We are not about users, we are about sharing. You can modify it if you don't like it, it works for me.
You very clearly sum up why Linux does not take more than marginal market shares from Windows. Windows and Mac OS X are about users. They're both crap too, but they're crap in a way that users understand.
The fact that I can modify it does not enter in to the equation. My mother can't, so she will continue using Windows.
But I'm getting used to this by now. Every time anybody mentions the fact that FLOSS has serious usability issues, about ten people answer "so modify it if you don't like it", and the same people can't for their world understand why people keep using Windows when FLOSS is "so much better".
And why on earth you take my comment personally I truly cannot understand. I did not mention you, I do not know what software you have written, nor do I care. The comment was about FLOSS, not about you.
What would you put into your ultimate virtual office solution?
One word: Usability.
Open Source is wonderful for what it is, its principles are beautiful, its spirit is clean, and it is absolutely no good to end users as it stands today.
Applications do not look the same, nor do they work the same. KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice. They want something that works, and where every application looks the same and works the same. They also do not care about recompiling their kernel every time they buy some hardware, or recompiling software to alter some setting only available compile-time.
Whatever functionality (which is normally Open Source developers' focus) the office solution gives, it is absolutely worthless if it takes a Ph.D. in Rocket Science (or two hours of trial-and-failure) to understand how to reach the wanted end results.
So usability would be my primer choice for end result.
I dare not count how many Open Source projects actually start out creating a logo, a hompeage, and an implementation of themes, a particularly pointless feature. Somehow that says everything. For most of them, anyways.
Sun has gone to great lengths to make sure that a compromized zone does not imply compromize of other zones.
In fact, one of Suns examples is a Zone for each service, where the technician that explained to me explicitly said that if one of the Zones run a sendmail which is rooted, the others are unaffected because there are separate "root" accounts for each zone (and we're not just talking separare passwords but actual separate root:s).
They protect stuff like/dev/kmem, you can't access raw devices, and so on within Zones. The machine still has a "core", outside of any Zones, which is a regular Solaris environment, but from within a Zone it's apparently very, very difficult to break out. Sun calls it "impossible" which means you'll most likely need to find a bug within the Zone implementation itself to break free.
Sun's also done similar things within Trusted Solaris before, so it's not something they just came up with.
> The trick to getting dvdrecord to work is to know that it only supports "-dao" on most drives."
Why doesn't the software help file clearly state that?
I so agree with you, but I'd go even further: Why does the software not set this flag automatically if it's the only one that works?
The luxury of ignorance. If only one flag works, and/or is required for correct operation, then I should not need to know about it at all.
Unfortunately, writing such software is difficult and, most importantly, boring. It's not C00L to have written software which is trivial to use, and the FLOSS community is unfortunately still driven by the wish to become famous for having written something C00L.
So what we should ask ourselves is: how do we make it 1337 to write software that grandma could use?
Is there no end to the Microsoft-bashing in this forum?
If Microsoft had done this using a home-made format, then everybody would be screaming death to them for inventing their own standard "just like they did with Word documents".
And when they do use a public format like XML? Then we all scream death to them because XML is so bloated etc. etc.
It's time to grow up.
PS. I will NOT make the mandatory "I really don't like them, but in this case..." argument, which seems to be the only standardized way of saying anything positive at all about Microsoft here.
That's cute. How many customers knows what DRM even means? Although trying our best to avoid seeing it, the world is actually made up of non-geeks. We're the exception to the norm, not them. They are "most customers", not us.
If people actually knew exactly what DRM meant, and if they actually had a choice, then surely they'd choose files without DRM. But MP3 or WMA? They don't give a damn. They just want to listen to the music. 95% of them use Windows, 95% of them can listen to either.
It's just like most people actually do not care exactly what kind of a motor is in the car they're driving - they just want it to look nice on the outside, accelerate fast and sound cool (and, if they're Volvo-owners, to be safe to drive in). And that's just the way it must be.
After all, if people were informed enough, more people would use Mac (because unlike Windows, Mac OS X is actually pretty easy to use, and doesn't break down on you). People don't know. They just expect computers to require rebooting, reinstalling drivers and calling tech-support, because "that's how computers are". In the same way they just expect not to be able to do just about anything with files bought online, apart from somewhere close to the things that Apple lets them do.
That's what I thought as well, for many many years.
Then I realized how much tedious work it is switching distros each time the cool new gadget you bought wasn't supported by your current distro choice. How each distro does things in a slightly but not quite different manner. How much time I spent re-learning things I should only have had to learn once. How much time people all around the world have spent re-inventing something someone else has already done, just becuase they didn't like the color.
And I started thinking: you know, wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to choose because everyting worked from the start? If people worked on many different problems, thus increasing the completeness of Linux, instead of all doing the same things but in very slightly different manners?
For the home computer geek, whose life is not complete if he hasn't been forced to reinstall his operating system in the last month, Linux is the perfect choice.
For the Enterprise desktop, Linux sucks, for the very same reasons that it rocks for geeks - you do not want to switch distros just because the camera you just bought wasn't supported by the distro you run now. And you definitely do not want to reeducate ordinary (l)users either.
Consistency and completeness are far more valuable than having thirty almost identical solutions, of which none is complete, to choose from.
I suggest buying a replacement capacitor or two - it sounds likely that one or more capacitors in your beloved calculator has dried out. Happens all the time in old electronics that hasn't been used for a long period of time.
You could at least try opening it up to see if there's big (relative to the rest) "can" capacitors (not sure of the proper english term, sorry:-) They often feature in the 100+ uF range.
When they dry out they often (but not always) start looking like they're about to explode (which they sometimes do). And best of all - if the solution is that simple it will probably cost you $2 in parts and a few minutes with a soldering iron.
Actually I do not agree with you at all. Comparing different encoders for a certain format is a complete test. In this particular case, the goal was to find out which AAC encoder is the best. The results answered that question.
As an Open-Source (and open standards) advocate it is easy to look at such a test and say "but Ogg/MP3/whatever is better anyways, they should have included them". Actually saying so leads nowhere at all.
If you want a comparison between Ogg, AAC, WMA and MP3, then do such a comparison. But this was not a test to find our which format/algorithm was the best, it was a test to find out which AAC encoder was the best, which is also what the test answered.
Not every test in the world should always include all and every variant of the test subject in question. Just because you're comparing the quality of carrots from different farmers, you shouldn't automatically be expected to include potatoes in the comparison just because there are people that prefer potatoes over carrots. If the test question was "which is the best vegetable", then omitting potatoes could be considered careless.
And, in very much the same way, if the test question is "which is the best AAC encoder", including MP3-or Ogg-encoders would be just as wrong.
There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of poorly written PHP/MySQL systems with serious security issues ranging from Cross-Site Scripting to SQL-injection.
I would submit that the online tutorials you speak of might very well get one the technical knowhow to build systems, but a dedicated book where dos and don'ts are explained and best practices shown is a better way of making sure the system you build is reasonably secure to start with.
The advantage is that you have almost all the information you need gathered in one place, written in the same style, using the same sort of examples, with the same notation and so on. Consistency is, at least for me, important for my effeciency in aquiring knowledge.
It is simply easier for me to get all the information from someone who thinks and writes consistently throughout. Online tutorials are great, and I'm very thankful for their existence, but I therefore do not think that books should somehow be considered obsolete or a waste of money.
Ok, updated Safari. Tabbed browsing support means Safari is now my default browser.
But I want to transfer the bookmarks from the bookmark bar in Camino to Safari. Seems like a lot of trouble. Because, well, it couldn't... or, it's OS X but yet... could bookmarks be drag-n-droppable? Between browsers from two entirely different places? They couldn't...
The RIAA wants money. They would get it this way too.
The only difference is that instead of edited highlights of a concert, sold a year after, the item on sale is a direct recording, made at the scene. It would even most likely be of poorer quality, since regular concert recordings are edited, for example leaving out three consecutive minutes of audience screaming, uninteresting talk between the songs, and other stuff that really just subtracts from the overall album quality.
Your idea of legitimizing piracy is odd. After all, as long as those who own the rights gets paid, it's not piracy, and I for one didn't read anything about Clear Channel intending to sell these recordings without giving anything to the rights owners.
If anyone could be worried, it's the people that arrange the concerts, since the risk that a concert recording goes wide spread is increased. However, I know very few people that attend concerts just to hear the songs. The songs are almost always on CD already. Most people I know, inlcuding myself, attend concerts to see the artists, to experience the concert itself. And a quick, unedited audio recording certainly wouldn't be a match for that.
I think it sounds like a great idea, if they indeed have it (remember it isn't confirmed that they do).
Yes, the easy part is getting the look right, natively or otherwise.
But the feel is an entirely different can of worms. Then all the stuff like whether OK buttons are to the right or left, where the menu-bar is at, whether it's Ctrl+Q or Alt+Q or Cmd+Q to quit an application (and whether Quit means "close the active window" or "close all windows"), what dialog titles should be (or if they should be sheets as in Mac OS X) and everything else comes in to play.
And without it, native look-and-feel isn't.;)
To be honest, I've yet to see anything that gets even close. Mac, Windows, KDE and Gnome have so different paradigms that it would be an incredible acheivment to create the first true native-look-and-feel-cross-platform toolkit.
As I read the question, it was about a cross-platform toolkit with native look-and-feel. I definately interpret this as being native to the platform where it's run, not native to the toolkit! Otherwise the statement would be meaningless.
The discussion has, as usual, talked a lot about Tk, which has it's own look-and-feel and therefore certainly not is native. Qt is cross-platform, with applications that look native, but necessarily aren't.
There's more to a platform's look-and-feel than how the buttons look. The location of the menu-bar is one example. The placement of OK/Cancel buttons another, and standard quick-keys a third. Mac OS X has GUI guidelines which specify how far apart different controls should be, and they are almost guaranteed to not match KDE's guidelines.
Mac OS X/Cocoa also has the concept of sheets, which are basically modal dialogs attached to one certain document window in an application. There's no similar concept in e.g. Gnome, and a toolkit would therefore be hard pressed to find a replacement within the native look-and-feel. In fact multi-document applications in their entirety are differently handled on Windows, Linux and Mac. And I don't even think Gnome and KDE agree on all details of look-and-feel.
Cross-platform with native look-and-feel is therefore a lot more complex than just using Qt or Tk. What would really be needed is actually a way of abstracting away the GUI part of an application entirely, basically making the entire presentation into a Stylesheet of sorts, somtehing like what you do to strings and numbers for i18n/l10n.
But I haven't seen any real efforts to do this. It might work without it for Linux vs. Windows, because neither have very strongly enforced standards on look-and-feel, and you can therefore get away with doing things almost right (or even doing them wrong).
But, it isn't for me. What I love about my Mac OS X is that it actually works, and works well. The GUI and applications of Mac OS X are thought through, there are Human Interface Guidlines that people actually follow, and it "just works".
Gnome has Human Interface Guidlines that either aren't followed or aren't very good. I know I'm picky here, but why is there, for example, no visible difference between a single and double click on a Gnome desktop icon? You have to wait until the application (maybe) starts to determine if your second click went through. That can take a very long time. Surely the Gnome HIG should (maybe does) say that the immediately visible change from a single- and double-click should be different? This is a small picky detail, the kind that IMO Gnome is full of and OS X has just a handful of.
Really, I'm just trying to illustrate that IMO, Gnome/GNU are miles behind when it comes to GUIs. I don't see who would actually use this. Running Gimp is nice because it doesn't cost anything, but
you don't need to buy a second harddisk to do that. People that will benefit from this disk run OS X. What could there possibly be to make them interested in switching to Gnome? "It's free and therefore better, I don't care if the GUI sucks!"?
Any insights into why people that run OS X would want to switch to Gnome would be appreciated, 'cause I don't get it.;-)
I absolutely agree with you that we should in no way discuss what's happening now, but what has happened in the past. Not!
Wouldn't it be sad if we actually had something relevant and recent to discuss? Or, for that matter, something which in some remote way applies to the subject? Horrible thought...
You do indeed have a very good point, regarding that all things do not necessarily scale well.
I don't know exactly what info is needed for a national ID card in the US, but I imagine that name, social security number (which I guess exists in some kind of database already) and current address are about everything you need. And collecting that data doesn't seem dangerous to me, even if the government running the database are corrupt bastards. At worst it seems they could give the information to companies to send people even more physical spam.
But I might be missing something in the scale, or indeed in the current state of affairs in the US, that in fact makes this a dangerous database. Passports often carry information about length and eye color as well, which seems much more dangerous to me.
The EFF wrote an article (linked to by the Slashdot article) about that National ID:s are bad, because the data can be abused. I don't see it. If someone could illuminate my mental darkness on this point, and illustrate in what way a database containing all names, ssns and addresses can be significantly abused would perhaps make my image more complete.
Did you know that they created a National ID in Finland one year ago on this day, and the day after everybodies' bank accounts were emtpy!
When Sweden got their national IDs a hundred years ago, birthrate fell to (and still is) 0! Everybody could find out everything about everybody else, and suddenly nobody wanted to reproduce!
Norwegian National IDs have built in radio transmitters, and the Big Bad Government has put receivers everywhere. Norwegians can't even take a sh*t without having it registered in the government's database (that is run by the Mafia!) how many grams of excrements they left!
Danes are required to check each others National IDs before saying Hello!
It's true! National IDs are BAD, mmmkay?
...
Come ON. If little piss-ant countries like us in Scandinavia can have National IDs without problems, why shouldn't the big and glorious nation of USA be able to handle it? I find it difficult to believe that your government is so corrupt, so incompetent and so basically naughty that a National ID is impossible without a Big Brother situation. And if it is, why whine about the National ID instead of making sure that the incompetent government goes away?
Or perhaps you could find a very big corporation that could run the database instead, it seems to work so well for other things.
From the other side of the pond, you look a bit silly sometimes.
And I'm not saying this to flame you, although I realize that many will take it that way. We europeans seem to have a different view of the world, and it just doesn't really fit with the governmental paranoia that seems to leak out of the cracks on slashdot as soon as anyone says anything that has the world "government" in it.
I'm just in the process of migrating from 1.3.x to 2.0.x, and let me assure you this is not done over night (I tried just that, and here I am still running 1.3.x).
The build process has been slowed down and, IMO, gone entirely broken. Previously I ran the configure script, which took a minute or so, compiled and installed. It worked.
Now a run a monstruous./configure, which calls itself recursively and takes about ten minutes to complete, at which time any and all warnings have scrolled well past the top of the window. It does not report easy mistakes such as trying to make "so" a shared module until it is almost finished. And the libraries are not linked against the modules properly, so attempting to use a static libssl or libm is not possible.
An upgrade from 1.3.x to 1.3.x+1 took about half an hour. An upgrade from 1.3.x to 2.0.x has taken me the better part of two days, including reinstalling openssl shared so that mod_ssl works at all, for no immediate gain.
I can understand that people do not make the switch.
Slashdot Mirror
We are not about users, we are about sharing. You can modify it if you don't like it, it works for me.
You very clearly sum up why Linux does not take more than marginal market shares from Windows. Windows and Mac OS X are about users. They're both crap too, but they're crap in a way that users understand.
The fact that I can modify it does not enter in to the equation. My mother can't, so she will continue using Windows.
But I'm getting used to this by now. Every time anybody mentions the fact that FLOSS has serious usability issues, about ten people answer "so modify it if you don't like it", and the same people can't for their world understand why people keep using Windows when FLOSS is "so much better".
And why on earth you take my comment personally I truly cannot understand. I did not mention you, I do not know what software you have written, nor do I care. The comment was about FLOSS, not about you.
Sincere congratulations!
This is the 10,000th posting this week which is motivated by the three magic words "worth the read"!
One word: Usability.
Open Source is wonderful for what it is, its principles are beautiful, its spirit is clean, and it is absolutely no good to end users as it stands today.
Applications do not look the same, nor do they work the same. KDE and GNOME? Yeah. But there are two of them. Why? End users do not care about choice. They want something that works, and where every application looks the same and works the same. They also do not care about recompiling their kernel every time they buy some hardware, or recompiling software to alter some setting only available compile-time.
Whatever functionality (which is normally Open Source developers' focus) the office solution gives, it is absolutely worthless if it takes a Ph.D. in Rocket Science (or two hours of trial-and-failure) to understand how to reach the wanted end results.
So usability would be my primer choice for end result.
I dare not count how many Open Source projects actually start out creating a logo, a hompeage, and an implementation of themes, a particularly pointless feature. Somehow that says everything. For most of them, anyways.
Sun has gone to great lengths to make sure that a compromized zone does not imply compromize of other zones.
In fact, one of Suns examples is a Zone for each service, where the technician that explained to me explicitly said that if one of the Zones run a sendmail which is rooted, the others are unaffected because there are separate "root" accounts for each zone (and we're not just talking separare passwords but actual separate root:s).
They protect stuff like /dev/kmem, you can't access raw devices, and so on within Zones. The machine still has a "core", outside of any Zones, which is a regular Solaris environment, but from within a Zone it's apparently very, very difficult to break out. Sun calls it "impossible" which means you'll most likely need to find a bug within the Zone implementation itself to break free.
Sun's also done similar things within Trusted Solaris before, so it's not something they just came up with.
> The trick to getting dvdrecord to work is to know that it only supports "-dao" on most drives."
Why doesn't the software help file clearly state that?
I so agree with you, but I'd go even further: Why does the software not set this flag automatically if it's the only one that works?
The luxury of ignorance. If only one flag works, and/or is required for correct operation, then I should not need to know about it at all.
Unfortunately, writing such software is difficult and, most importantly, boring. It's not C00L to have written software which is trivial to use, and the FLOSS community is unfortunately still driven by the wish to become famous for having written something C00L.
So what we should ask ourselves is: how do we make it 1337 to write software that grandma could use?
Oh, pleeeeeze!
Is there no end to the Microsoft-bashing in this forum?
If Microsoft had done this using a home-made format, then everybody would be screaming death to them for inventing their own standard "just like they did with Word documents".
And when they do use a public format like XML? Then we all scream death to them because XML is so bloated etc. etc.
It's time to grow up.
PS. I will NOT make the mandatory "I really don't like them, but in this case..." argument, which seems to be the only standardized way of saying anything positive at all about Microsoft here.
That's cute. How many customers knows what DRM even means? Although trying our best to avoid seeing it, the world is actually made up of non-geeks. We're the exception to the norm, not them. They are "most customers", not us.
If people actually knew exactly what DRM meant, and if they actually had a choice, then surely they'd choose files without DRM. But MP3 or WMA? They don't give a damn. They just want to listen to the music. 95% of them use Windows, 95% of them can listen to either.
It's just like most people actually do not care exactly what kind of a motor is in the car they're driving - they just want it to look nice on the outside, accelerate fast and sound cool (and, if they're Volvo-owners, to be safe to drive in). And that's just the way it must be.
After all, if people were informed enough, more people would use Mac (because unlike Windows, Mac OS X is actually pretty easy to use, and doesn't break down on you). People don't know. They just expect computers to require rebooting, reinstalling drivers and calling tech-support, because "that's how computers are". In the same way they just expect not to be able to do just about anything with files bought online, apart from somewhere close to the things that Apple lets them do.
That's what I thought as well, for many many years.
Then I realized how much tedious work it is switching distros each time the cool new gadget you bought wasn't supported by your current distro choice. How each distro does things in a slightly but not quite different manner. How much time I spent re-learning things I should only have had to learn once. How much time people all around the world have spent re-inventing something someone else has already done, just becuase they didn't like the color.
And I started thinking: you know, wouldn't it be great if I didn't have to choose because everyting worked from the start? If people worked on many different problems, thus increasing the completeness of Linux, instead of all doing the same things but in very slightly different manners?
For the home computer geek, whose life is not complete if he hasn't been forced to reinstall his operating system in the last month, Linux is the perfect choice.
For the Enterprise desktop, Linux sucks, for the very same reasons that it rocks for geeks - you do not want to switch distros just because the camera you just bought wasn't supported by the distro you run now. And you definitely do not want to reeducate ordinary (l)users either.
Consistency and completeness are far more valuable than having thirty almost identical solutions, of which none is complete, to choose from.
You could at least try opening it up to see if there's big (relative to the rest) "can" capacitors (not sure of the proper english term, sorry :-) They often feature in the 100+ uF range.
When they dry out they often (but not always) start looking like they're about to explode (which they sometimes do). And best of all - if the solution is that simple it will probably cost you $2 in parts and a few minutes with a soldering iron.
Actually I do not agree with you at all. Comparing different encoders for a certain format is a complete test. In this particular case, the goal was to find out which AAC encoder is the best. The results answered that question.
As an Open-Source (and open standards) advocate it is easy to look at such a test and say "but Ogg/MP3/whatever is better anyways, they should have included them". Actually saying so leads nowhere at all.
If you want a comparison between Ogg, AAC, WMA and MP3, then do such a comparison. But this was not a test to find our which format/algorithm was the best, it was a test to find out which AAC encoder was the best, which is also what the test answered.
Not every test in the world should always include all and every variant of the test subject in question. Just because you're comparing the quality of carrots from different farmers, you shouldn't automatically be expected to include potatoes in the comparison just because there are people that prefer potatoes over carrots. If the test question was "which is the best vegetable", then omitting potatoes could be considered careless.
And, in very much the same way, if the test question is "which is the best AAC encoder", including MP3-or Ogg-encoders would be just as wrong.
That's my view, at least.
/Viktor...
I suggest the following design, which I am for reasons of nationality not able to contend with.
The best design for this T-shirt
was not American enough.
This is what was.
I'll stop whining now.
There are also hundreds, if not thousands, of poorly written PHP/MySQL systems with serious security issues ranging from Cross-Site Scripting to SQL-injection.
I would submit that the online tutorials you speak of might very well get one the technical knowhow to build systems, but a dedicated book where dos and don'ts are explained and best practices shown is a better way of making sure the system you build is reasonably secure to start with.
The advantage is that you have almost all the information you need gathered in one place, written in the same style, using the same sort of examples, with the same notation and so on. Consistency is, at least for me, important for my effeciency in aquiring knowledge.
It is simply easier for me to get all the information from someone who thinks and writes consistently throughout. Online tutorials are great, and I'm very thankful for their existence, but I therefore do not think that books should somehow be considered obsolete or a waste of money.
Ok, updated Safari. Tabbed browsing support means Safari is now my default browser.
But I want to transfer the bookmarks from the bookmark bar in Camino to Safari. Seems like a lot of trouble. Because, well, it couldn't... or, it's OS X but yet... could bookmarks be drag-n-droppable? Between browsers from two entirely different places? They couldn't...
But they are. And that's damn sexy.
It just works.
32.000 shouldn't really be considered that small a number. After all, iPhoto gets painfully slow (one minute just to start up?) at 800 or so photos.
So 32.000 songs sounds ok to me...
The RIAA wants money. They would get it this way too.
The only difference is that instead of edited highlights of a concert, sold a year after, the item on sale is a direct recording, made at the scene. It would even most likely be of poorer quality, since regular concert recordings are edited, for example leaving out three consecutive minutes of audience screaming, uninteresting talk between the songs, and other stuff that really just subtracts from the overall album quality.
Your idea of legitimizing piracy is odd. After all, as long as those who own the rights gets paid, it's not piracy, and I for one didn't read anything about Clear Channel intending to sell these recordings without giving anything to the rights owners.
If anyone could be worried, it's the people that arrange the concerts, since the risk that a concert recording goes wide spread is increased. However, I know very few people that attend concerts just to hear the songs. The songs are almost always on CD already. Most people I know, inlcuding myself, attend concerts to see the artists, to experience the concert itself. And a quick, unedited audio recording certainly wouldn't be a match for that.
I think it sounds like a great idea, if they indeed have it (remember it isn't confirmed that they do).
No, no, no.
This is Slashdot. The important question is "how will this affect my right to copy what i bloody well please".
And the important observation is "if the VHDL code isn't open source we must immediately boycott this unfree threat to our society!"
But the feel is an entirely different can of worms. Then all the stuff like whether OK buttons are to the right or left, where the menu-bar is at, whether it's Ctrl+Q or Alt+Q or Cmd+Q to quit an application (and whether Quit means "close the active window" or "close all windows"), what dialog titles should be (or if they should be sheets as in Mac OS X) and everything else comes in to play.
And without it, native look-and-feel isn't. ;)
To be honest, I've yet to see anything that gets even close. Mac, Windows, KDE and Gnome have so different paradigms that it would be an incredible acheivment to create the first true native-look-and-feel-cross-platform toolkit.
Swing might be cross platform, but it isn't native look-and-feel, which the original poster suggested the topic of discussion was.
As I read the question, it was about a cross-platform toolkit with native look-and-feel. I definately interpret this as being native to the platform where it's run, not native to the toolkit! Otherwise the statement would be meaningless.
The discussion has, as usual, talked a lot about Tk, which has it's own look-and-feel and therefore certainly not is native. Qt is cross-platform, with applications that look native, but necessarily aren't.
There's more to a platform's look-and-feel than how the buttons look. The location of the menu-bar is one example. The placement of OK/Cancel buttons another, and standard quick-keys a third. Mac OS X has GUI guidelines which specify how far apart different controls should be, and they are almost guaranteed to not match KDE's guidelines.
Mac OS X/Cocoa also has the concept of sheets, which are basically modal dialogs attached to one certain document window in an application. There's no similar concept in e.g. Gnome, and a toolkit would therefore be hard pressed to find a replacement within the native look-and-feel. In fact multi-document applications in their entirety are differently handled on Windows, Linux and Mac. And I don't even think Gnome and KDE agree on all details of look-and-feel.
Cross-platform with native look-and-feel is therefore a lot more complex than just using Qt or Tk. What would really be needed is actually a way of abstracting away the GUI part of an application entirely, basically making the entire presentation into a Stylesheet of sorts, somtehing like what you do to strings and numbers for i18n/l10n.
But I haven't seen any real efforts to do this. It might work without it for Linux vs. Windows, because neither have very strongly enforced standards on look-and-feel, and you can therefore get away with doing things almost right (or even doing them wrong).
Interesting idea. A strange one, but interesting.
But, it isn't for me. What I love about my Mac OS X is that it actually works, and works well. The GUI and applications of Mac OS X are thought through, there are Human Interface Guidlines that people actually follow, and it "just works".
Gnome has Human Interface Guidlines that either aren't followed or aren't very good. I know I'm picky here, but why is there, for example, no visible difference between a single and double click on a Gnome desktop icon? You have to wait until the application (maybe) starts to determine if your second click went through. That can take a very long time. Surely the Gnome HIG should (maybe does) say that the immediately visible change from a single- and double-click should be different? This is a small picky detail, the kind that IMO Gnome is full of and OS X has just a handful of.
Really, I'm just trying to illustrate that IMO, Gnome/GNU are miles behind when it comes to GUIs. I don't see who would actually use this. Running Gimp is nice because it doesn't cost anything, but you don't need to buy a second harddisk to do that. People that will benefit from this disk run OS X. What could there possibly be to make them interested in switching to Gnome? "It's free and therefore better, I don't care if the GUI sucks!"?
Any insights into why people that run OS X would want to switch to Gnome would be appreciated, 'cause I don't get it. ;-)
I absolutely agree with you that we should in no way discuss what's happening now, but what has happened in the past. Not!
Wouldn't it be sad if we actually had something relevant and recent to discuss? Or, for that matter, something which in some remote way applies to the subject? Horrible thought...
You do indeed have a very good point, regarding that all things do not necessarily scale well.
I don't know exactly what info is needed for a national ID card in the US, but I imagine that name, social security number (which I guess exists in some kind of database already) and current address are about everything you need. And collecting that data doesn't seem dangerous to me, even if the government running the database are corrupt bastards. At worst it seems they could give the information to companies to send people even more physical spam. But I might be missing something in the scale, or indeed in the current state of affairs in the US, that in fact makes this a dangerous database. Passports often carry information about length and eye color as well, which seems much more dangerous to me.
The EFF wrote an article (linked to by the Slashdot article) about that National ID:s are bad, because the data can be abused. I don't see it. If someone could illuminate my mental darkness on this point, and illustrate in what way a database containing all names, ssns and addresses can be significantly abused would perhaps make my image more complete.
Not a national ID?!
Did you know that they created a National ID in Finland one year ago on this day, and the day after everybodies' bank accounts were emtpy!
When Sweden got their national IDs a hundred years ago, birthrate fell to (and still is) 0! Everybody could find out everything about everybody else, and suddenly nobody wanted to reproduce!
Norwegian National IDs have built in radio transmitters, and the Big Bad Government has put receivers everywhere. Norwegians can't even take a sh*t without having it registered in the government's database (that is run by the Mafia!) how many grams of excrements they left!
Danes are required to check each others National IDs before saying Hello!
It's true! National IDs are BAD, mmmkay?
...
Come ON. If little piss-ant countries like us in Scandinavia can have National IDs without problems, why shouldn't the big and glorious nation of USA be able to handle it? I find it difficult to believe that your government is so corrupt, so incompetent and so basically naughty that a National ID is impossible without a Big Brother situation. And if it is, why whine about the National ID instead of making sure that the incompetent government goes away?
Or perhaps you could find a very big corporation that could run the database instead, it seems to work so well for other things.
From the other side of the pond, you look a bit silly sometimes.
And I'm not saying this to flame you, although I realize that many will take it that way. We europeans seem to have a different view of the world, and it just doesn't really fit with the governmental paranoia that seems to leak out of the cracks on slashdot as soon as anyone says anything that has the world "government" in it.
The build process has been slowed down and, IMO, gone entirely broken. Previously I ran the configure script, which took a minute or so, compiled and installed. It worked.
Now a run a monstruous ./configure, which calls itself recursively and takes about ten minutes to complete, at which time any and all warnings have scrolled well past the top of the window. It does not report easy mistakes such as trying to make "so" a shared module until it is almost finished. And the libraries are not linked against the modules properly, so attempting to use a static libssl or libm is not possible.
An upgrade from 1.3.x to 1.3.x+1 took about half an hour. An upgrade from 1.3.x to 2.0.x has taken me the better part of two days, including reinstalling openssl shared so that mod_ssl works at all, for no immediate gain.
I can understand that people do not make the switch.
If it were not for all the nuclear-phobic twits out there, the issue would have been resolved in the 60s.
Would you care to elaborate how you mean that would have happened? I'm probably missing some obvious argument here.