as the next great thing is always in development and just around the corner... and the company gets sold before the lies are uncovered.
Eventually you realize that you've been a bit of an idiot too - believing that rational arguments and good technology can win the day in what are essentially mergers and acquisitions firms, not software houses.
The company I work for has gone through this literally 6 times since I've been there. If it weren't for liking the day-to-day work, and the salary, I'd have been out of there years ago. But then, where would I have gone...
What remains to be seen is whether the current global economic collapse will topple these houses of cards too.
Reading this post, it's obvious that the 'choice is good' mantra is so simplistic as to be useless.
When it comes down to desktop environments, if you need to know all these details to choose best of breed apps from various desktops, you're essentially gonna end up picking one or the other desktop and living with its deficiencies. That's a choice of sorts, but hardly optimal.
That isn't to say that both KDE and GNOME are not better than they would otherwise have been without the other as competition to spur them along - though Windows and OS/X ought to provide competition enough for that...
But seriously. The advantages of competing development have been reaped, and we're left with the problems. Various incompatibilities and no logical target for any new app. KDE, GNOME and freedesktop need to work together toward a new goal. Define a set of shared services that all underlying toolkits can rely on for common dialogs, themes, etc. Ultimately produce a desktop on which there are no visible differences between a GTK app and a QT app. Or as close as you can get.
The ultimate question is whether there's something about FOSS that makes such cooperation impossible. Obviously, nobody can be forced to respect any kind of dictated standard - though it seems like within the desktops, devs do respect the standards. Yes somebody could always fork off yet another desktop, but ultimately if the GNOME and KDE muckety-mucks could agree to cooperate, they could more or less impose their decisions on the rest of us. And about now, that sounds okay - as long as it works like KDE ;)
As it is, we're ending up letting Ubuntu (a good, but not great distro) make our decisions for us. Even somebody like Jeremy Allison ends up pretty unenthusiastically 'endorsing' GNOME because he figures Ubuntu is the new 'standard target'. But he doesn't sound thrilled...
>Well, no, actually -- remember how Firefox used to leak memory? A lot of that was actually memory fragmentation. And RAM has exactly as much seek time as an SSD -- that is, none at all.
Memory fragmentation's a different issue. Individual memory allocations need to be contiguous, so if you're memory's fragmented into lots of small chunks, each large allocation will need to grab a new chunk.
Files don't need to be contiguous, so that can't happen. And, since SSD solves the seek time problem, fragmenting them isn't much of a performance hit either.
In fact, maybe apps like Firefox could use memory-mapped files for large allocations on an SSD-based system to eliminate the need for contiguous memory allocations in the first place.
The problem with Virtual PC on the G5 is that it needs to emulate the X86 application code plus the Windows OS.
Since most apps strike a pretty reasonable balance between application logic and library calls, most emulators only need to emulate a relatively small portion of the code. They can drop down into native implementations as soon as the app calls library code. That's why script languages are viable at all.
Where I work, we had a large set of applications written in assembler (don't ask) for an '80s vintage minicomputer that was discontinued. Rather then junk the whole thing, we wrote a machine emulator and reimplemented key libraries in C on unix. The result was faster than the original minis, since modern unix hardware was so much faster and the app/library mix was skewed toward the native libraries.
I think one of the problems with traditional desktop Java apps was that major libraries (like Swing?) were not available on all platforms as native code. Again, that leaves you essentially emulating the application plus the platform, which shouldn't be necessary. Don't know if that's still an issue with Java. Certainly Eclipse seems to perform pretty well (once it starts up)...
People always claim that FOSS (usually they just mean Linux, and in particular the KDE and GNOME desktops) just copies Microsoft and/or Apple, so "where's the innovation".
Well, this is where. FOSS made it possible for Asus and Dell to think about instant on computing. With Windows, you'd only have it if Microsoft came up with the idea. With Linux, anyone is free to come up with the idea. Even people not associated with Linux development per se.
That's what open source innovation is about. Providing the freedom to innovate. Yes Linux is still playing catchup (to a limited extent these days) in matching mainstream desktop functionality and in keeping up with all the closed de-facto 'standards' that keep appearing due to the fact that the marketplace is still a heavily distorted Monopoly dominated one.
So don't expect a new desktop paradigm (which most people probably don't even want). But expect a host of new devices (EeePC, Android, TiVo, etc) made possible by the true open source innovation - freedom to reuse.
The problem isn't that Mono prevents migration from Windows. To the extent that apps are built targeting .NET, Mono obviously helps migrate those apps.
But at the same time, if developers are targeting .NET under the illusion that they'll get easy portability, then there are probably better solutions. QT comes to mind, not to mention Java.
It seems like Mono will never provide complete portability. The article talks about percentages of the code that will work under Mono, the assumption being that the developer will need to make tweaks to get a Linux version. I'd bet there'd be cases where they'd have to do tweaks to get a Mac version too. At that point, what's the advantage to using an interpreted language over a nice C++ framework like QT?
Bottom line - If portability is the goal, Mono might just muddy the waters. Why not work to build something truly portable with whatever perceived advantages of .NET built in?
The main benefit of cloud computing is its thin client approach. Client side just needs a web browser. To the extent that a generic, standards-compliant web browser works, that means that the cloud computing model is also platform-neutral. From a development point of view, it makes great sense. You build something, and can deploy it in any configuration from servers on the Internet 'cloud' to internal corporate servers.
Why can't that be even further extended to support a single-user server running on a desktop PC? That essentially would give you the ultimate in deployment flexibility from a single code base.
Of course, you then have to factor in the fact that (current) web-based app functionality doesn't measure up to desktop apps. Also, deploying a 'cloud' on your desktop PC seems a little nasty - traditionally a web server and app isn't a nicely shrink-wrappable quantity. But maybe one day there will be an open source 'portable, zero-admin, web app environment' that could be easily used for such deployments.
Then again, maybe Google Gears or XUL-based apps like Songbird already provide much of this benefit. Real desktop apps built with web technologies so they can be repurposed as cloud apps where appropriate...
>People have been arguing about which text editor is better since before there was a Linux...
Perhaps, but nobody's suggesting that anybody build large commercial apps using vi or Emacs as an application framework. That said, people (including in this thread) are asking the likes of Oracle to support multiple Linux distros. At that point, havint the kind of silly 'vi vs. emacs' argument you mention as harmless is anything but.
Until something like the LSB really takes hold, Linux will be great for
1. open source stuff distros can include in their distro-specific repositories.
2. Non-gui stuff, where the libraries *are already* largely standardized.
3. Low-level gui stuff (coded at the X11 level) like Flash, which doesn't need lots of specific desktop libraries around.
4. Statically linked stuff, like Acrobat and OOo that can be released with no dependecies.
That's a lot of stuff. Enough to run a nice EEEpc. But not enough for the general Quicken-using public to use.
Hell, even Firefox has so many desktop toolkit dependencies that it needs to be integrated and released by the distros, whereas Opera can put out a statically-linked QT-level version that works for most distros. I'd like Firefox to be releasable that way too. I hate it that my otherwise fantastic Mandriva 2008-1 system can't be (easily) upgraded to Firefox 3. With a stable GTK+ implementation, standardized across distros, that would be a snap. But it doesn't look like we'll ever get there... or that we're even trying.
I agree that this is (or ought to be patentable), but isn't there prior art for "take something that traditionally was deployed in 2 dimentions and array it 3 dimensionally to gain a huge increasd in surface area".
Ultimately, how different is this from "take a process that used to be done on paper and deploy it on a computer network for enhanced efficiency"?
Somehow, the realization of the 'product' as a physical thing makes it fell alright to me. So what, other than the zero cost of replication makes software that different?
To me, it's mostly the motivation... i.e. to prevent interoperability. Software's all about standards, and patent-based monopolies just screw up the whole ecosystem. Is there something analogous in the world of physical inventions?
What made the Republican read like a Nazi convention is the fact that the crowds would cheer anything put out to them. If the tone sounded sufficiently 'American' they were on their feet cheering.
Whether it was hateful, sarcastic, dishonest stuff about the Democrats, Palin's pregnant daughter or McCain telling them that THEY had failed for 8 years. Didn't matter. As long as the inflection, followed by a cheering crowd, made for an impression of 'enthusiasm', they were cheering away.
Very little content. Much of it misleading or outright dishonest. But lots of cheering.
Scary
P.S. The Dems had a lot of showbiz unity too, but they are in fact unified in their policy proposals. And, of course, they haven't gone all Orwellian with language in any way comparable to the 'up is down' Republicans.
I don't care how good Silverlight is, if there's a multiplatform alternative that's reasonable, you should use it.
Microsoft may or may not create good software in some instances. The problem is that only Microsoft has the nerve (and the Monopoly clout) to produce a new Internet streaming protocol and not make it available on all the major platforms. And Linux is one of the majors these days - with all the linux cellphones, netbooks, etc. Hell, desktop Linux use may be getting close to Macintosh levels.
If Microsoft wants to make their websites proprietary, let them. If they want to compete with Flash, do it - but be aware that doing it requires that they do it on at least all the platforms Flash supports.
That said, nobody intending to reach a large audience should use protocols that are not as universally available as possible. It defeats the purpose. Microsoft can get away with limited platform support only because NBC, the DNC, etc are willing to use their stuff without Linux support.
That said, the DNC probably farmed this out and has no idea of the issues involved.
Actually, the software barrier to entry has proven much harder to overcome than the hardware one.
AMD went from obscurity to near dominance in some segments and part way back in a comparitively short time. It seems the X86 platform is just simpler to clone than the Windows/Office/IE-specific web platform.
Linux and OOo have made amazing strides, but are still not 'plug in replacements' in the way that AMD is for Intel.
What'dya wanna bet that this is really just a new, better platform for deploying apps to a thin client a la Citrix?
Replace the fat, buggy Windows desktop with a new, proprietary thin client and host those traditional Windows apps on a server (not necessarily owned by Microsoft) with per-seat pricing.
Solves a lot of the deployment (and maybe, security) problems with the current MS architecture. And Microsoft still gets the lock-in and per-seat licensing.
Sure, you can kind of do this today, but Citrix doesn't really scale that well. So, if they can build a new platform designed to work this way, could they really make a go of it? Plus, doesn't Citrix get a cut now? Isn't it about time for Microsoft to stab their 'partner' in the back?