>There are too many libraries that WINE simply doesn't support without linking against MS' DLLs...
True enough, but remember this article was directed at people trying to port their own code from Win32 to Linux. WINE should at least provide a good starting point. They don't *have* to use MS's DLL's.
But the real reason IBM doesn't deal with porting GUI-based code is that they're not interested in desktop Linux. They're talking about porting command-line based code only.
And the previous poster's point about buying a cheap X86 box rather than run a POWER-based Linux desktop misses the real value of a POWER WINE port. The ability to port WIN32 code to MacOS. I've had to resort to running my WIN32 code on Linux under WINE and accessing it via X-windows from OS/X - which, believe it or not, works fairly well. Then again, I've avoided using MFC or any MS DLL's.
Y'know what. Video games haven't been interesting since Q-bert. Pretty, yes. Technologically impressive, you bet.
Watching the Grammy's last night, I could see the appeal of Usher, Kanye West, Black Eyed Peas, etc. But the appeal felt essentially the same for all three. It's not the music. It's the energy, the hype, the dancing. Musically, it all makes a bland outfit like Los Lonely Boys seem super-creative.
Somehow the experience of hip-hop, video games and recent action films all feel the same. Lots of WOW factor, and nothing else to keep your interest. Honestly, I don't see how anybody feels the need to own more than one item from each category.
So at 52, I have to question whether it's my age or just the cheap commercial culture. My favorite album of '04 was SMiLE, admittedly at least partially as a nostalgia-fest. But you've got to admit that there's at least an attempt at an emotional connection with the music that went into its production. Are today's audiences really satisfied with Las Vegas-style extravaganzas?
Well, maybe you moved to Firefox simply because it was better, but I can point to a bunch of people for whom I've set up Firefox, shown it to them, had them say thay liked it, and still see them using IE.
Why? Well, when I ask them, they give all kinds of ridiculous explanations that boil down to "The Internet icon brings up IE". They're simply not comfortable with change.
Occasionally one of them will point out that some web sites don't work under Firefox, but those are the sophisticates in the group - and they at least prefer Firefox when it works for them.
If Solaris is based on SCO's System 5 code, then wouldn't opening it's source (whether Sun has the right or not) potentially pollute other open source projects that borrowed from it?
If Solaris is based on BSD and has no SCO code in it, I guess that's not an issue. But then why did they take out a SCO license? I imagine some conspiracy theorists will say simply to hurt Linux, but that can't be the whole story, can it?
IBM had a SCO license too, but that's because AIX has SysV code in it. That's not the code they gave to Linux, but if they were to open-source all of AIX and pieces of SCO code migrated to Linux, that would be a problem, no?. So why not with Solaris too?
Does anybody have any insights into why Apple wouldn't allow the iPod to support.ogg?
Seems like they support.mp3 because it had the mindshare upfront and also because it produces bigger files than Apple's proprietary format, and as such is a worse solution.
Ogg is probably much more comparable to.AAC. Is that the problem? Are they afraid that users would prefer.ogg to AAC? If so, why is that a problem? Just because they don't control it?
Surely the success of the iPod isn't due to Apple's control over the file formats. If anything, it's been in spite of that. I'd think Apple would have more to gain from anything that discourages WMA from becoming another de-facto Microsoft-controlled standard.
Would a world with multi-vendor ogg-supporting iPod-like devices be a worse competitive environment for Apple than a world where everyone *except* Apple supports the other 'standard' (i.e. WMA)?
Not only is this a really great idea, it's only possible because of the 'stability' of the Win32 API.
Yep, you don't have to boot an OS to run this thing because that ubiquitous OS we all hate has actually gotten one thing right. They built an API some 10 years ago and made sure it works on (almost) all iterations of their OS since.
I imagine I'm asking for flames here, but somewhere amidst the 'choice is always good' arguments, we tend to lose the 'consistency is good' flip side. Maybe that's the product of the OSS development model, but it is getting to be a real stumbling block.
I remember reading recently that the City of Philadelphia was planning on building a citywide, free WI-FI network.
Could the purpose of this be specifically to kill that off?
Only need IE to get past 'unknown browser' screens
on
Redmondmag on Dumping IE
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The only time I ever use IE is when a site won't let you past a 'best viewed with IE' screen.
Once you go in with IE, you can find the real target URL, and 9 times out of 10 it works fine in Firefox. If I care about the site, I just bookmark the inside page.
I suppose there are tricks I could do to set Fox to pretend to be IE, but I'm too lazy for that. If I were on Linux fulltime, I suppose I'd have to, but I just periodically import my Firefox bookmarks from Windows into the Linux version.
...they killed Netscape, but the goal was to prevent applications from moving from Windows to the Web.
Well, sort of. Actually IE-specific Web applications are just fine as far as Microsoft is concerned. Especially ones that use.Net features that are unlikely to be replicated in portable browsers.
Microsoft doesn't care which Windows-only technology people use as long as it's Windows-only.
And by the way, it is possible to build new technologies that are as thin as the Web model, but that provide a much 'richer' experience. HTML wasn't designed for that purpose, but that doesn't mean other thin-client technologies can't be. I've built one myself - it wasn't that hard. Let's hope we get there before Microsoft does.
Back in the days when Mozilla wasn't a great performer, lots of/.'ers would say stuff like, "if IE's a free download, why should I use this crappy Mozilla stuff". Well, now you know why.
It was only a matter of time before MS decided to tie browser upgrades to OS upgrades. After all, for a large portion of users, the browser's the only app they use. With their ill-gotten browser semi-monopoly, why wouldn't MS force you to buy an OS upgrade to get a new browser. DOJ? Not this DOJ.
Sounds like as good a reason as any to separate the browser from the OS. After all, this side-effect of bundling can't possibly be regarded as beneficial to consumers, and consumer benefit was the only defense they could come up with for exempting their bundling from antitrust regulations.
So maybe this is just a sysadmin feature to prevent copying data to removable devices. I can see where some admins would want that. And if that feature doesn't work under Linux, then I can see them disallowing Linux on their networks.
If it's based on some 'patented' command set, then it's unimplementable in Linux. The drive may work, but you can't turn on it read-only mode. Or some such thing.
If MS succeeds in getting all the USB manufacturers to build in some new feature that only Windows users can access, Cringley's point is still valid. Your hardware may work under Linux, but not all of its features.
Bush may have 'won' Florida, but my beef is this. By any standard, he only won because of the butterfly ballot screw-up. And even then, lost the popular vote and only won by the slimmest Electoral College margin.
Probably the exit polls the networks relied on more accurately reflected the voters' intentions than the actual count did. But them's the rules.
All fair enough.
But the guy ran as a moderate 'uniter, not a divider'. Now you'd think a moderate uniter, especially one that got in through a fluke, might try to actually govern from the middle. Well, we know that didn't happen. GWB's been all talk, spin and constantly recallibrated salesmanship. All covering for actions that have been about as partisan as possible. So some people are mad. Go figure
Rather than be able to run an emulated X86 app on a Mac, wouldn't it be better to make it easy to build a native mac app using winelib?
A few tweaks here and there for byte ordering stuff, and presto, a native Mac app. Plus you could have conditional logic to be even more mac-like. No drive letters, etc.
wxWidgets is a really nice toolkit. The problem is that it isn't truely cross platform where it counts.
Like it or not, the 2nd platform most business app developers want to target is the Macintosh. I tried porting a Win32 app to wxWidgets a while back, and it looked like I could get it to work on Windows (and probably Linux), but the Mac port was just not there. Widgets didn't draw, size or behave right, and I had problems getting sockets to work right.
It appears like there's a push on currently to get the mac support up to par (at least their website is soliciting contributions). It's a shame that Apple wouldn't fund this themselves, but I guess they're still pushing native Mac toolkits (though why, at this point in the game, I can't imagine).
Actually, the perfect Michael Moore bit on Microsoft would have been to go around to the various PC makers and try to buy a PC without any Microsoft software.
Then when told he can't, ask how much he's paying for it.
Then when told he can't be told, ask to have a second OS installed alongside.
Then when told he can't, buy it and try to return the unused MS software.
All on camera. He gets to play innocent and point out the truely sleazy aspects of the situation - while informing the public that, yes, there really is a problem. Of course this should have been done circa 1998. Would've made a great episode of his 'The Awful Truth' TV series.
My Samsung DVD/VCR combo has single fast-forward and rewind buttons that skip to the next/previous chapter if pressed shortly and do normal 2x,4x,etc if you keep them held down.
I hate this behavior, but I guess it still qualifies as prior art.
Yes, it's nice to rely on 'standard' client software being installed on all desktops.
But who cares what that standard is? If Microsoft hadn't bullied Netscape off of the desktop, they would have been the standard everybody coded to, and the situation would be essentially the same. You might not like the Netscape standard, but NS didn't start getting nastily proprietary until Microsoft started a 'features war' with them.
Same applies to Real. If Real were the standard, and all PC manufacturers included it (and were not *prevented* from including it during the years of illegal MS tricks), developers would have had the standard they needed. Once again, Real didn't start playing nasty until their means of making a living was illegally pulled out from under them.
I suppose you can use todays distorted marketplace to make a case for the status quo, but that doesn't address the laws that were broken to get us here. And we still have Apple and Linux users excluded by Windows Media developers. A truly cross-platform standard is always going to be better for developers and consumers both than a 90+% 'standard' that locks out the healthy competition that is the goal of all antitrust enforcement.
Do you really believe that the cost of programmers has anything to do with how expensive software is?
Hardware probably costs just as much to develop. How many highly-paid engineers do you think it takes to design, prototype and bring to production a new generation of chips? How about video processors.
And of course, hardware costs much more to mass-produce.
The myth that software is so labor intesnive to devalop is just that. Yes, it costs a lot to produce. No, it doesn't cost appreciably more to produce than many other products.
A Hollywood blockbuster can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, but still gets 'sold' quite profitably at a very reasonable price.
PC hardware remains cheap because it is a large, competitive market. Microsoft software remains expensive (compared to cost of mass-production) because because it's not in a competitive market. When competition emerges, you get IE for 'free'...
>If Windows was 30% of the market share, MS could add a media player and increase value, sure.
If Windows was 30% of the market, they would jump at the chance to bundle in the low-cost or free media players, browsers, etc that were already available and successful on the other (presumably non-monopoly, non-MS-like) platforms. They couldn't afford to develop (and nobody would want) incompatible, MS-only 'equivalents'. This would be a healthy situation, and would encourage cross-platform standards that would in turn reinforce a healthy competitive marketplace.
What Microsoft does, however, is spend huge sums of money just to provide comparable, but incompatible, functionality to what already exists. It then bundles that functionality into a monopoly desktop platform with the deliberate intention to kill off the cross-platform competition, maintain the monopoly, and where possible, extend it to other arenas.
That's the problem. It has nothing to do with their being 'too successful' and everything to do with their abusing their success.
> The scenario you've described is not that likely to happen, for a simple reason and that is: India won't be cheap forever! The Indian programmers will eventually start demanding better healthcare, education for the kids etc.
Yes, but India may well be cheap for a very long time. And then there's China. The point is that the potential pool of underemployed labor in the 3rd world is huge,. This pain's going to go on for quite some time before any equilibrium is reached.
>The problem you're facing is to decide between being selfish and saying "all high paid jobs belong to us".
Who said those jobs are "high paid"? Maybe they were reasonably high paid in the US, but these jobs are going to India specifically because they are not high paid there. Just because they're better for Indians than the alternatives doesn't make them high paid. And if Indian pay gets too high, that's when the jobs go to China.
It would seem reasonable to at least attempt to establish a minimum global standard of living to mitigate the race to the bottom. Otherwise, outsourcing becomes slave labor by another name (no health benefits, no job security, no wage leverage). How much difference does it make that the slaves' choices are so limited that they are willing slaves.
Whatever's in MDK10.0 beta 2. I assume it's the latest.
And yes, the tab widget redraws are much better now. There just remains the awkward fact that the tabs redraw a few seconds after they appear because Konq seems to resize them to reflect the text displayed on them once that text becomes available...
Well, I'm glad to see that I'm a troll. What exactly do you have to say before people understand that you
1. Like KDE. 2. Use KDE. 3. Think GNOME looks like a lame Mac0S/7 clone. 4. Think kuickshow is as close to picture-album browsing nirvana as you can get (though I'd like a simple 'crop' tool built in).
And...
5. Still think the QT widgets tend to redraw a lot.
No, I'm not trolling. Yes, I have a (somewhat) slow, old processor, but enough memory that my KDE desktop works reasonably well.
And, damn it, Konqueror redraws the file directory window 50000 times while it's building thumbnails even after all the visible thumbnails are there, while (believe it or not) Nautilus doesn't seem to do this.
And yes, the Konqueror toolbars and tabs on my MDK10.0 beta don't redraw as many times as they used to under KDE3.1, but they still do redraw enough to be jarring.
Would that alone make me switch from KDE to GNOME? Not on your life. Does it make me wish KDE/QT were better? Yep.
The tabs in the new Konqueror are indeed much better than before, but still not as nice as the tabs in Mozilla.
As with many KDE widgets (toolbars, the file list browser in konqueror), the tabs seem to flash a lot before settling down. Maybe it's my slow PII-233 processor, though it seems like KDE3.2 finally got the app load time down to a reasonable level even on this box, so I think the processor's not the problem.
I think the problem with the Konqui tabs is that they are sized based on their label data, but the label data isn't available until the page actually gets loaded. They then do a sort of cute animation to expand or shrink the tab as necessary, but in the meantime the thing gets painted umpteen times.
Mozilla just seems to use equal-sized tabs, all shrunken as needed to get them all to fit. In a sense this is less elegant, but it works beautifully. No flashing, plus you get a nice animated 'downloading' indicator on each incomplete tab.
I've always been a KDE fan, but I took a look at a recent GNOME release (2.6? MDK10.0 beta), and GNOME seems to have no redraw issues. I don't particularly like the way GNOME looks, but it still seems more 'solid' on my slow processor due to this level of attention to detail.
Probably, widget redraw problems are in TrollTech's court. But with kde3.2 (and the beautiful Plastik theme) solving most of kde's aesthetic issues, it'd be nice if somebody put the screws to TT about widget redraws. (don't lots of kde programmers work for TT?).
Just how much money does Microsoft have to lose on every unit, and for how many years, before they run afoul of anti-dumping laws?
Seriously, is it legal for a monopoly to spend their monopoly profits to buy their way into a related market that they're unable to win fairly? Cheap introductory pricing is one thing, but a business model based on losing money indefinitely on the off chance that Sony might someday come up with something that renders *some* PC's unnecessary?
Is it only dumping when a foreign company does it?
If this comes with a good X server for Windows, it might make it easy to set up a Linux Terminal Server in a Windows desktop shop. That might be a good way for people to get their feet wet.
Or does this thing only work on Win2k or XP Server editions?
Slashdot Mirror
>There are too many libraries that WINE simply doesn't support without linking against MS' DLLs...
True enough, but remember this article was directed at people trying to port their own code from Win32 to Linux. WINE should at least provide a good starting point. They don't *have* to use MS's DLL's.
But the real reason IBM doesn't deal with porting GUI-based code is that they're not interested in desktop Linux. They're talking about porting command-line based code only.
And the previous poster's point about buying a cheap X86 box rather than run a POWER-based Linux desktop misses the real value of a POWER WINE port. The ability to port WIN32 code to MacOS. I've had to resort to running my WIN32 code on Linux under WINE and accessing it via X-windows from OS/X - which, believe it or not, works fairly well. Then again, I've avoided using MFC or any MS DLL's.
Y'know what. Video games haven't been interesting since Q-bert. Pretty, yes. Technologically impressive, you bet.
Watching the Grammy's last night, I could see the appeal of Usher, Kanye West, Black Eyed Peas, etc. But the appeal felt essentially the same for all three. It's not the music. It's the energy, the hype, the dancing. Musically, it all makes a bland outfit like Los Lonely Boys seem super-creative.
Somehow the experience of hip-hop, video games and recent action films all feel the same. Lots of WOW factor, and nothing else to keep your interest. Honestly, I don't see how anybody feels the need to own more than one item from each category.
So at 52, I have to question whether it's my age or just the cheap commercial culture. My favorite album of '04 was SMiLE, admittedly at least partially as a nostalgia-fest. But you've got to admit that there's at least an attempt at an emotional connection with the music that went into its production. Are today's audiences really satisfied with Las Vegas-style extravaganzas?
Well, maybe you moved to Firefox simply because it was better, but I can point to a bunch of people for whom I've set up Firefox, shown it to them, had them say thay liked it, and still see them using IE.
Why? Well, when I ask them, they give all kinds of ridiculous explanations that boil down to "The Internet icon brings up IE". They're simply not comfortable with change.
Occasionally one of them will point out that some web sites don't work under Firefox, but those are the sophisticates in the group - and they at least prefer Firefox when it works for them.
If Solaris is based on SCO's System 5 code, then wouldn't opening it's source (whether Sun has the right or not) potentially pollute other open source projects that borrowed from it?
If Solaris is based on BSD and has no SCO code in it, I guess that's not an issue. But then why did they take out a SCO license? I imagine some conspiracy theorists will say simply to hurt Linux, but that can't be the whole story, can it?
IBM had a SCO license too, but that's because AIX has SysV code in it. That's not the code they gave to Linux, but if they were to open-source all of AIX and pieces of SCO code migrated to Linux, that would be a problem, no?. So why not with Solaris too?
Does anybody have any insights into why Apple wouldn't allow the iPod to support .ogg?
.mp3 because it had the mindshare upfront and also because it produces bigger files than Apple's proprietary format, and as such is a worse solution.
.AAC. Is that the problem? Are they afraid that users would prefer .ogg to AAC? If so, why is that a problem? Just because they don't control it?
Seems like they support
Ogg is probably much more comparable to
Surely the success of the iPod isn't due to Apple's control over the file formats. If anything, it's been in spite of that. I'd think Apple would have more to gain from anything that discourages WMA from becoming another de-facto Microsoft-controlled standard.
Would a world with multi-vendor ogg-supporting iPod-like devices be a worse competitive environment for Apple than a world where everyone *except* Apple supports the other 'standard' (i.e. WMA)?
Not only is this a really great idea, it's only possible because of the 'stability' of the Win32 API.
Yep, you don't have to boot an OS to run this thing because that ubiquitous OS we all hate has actually gotten one thing right. They built an API some 10 years ago and made sure it works on (almost) all iterations of their OS since.
I imagine I'm asking for flames here, but somewhere amidst the 'choice is always good' arguments, we tend to lose the 'consistency is good' flip side. Maybe that's the product of the OSS development model, but it is getting to be a real stumbling block.
I remember reading recently that the City of Philadelphia was planning on building a citywide, free WI-FI network.
Could the purpose of this be specifically to kill that off?
The only time I ever use IE is when a site won't let you past a 'best viewed with IE' screen.
Once you go in with IE, you can find the real target URL, and 9 times out of 10 it works fine in Firefox. If I care about the site, I just bookmark the inside page.
I suppose there are tricks I could do to set Fox to pretend to be IE, but I'm too lazy for that. If I were on Linux fulltime, I suppose I'd have to, but I just periodically import my Firefox bookmarks from Windows into the Linux version.
...they killed Netscape, but the goal was to prevent applications from moving from Windows to the Web.
.Net features that are unlikely to be replicated in portable browsers.
Well, sort of. Actually IE-specific Web applications are just fine as far as Microsoft is concerned. Especially ones that use
Microsoft doesn't care which Windows-only technology people use as long as it's Windows-only.
And by the way, it is possible to build new technologies that are as thin as the Web model, but that provide a much 'richer' experience. HTML wasn't designed for that purpose, but that doesn't mean other thin-client technologies can't be. I've built one myself - it wasn't that hard. Let's hope we get there before Microsoft does.
Back in the days when Mozilla wasn't a great performer, lots of /.'ers would say stuff like, "if IE's a free download, why should I use this crappy Mozilla stuff". Well, now you know why.
It was only a matter of time before MS decided to tie browser upgrades to OS upgrades. After all, for a large portion of users, the browser's the only app they use. With their ill-gotten browser semi-monopoly, why wouldn't MS force you to buy an OS upgrade to get a new browser. DOJ? Not this DOJ.
Sounds like as good a reason as any to separate the browser from the OS. After all, this side-effect of bundling can't possibly be regarded as beneficial to consumers, and consumer benefit was the only defense they could come up with for exempting their bundling from antitrust regulations.
So maybe this is just a sysadmin feature to prevent copying data to removable devices. I can see where some admins would want that. And if that feature doesn't work under Linux, then I can see them disallowing Linux on their networks.
If it's based on some 'patented' command set, then it's unimplementable in Linux. The drive may work, but you can't turn on it read-only mode. Or some such thing.
If MS succeeds in getting all the USB manufacturers to build in some new feature that only Windows users can access, Cringley's point is still valid. Your hardware may work under Linux, but not all of its features.
Bush may have 'won' Florida, but my beef is this. By any standard, he only won because of the butterfly ballot screw-up. And even then, lost the popular vote and only won by the slimmest Electoral College margin.
Probably the exit polls the networks relied on more accurately reflected the voters' intentions than the actual count did. But them's the rules.
All fair enough.
But the guy ran as a moderate 'uniter, not a divider'. Now you'd think a moderate uniter, especially one that got in through a fluke, might try to actually govern from the middle. Well, we know that didn't happen. GWB's been all talk, spin and constantly recallibrated salesmanship. All covering for actions that have been about as partisan as possible. So some people are mad. Go figure
Rather than be able to run an emulated X86 app on a Mac, wouldn't it be better to make it easy to build a native mac app using winelib?
A few tweaks here and there for byte ordering stuff, and presto, a native Mac app. Plus you could have conditional logic to be even more mac-like. No drive letters, etc.
Any good reason not to take this approach?
wxWidgets is a really nice toolkit. The problem is that it isn't truely cross platform where it counts.
Like it or not, the 2nd platform most business app developers want to target is the Macintosh. I tried porting a Win32 app to wxWidgets a while back, and it looked like I could get it to work on Windows (and probably Linux), but the Mac port was just not there. Widgets didn't draw, size or behave right, and I had problems getting sockets to work right.
It appears like there's a push on currently to get the mac support up to par (at least their website is soliciting contributions). It's a shame that Apple wouldn't fund this themselves, but I guess they're still pushing native Mac toolkits (though why, at this point in the game, I can't imagine).
Actually, the perfect Michael Moore bit on Microsoft would have been to go around to the various PC makers and try to buy a PC without any Microsoft software.
Then when told he can't, ask how much he's paying for it.
Then when told he can't be told, ask to have a second OS installed alongside.
Then when told he can't, buy it and try to return the unused MS software.
All on camera. He gets to play innocent and point out the truely sleazy aspects of the situation - while informing the public that, yes, there really is a problem. Of course this should have been done circa 1998. Would've made a great episode of his 'The Awful Truth' TV series.
My Samsung DVD/VCR combo has single fast-forward and rewind buttons that skip to the next/previous chapter if pressed shortly and do normal 2x,4x,etc if you keep them held down.
I hate this behavior, but I guess it still qualifies as prior art.
Yes, it's nice to rely on 'standard' client software being installed on all desktops.
But who cares what that standard is? If Microsoft hadn't bullied Netscape off of the desktop, they would have been the standard everybody coded to, and the situation would be essentially the same. You might not like the Netscape standard, but NS didn't start getting nastily proprietary until Microsoft started a 'features war' with them.
Same applies to Real. If Real were the standard, and all PC manufacturers included it (and were not *prevented* from including it during the years of illegal MS tricks), developers would have had the standard they needed. Once again, Real didn't start playing nasty until their means of making a living was illegally pulled out from under them.
I suppose you can use todays distorted marketplace to make a case for the status quo, but that doesn't address the laws that were broken to get us here. And we still have Apple and Linux users excluded by Windows Media developers. A truly cross-platform standard is always going to be better for developers and consumers both than a 90+% 'standard' that locks out the healthy competition that is the goal of all antitrust enforcement.
Do you really believe that the cost of programmers has anything to do with how expensive software is?
Hardware probably costs just as much to develop. How many highly-paid engineers do you think it takes to design, prototype and bring to production a new generation of chips? How about video processors.
And of course, hardware costs much more to mass-produce.
The myth that software is so labor intesnive to devalop is just that. Yes, it costs a lot to produce. No, it doesn't cost appreciably more to produce than many other products.
A Hollywood blockbuster can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, but still gets 'sold' quite profitably at a very reasonable price.
PC hardware remains cheap because it is a large, competitive market. Microsoft software remains expensive (compared to cost of mass-production) because because it's not in a competitive market. When competition emerges, you get IE for 'free'...
>If Windows was 30% of the market share, MS could add a media player and increase value, sure.
If Windows was 30% of the market, they would jump at the chance to bundle in the low-cost or free media players, browsers, etc that were already available and successful on the other (presumably non-monopoly, non-MS-like) platforms. They couldn't afford to develop (and nobody would want) incompatible, MS-only 'equivalents'. This would be a healthy situation, and would encourage cross-platform standards that would in turn reinforce a healthy competitive marketplace.
What Microsoft does, however, is spend huge sums of money just to provide comparable, but incompatible, functionality to what already exists. It then bundles that functionality into a monopoly desktop platform with the deliberate intention to kill off the cross-platform competition, maintain the monopoly, and where possible, extend it to other arenas.
That's the problem. It has nothing to do with their being 'too successful' and everything to do with their abusing their success.
> The scenario you've described is not that likely to happen, for a simple reason and that is: India won't be cheap forever! The Indian programmers will eventually start demanding better healthcare, education for the kids etc.
Yes, but India may well be cheap for a very long time. And then there's China. The point is that the potential pool of underemployed labor in the 3rd world is huge,. This pain's going to go on for quite some time before any equilibrium is reached.
>The problem you're facing is to decide between being selfish and saying "all high paid jobs belong to us".
Who said those jobs are "high paid"? Maybe they were reasonably high paid in the US, but these jobs are going to India specifically because they are not high paid there. Just because they're better for Indians than the alternatives doesn't make them high paid. And if Indian pay gets too high, that's when the jobs go to China.
It would seem reasonable to at least attempt to establish a minimum global standard of living to mitigate the race to the bottom. Otherwise, outsourcing becomes slave labor by another name (no health benefits, no job security, no wage leverage). How much difference does it make that the slaves' choices are so limited that they are willing slaves.
Whatever's in MDK10.0 beta 2. I assume it's the latest.
And yes, the tab widget redraws are much better now. There just remains the awkward fact that the tabs redraw a few seconds after they appear because Konq seems to resize them to reflect the text displayed on them once that text becomes available...
Well, I'm glad to see that I'm a troll. What exactly do you have to say before people understand that you
1. Like KDE.
2. Use KDE.
3. Think GNOME looks like a lame Mac0S/7 clone.
4. Think kuickshow is as close to picture-album browsing nirvana as you can get (though I'd like a simple 'crop' tool built in).
And...
5. Still think the QT widgets tend to redraw a lot.
No, I'm not trolling. Yes, I have a (somewhat) slow, old processor, but enough memory that my KDE desktop works reasonably well.
And, damn it, Konqueror redraws the file directory window 50000 times while it's building thumbnails even after all the visible thumbnails are there, while (believe it or not) Nautilus doesn't seem to do this.
And yes, the Konqueror toolbars and tabs on my MDK10.0 beta don't redraw as many times as they used to under KDE3.1, but they still do redraw enough to be jarring.
Would that alone make me switch from KDE to GNOME? Not on your life. Does it make me wish KDE/QT were better? Yep.
The tabs in the new Konqueror are indeed much better than before, but still not as nice as the tabs in Mozilla.
As with many KDE widgets (toolbars, the file list browser in konqueror), the tabs seem to flash a lot before settling down. Maybe it's my slow PII-233 processor, though it seems like KDE3.2 finally got the app load time down to a reasonable level even on this box, so I think the processor's not the problem.
I think the problem with the Konqui tabs is that they are sized based on their label data, but the label data isn't available until the page actually gets loaded. They then do a sort of cute animation to expand or shrink the tab as necessary, but in the meantime the thing gets painted umpteen times.
Mozilla just seems to use equal-sized tabs, all shrunken as needed to get them all to fit. In a sense this is less elegant, but it works beautifully. No flashing, plus you get a nice animated 'downloading' indicator on each incomplete tab.
I've always been a KDE fan, but I took a look at a recent GNOME release (2.6? MDK10.0 beta), and GNOME seems to have no redraw issues. I don't particularly like the way GNOME looks, but it still seems more 'solid' on my slow processor due to this level of attention to detail.
Probably, widget redraw problems are in TrollTech's court. But with kde3.2 (and the beautiful Plastik theme) solving most of kde's aesthetic issues, it'd be nice if somebody put the screws to TT about widget redraws. (don't lots of kde programmers work for TT?).
Just how much money does Microsoft have to lose on every unit, and for how many years, before they run afoul of anti-dumping laws?
Seriously, is it legal for a monopoly to spend their monopoly profits to buy their way into a related market that they're unable to win fairly? Cheap introductory pricing is one thing, but a business model based on losing money indefinitely on the off chance that Sony might someday come up with something that renders *some* PC's unnecessary?
Is it only dumping when a foreign company does it?
If this comes with a good X server for Windows, it might make it easy to set up a Linux Terminal Server in a Windows desktop shop. That might be a good way for people to get their feet wet.
Or does this thing only work on Win2k or XP Server editions?