For example...say I wanted to upgrade the video card in my old laptop (provided it wasn't one built into the motherboard)
I think you just answered your own question. To make the stuff fit into the smallest possible space, they need to build just about everything into the mainboard. You'd more or less be buy a new computer when you "upgrade" anyway. Might as well replace the shell too. And the battery is probably not going to be very good buy the time you get arund to upgrading. Might as well replace that as well. I think modular laptops would be less desirable than you think.
Yeah, yeah, I had an Atari 2600 that I played to death, so clearly it's not the case that literally nobody was playing consoles. Look at the numbers. According to Wikipedia, the NES sold just over 60 million units.
The Atari 2600 sold 40 million units.
Right there the numbers are pretty comparable. Now, add in other common systems. Intellivision and Colecovision each sold 6 million units. Right there you've almost equaled the NES. What about the other misc. systems that were either strictly console gaming system are hybrid console/PC?
If that isn't mainstream, I don't know what is. I wouldn't be picking on your statement that "nobody was playing consoles before the NES" if the numbers were in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. But we're talking about millions here. Millions of households had some kind of gaming console before the NES. It was mainstream. Not quite "ubiquitous" but definitely mainstream.
But the state of console gaming before the NES was not good. NES changed that. It changed what video games could do and it made console gaming completely main stream. If you read the article, the reason the state of console gaming was "not good" was because of too much selection and too many poor quality games. It was stagnant. NES merely breathed new life into the industry. It didn't invent it or even make it mainstream.
It's like saying nobody was on the internet before Mosaic. Sure it's not strictly true, but Mosaic is what made the internet (or www, rather) take off. Except in this case it's like if Mosaic started the boom and then went on to dominate the web-browser market for a decade. I don't think the analogy is apt. As I pointed out, game consoles were already in millions of households before the NES. The internet was not.
Before NES people didn't play consoles. Now they do.
Huh? Before NES came out i knew lots of people who had one of the following: Some version of the Atari, Colecovision (I had this), Intellivision, C64 (yes, many people used these primarily as a game console). There were even some lesser known systems that I saw at friends' houses like the Odyssey2. NES did not make console gaming mainstream by any means. It just made a quantum leap as far as what consoles could do and consolidated all those other misc. systems into one. No longer was it a question of what console you had, it was "Which NES games do you have?"
I figure the requirements for a 21 pass overwrite scheme is still a requirement for sanitizing government drives for a reason.
Is it 21 now? I thought it was 7. And no, that isn't proof of it being possible to recover data from a drive that has been overwritten. It just means the government knows it not necessarily impossible. SO they're just careful. Also, I imagine they figure if you're going to overwrite it once, it isn't much trouble telling a program to do it many times.
Is it overkill? Certainly. But apparently 3 passes isn't considered enough.
Or it is just as easy to do it 21 times. It is one of those "why not?" things. The only thing that counts as evidence that it (recovery of data from one or more overwrites) can be done is that it has been done.
I don't know about NAND chips , but apparently ram isn't all that "volatile" as it should be( http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/secure_del.html [auckland.ac.nz] , part 7). If nand flash is anything like ram the ware leveling algorithms would still ruin any forensics in a system were data changes frequently.
Grr, why does everyone reference that paper and just assume it has actually been proven in teh field? That whole paper is just THEORY which has never been show to be practical, as far as I know.
The only difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference. Congrats for referencing the same old paper that everyone else references on this subject. Now try finding reports of people who've actually recovered a meaningful amount of data from a drive that has been overwritten with random data.
Actually with regular/magnetic drives data is not gone forever with one pass. You can still use specialized readers that will detect change in magnetic field and be able to tell whether the analyzed bit was 0 or 1 before it was overwritten.
Yes, that is the common myth. And some say it is theoretically possibly. But nobody has ever published anything that I am aware of showing it actually being done. Can you point to reports of anyone actually do it? Anyone sell these "special readers?"
That said, i think it depends on WHAT you overwrite the data with. If you just use all zeros, then ya, you MIGHT be able to see what was there before, but if you write random data, I doubt you'll be recovering much, if anything. Maybe you'll get lucky and read some off-track writes, but I dunno.
For most people I know, "multitasking" consists of talking on the phone while waiting for their code to compile, or answering the office phone when it rings, even if you were in the middle of writing a paper. But that is NOT the same as sitting there, wire-tense, waiting to jump on it the instant it rings. That would drive anybody crazy. No wonder their cortisol and epiniphrine levels were elevated.
I don't know about you, but there are times when the phone ringing while I'm working can make me jump or at least flinch. The thing is that people DON'T call me when I'm just sitting there waiting for something to compile. They invariably call when I'm focused on something (or so it seems). And then there's email. Being a slave to your inbox and compulsively reading ever new message that comes in will definitly cut down on productivity and cause stress. I don't know about elevated levels of cortisol or epinephrin, but I think there is something to the idea that multitasking is stressful. I know I'd feel a lot more relaxed and focused if I could just turn off my phone and email for hours at a time without worry.
The study may have been a little extreme. But I think it still might have some truth to it.
I do it all the time. I've never had a job (aside from working at Walmart as a teen) where I didn't feel I could disagree with or constructively criticize my boss. Of course, you need to attain a certain level of rapport and competence before you go shooting your mouth off, but you shouldn't have to be afraid.
ASP.NET 2.0 actually pretty much does in fact obsolete most of what you might know about ASP.NET 1.0, which I expect is nearly nothing. I won't bore you with a point by point response to what yuo wrote, I'm sure neither of us care enough to take it seriously anyway.
You're thinking too narrowly. So what if ASP.NET 2.0 is a lot different than 1.0? CS is about concepts and patterns. Not about the framework du jour. If your education centered on teaching you a specific language and/or framework, you got ripped off.
But two quick notes. Yeah, I can name the next COBOL. It's called Java and Visual Basic, both. They both are languages with large code bases that people have to support but would really rather be using a newer platform if they could.
Well, Visual Basic has always been a bit of a toy. Nobody I know ever really took it seriously. SO yeah, I can see that becoming the next "COBOL" in the sense that it will be obsolete. But Java? Please! Java devs I know kinda like it. It has plenty of third party support. It is fast and mature. And technically speaking it isn't really that much differnt than C#. So how do you figure it is going to be the next COBOL? Certainly not any time soon.
Also, you keep talking about your CS curriculum. You must be really young and new here. You need to pick up new skills on your own. Hopefully 15 more years into your career you'll be thinking about what you learned in the last couple of years, rather than still thinking about what you learned in CS school.
I'm talking about CS because that is what this thread is about. The issue is this: how fast does technology move and how quickly is what you learn in CS obsolete? I was responding to a person who claimed that most of what you learn is CS is obsolete in the time it takes to make up a lesson plan. Which is just plain wrong.
I'm perfectly comfortable with my ability to pick up new languages and frameworks as needed. And that is because I grasp the larger concepts and patterns, rather than focusing on the the syntax and APIs of particular frameworks.
C# 2.0 and 3.0 In 2005, C# 2.0 was entering beta. People were maybe going to use it. The idea of being able to rely on having.NET 1 installed on people's machines at all was really just finally solidifying. It was hard to find web hosting that supported ASP.NET 2.0 in 1995. C# Web code was, by and large, written exclusively in 1.1. Web development in 2.0 is day and night different from 1.1, so that's a major area of technology regarding C# that's moved on the last 2 years. Clearly you're not familiar with the radical new things in C# 3.0, like LINQ. You may think you're not sure if LINQ will be awesome, but you probably didn't like generics either then. Finally, 2 years ago Silverlight was just a "maybe someday they might do something". Today Microsoft is pushing silverlight hard and it's going to happen.
Ok, but how much does what you learn in CS depend on language specific features? I'm not saying you don't have to keep up to date on languages and APIs. But there's no real fundamental change in the above. Then again, I'm not intimtely familiar with C# specifically, so maybe its evolution was so radical that it makes everything you knew before obsolete. But I seriously doubt it.
Mono. Way better system today that it was a couple of years about. They've implemented System.Windows.Forms, it runs fast as JIT native code, and it runs ASP.NET 2.0. It's practical for production now, both for web, for server apps, and for GUI apps under either Linux or Windows. Wasn't nearly as good or practical 2 years ago.
So what about this makes what I might have learned in CS obsolete?
Ruby. Ok, you really think nothings happened with Ruby since 2005? In 2005 Ruby was really exotic and rarely used, and rarely heard of outside of certain circles. Ruby's popularity and adoption has increased staggeringly since 2005. You think anybody saw advertisements looking for Ruby developers in 2005? Hell no.
You've gone beyond taking my statement out of context. Now you're confusing a change in popularity of a language with a change in the language itself. Even Ruby 1.9 (soon to be 2.0, hopefully) doesn't change THAT much. It will mostly just make Ruby faster.
PHP. Ruby's popularity has fueled innovation in other areas, including here. CakePHP is a framework I've used on some projects that's really a terrific way to write things. There's other killer frameworks that have come a long way in the last 2 years, such as Django.
As we speak, I'm in the process of writing a nasty letter to my alma mater demanding my money back because my entire CS education was centered around a web framework that has now been obsoleted by CakePHP.... NOT.
Python Gaining in popularity really fast. Django, and other apps are very strong. Today if you aren't well versed with a scripting language of some sort, you're dog meat compared to other developers. People weren't as wise to that two years ago as they are today.
There's plenty of jobs of developers who specialize in Java, for example. Now you're just making shit up.
Erlang Those umpteen multi core processors are coming soon, and more and more people are interested in languages that easily support parallel processing and distributed processing. Erlang is gaining steam fast. Have you tried it yet? I can tell you tons more people know Erlang today than did in 2005.
Again, confusing changes in language/framework popularity with fundamental changes in CS. tsk tsk.
You would happen to write for Wired magazine, would you? Because this is exactly the kind of technology infatuated garbage I would expect from taht magazine.
Seriously, if you think things aren't moving fast in the industry, then do be careful. If you've been coding the same thing for a handful of years and not learning much new... well, you can
That's very optimistic. More that this is obsolete in the time it takes to develop lesson plans, get textbooks approved, etc.
Nonsense. Technology does not move THAT fast. Even saying 50% is obsolete in 2 years is a bit a of a stretch. Seriously, how much has CS/IT really changed in CS since 2005? Maybe a new major version of Java? Yeah, I'm sure Java developers were just scrambling to catch up there... not. Most just continued targeting old releases. Any big changes in Javascript? Python? PHP? Perl? Ruby? C#? Nope, still the same stuff with perhaps a few API updates here and there. Have basic concepts like sorting, linked lists, and recursion changed? Nope. Has some new major concept in programming replaced OO? Nope. Hell, you coudl probably go back 7 years and not find too many major CS concepts that have changed significantly.
Anyone who says that what they learn in CS is obsolete in the time it takes to develop lesson plans and get textbooks approved either went to a shitty school (and had shitty text books) or simply failed to grasp the larger concepts and patterns.
How is that flamebait? I'm dead serious. If the quality of software doesn't improve dramatically, we're going to be in a world of hurt very soon.
Why "soon?" What is going to change in the near future that will make insecure software/configurations any more of a threat than they already are?
How do you suggest we achieve that improvement if not by making authors of faulty software liable for their negligence?
Diversity is one good way of avoiding large scale security related disasters. Sure, individuals will still get hurt, but if theres a broad range of software options available (and used) there's not much that can take down the internet as a whole or put us in a "world of hurt."
We certainly can't keep upgrading software every time a bug is found, if bugs keep cropping up at the current rate.
What "rate" is that? Do you have statistics that show that software is getting less secure or more bugs are found? My subjective impression is that software in general is getting better on the whole. And security is slowly becoming more of a priority. The only thing that is changing is the scale of the exploits when a bug is found. No longer is it important to have control over individual systems. Black Hats need botnets. Again, more diversity will help greatly in keeping the effect of this to a minimum. Holding software vendors monetarily responsible for hacks would kill the industry and possibly hurt diversity.
Besides, who is goign to pay when free software is exploited? Can you really justify extracting money from developers who offer their wares to the public for free?
I actually find GNOME and KDE to be more impressive then apple's products because they work with MANY distros whereas Apple constrains it to one.
Um, what's so impressive about working with many distributions? It is all the same base software, just packaged differently. Besides, it isn't up to the KDE people to make sure it works on different distributions. It is up to the distribution maintainers.
Same idea with their hardware. It's much easier to program when you can limit the portability.
And it is much better for the users who don't have to worry about finding drivers (much) and getting random hardware to work. I'm not really sure how you can twist the fact that owning a PC is quite often a pain in the ass into something that is "impressive."
What is impressive about KDE is the magnitude of the project and that it is all done by volunteers. That's all, really.
So I guess the question is, why you using OS X at all? I am a former desktop Linux user of 12 years and I have fully embraced Cocoa apps. The Finder works fine for me. iTerm works fine. I love TextMate for editing. There's a number of Cocoa torrent clients (what does it really have to do besides sit there in the background and download anyway?) But then I suppose was never much for KDE or GNOME even when I was using Linux on the desktop. It was all XFCE or WindowMaker for me. I was used to running just random apps each using a differnt UI toolkit... few of which looked or behaved the same. The ONLY thing I miss from Linux is the desktop pager. I've tried a few implementations on OSX but none of them really work Just Right(tm).
I believe you just answered your own question. There are some really nice KDE apps available that would be great to have running native on OS X.
Only if you consider a QT app to be native, which I don't. QT is an abstraction of the Carbon API. And KDE is further abstraction of QT. I doubt that any KDE app would ever integrate well enough with the rest of my OS X desktop to make me want to use it. And if the K app was really that awesome, I'd always secretly be hoping for someone to port/rewrite/reimplement it directly to Cocoa.
Anyway, the app I mentioned was GTK. Though I should mention that I haven't read newsgroups in a while and haven't bothered reinstall PAN since I upgraded to Leopard. I guess my point is that for most common functionality, I find that native Cocoa apps are not only better individually than Linux counterparts, but also integrate better with each other. Like Java (Swing/SWT) apps, K apps would have an automatic handicap running on OS X in my opinion.
Using "native" somewhat loosely, of course. I know Qt apps can do a decent job of at least appearing native, but I have my doubts about anything that is further abstracted with KDE libraries. Doesn't KDE provide a lot of redundant facilities such as a VFS that would make integration with the Finder, the Dock, and other Cocoa apps somewhat... awkward? Will the K apps come packaged nicely in.app folders or would I have to manage packages and installers? I can't say I'm terribly excited by the prospect of K apps on OS X. Seriously, what's the point?
I know this is considered by many as blasphemy but, it can't be seen as anything other than a REALLY good thing for the linux camp out there, provided it works well. One of the biggest barriers to people running linux is that they are uncomfortable with how it will work compared to their comfy Windows box.
Ha! I've heard Windows called a lot of things, but "comfy" is not one of them. I'll assume what you mean is "ensnaring.";-)
Slashdot Mirror
Probably the same people who buy brand new Dell desktops rather than upgrade anything more complex than RAM or a hard drive.
-matthew
I think you just answered your own question. To make the stuff fit into the smallest possible space, they need to build just about everything into the mainboard. You'd more or less be buy a new computer when you "upgrade" anyway. Might as well replace the shell too. And the battery is probably not going to be very good buy the time you get arund to upgrading. Might as well replace that as well. I think modular laptops would be less desirable than you think.
-matthew
The Atari 2600 sold 40 million units.
Right there the numbers are pretty comparable. Now, add in other common systems. Intellivision and Colecovision each sold 6 million units. Right there you've almost equaled the NES. What about the other misc. systems that were either strictly console gaming system are hybrid console/PC?
If that isn't mainstream, I don't know what is. I wouldn't be picking on your statement that "nobody was playing consoles before the NES" if the numbers were in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. But we're talking about millions here. Millions of households had some kind of gaming console before the NES. It was mainstream. Not quite "ubiquitous" but definitely mainstream. But the state of console gaming before the NES was not good. NES changed that. It changed what video games could do and it made console gaming completely main stream. If you read the article, the reason the state of console gaming was "not good" was because of too much selection and too many poor quality games. It was stagnant. NES merely breathed new life into the industry. It didn't invent it or even make it mainstream. It's like saying nobody was on the internet before Mosaic. Sure it's not strictly true, but Mosaic is what made the internet (or www, rather) take off. Except in this case it's like if Mosaic started the boom and then went on to dominate the web-browser market for a decade. I don't think the analogy is apt. As I pointed out, game consoles were already in millions of households before the NES. The internet was not.
-matthew
Huh? Before NES came out i knew lots of people who had one of the following: Some version of the Atari, Colecovision (I had this), Intellivision, C64 (yes, many people used these primarily as a game console). There were even some lesser known systems that I saw at friends' houses like the Odyssey2. NES did not make console gaming mainstream by any means. It just made a quantum leap as far as what consoles could do and consolidated all those other misc. systems into one. No longer was it a question of what console you had, it was "Which NES games do you have?"
-matthew
Is it 21 now? I thought it was 7. And no, that isn't proof of it being possible to recover data from a drive that has been overwritten. It just means the government knows it not necessarily impossible. SO they're just careful. Also, I imagine they figure if you're going to overwrite it once, it isn't much trouble telling a program to do it many times. Is it overkill? Certainly. But apparently 3 passes isn't considered enough.
Or it is just as easy to do it 21 times. It is one of those "why not?" things. The only thing that counts as evidence that it (recovery of data from one or more overwrites) can be done is that it has been done.
-matthew
Grr, why does everyone reference that paper and just assume it has actually been proven in teh field? That whole paper is just THEORY which has never been show to be practical, as far as I know.
Which 'recovery services' are these? Can you reference any authoritative reports of ANYONE recovering a meaningful amount of data even 1 pass deep?
The only difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference. Congrats for referencing the same old paper that everyone else references on this subject. Now try finding reports of people who've actually recovered a meaningful amount of data from a drive that has been overwritten with random data.
Yes, that is the common myth. And some say it is theoretically possibly. But nobody has ever published anything that I am aware of showing it actually being done. Can you point to reports of anyone actually do it? Anyone sell these "special readers?"
That said, i think it depends on WHAT you overwrite the data with. If you just use all zeros, then ya, you MIGHT be able to see what was there before, but if you write random data, I doubt you'll be recovering much, if anything. Maybe you'll get lucky and read some off-track writes, but I dunno.
-matthew
I don't know about you, but there are times when the phone ringing while I'm working can make me jump or at least flinch. The thing is that people DON'T call me when I'm just sitting there waiting for something to compile. They invariably call when I'm focused on something (or so it seems). And then there's email. Being a slave to your inbox and compulsively reading ever new message that comes in will definitly cut down on productivity and cause stress. I don't know about elevated levels of cortisol or epinephrin, but I think there is something to the idea that multitasking is stressful. I know I'd feel a lot more relaxed and focused if I could just turn off my phone and email for hours at a time without worry.
The study may have been a little extreme. But I think it still might have some truth to it.
-matthew
I do it all the time. I've never had a job (aside from working at Walmart as a teen) where I didn't feel I could disagree with or constructively criticize my boss. Of course, you need to attain a certain level of rapport and competence before you go shooting your mouth off, but you shouldn't have to be afraid.
You're thinking too narrowly. So what if ASP.NET 2.0 is a lot different than 1.0? CS is about concepts and patterns. Not about the framework du jour. If your education centered on teaching you a specific language and/or framework, you got ripped off.
Well, Visual Basic has always been a bit of a toy. Nobody I know ever really took it seriously. SO yeah, I can see that becoming the next "COBOL" in the sense that it will be obsolete. But Java? Please! Java devs I know kinda like it. It has plenty of third party support. It is fast and mature. And technically speaking it isn't really that much differnt than C#. So how do you figure it is going to be the next COBOL? Certainly not any time soon.
I'm talking about CS because that is what this thread is about. The issue is this: how fast does technology move and how quickly is what you learn in CS obsolete? I was responding to a person who claimed that most of what you learn is CS is obsolete in the time it takes to make up a lesson plan. Which is just plain wrong.
I'm perfectly comfortable with my ability to pick up new languages and frameworks as needed. And that is because I grasp the larger concepts and patterns, rather than focusing on the the syntax and APIs of particular frameworks.
-matthew
Ok, but how much does what you learn in CS depend on language specific features? I'm not saying you don't have to keep up to date on languages and APIs. But there's no real fundamental change in the above. Then again, I'm not intimtely familiar with C# specifically, so maybe its evolution was so radical that it makes everything you knew before obsolete. But I seriously doubt it.
So what about this makes what I might have learned in CS obsolete?
You've gone beyond taking my statement out of context. Now you're confusing a change in popularity of a language with a change in the language itself. Even Ruby 1.9 (soon to be 2.0, hopefully) doesn't change THAT much. It will mostly just make Ruby faster.
As we speak, I'm in the process of writing a nasty letter to my alma mater demanding my money back because my entire CS education was centered around a web framework that has now been obsoleted by CakePHP.... NOT.
There's plenty of jobs of developers who specialize in Java, for example. Now you're just making shit up.
Again, confusing changes in language/framework popularity with fundamental changes in CS. tsk tsk.
You would happen to write for Wired magazine, would you? Because this is exactly the kind of technology infatuated garbage I would expect from taht magazine.
Nonsense. Technology does not move THAT fast. Even saying 50% is obsolete in 2 years is a bit a of a stretch. Seriously, how much has CS/IT really changed in CS since 2005? Maybe a new major version of Java? Yeah, I'm sure Java developers were just scrambling to catch up there... not. Most just continued targeting old releases. Any big changes in Javascript? Python? PHP? Perl? Ruby? C#? Nope, still the same stuff with perhaps a few API updates here and there. Have basic concepts like sorting, linked lists, and recursion changed? Nope. Has some new major concept in programming replaced OO? Nope. Hell, you coudl probably go back 7 years and not find too many major CS concepts that have changed significantly.
Anyone who says that what they learn in CS is obsolete in the time it takes to develop lesson plans and get textbooks approved either went to a shitty school (and had shitty text books) or simply failed to grasp the larger concepts and patterns.
-mtthew
Why "soon?" What is going to change in the near future that will make insecure software/configurations any more of a threat than they already are?
Diversity is one good way of avoiding large scale security related disasters. Sure, individuals will still get hurt, but if theres a broad range of software options available (and used) there's not much that can take down the internet as a whole or put us in a "world of hurt."
What "rate" is that? Do you have statistics that show that software is getting less secure or more bugs are found? My subjective impression is that software in general is getting better on the whole. And security is slowly becoming more of a priority. The only thing that is changing is the scale of the exploits when a bug is found. No longer is it important to have control over individual systems. Black Hats need botnets. Again, more diversity will help greatly in keeping the effect of this to a minimum. Holding software vendors monetarily responsible for hacks would kill the industry and possibly hurt diversity.
Besides, who is goign to pay when free software is exploited? Can you really justify extracting money from developers who offer their wares to the public for free?
-matthew
Um, what's so impressive about working with many distributions? It is all the same base software, just packaged differently. Besides, it isn't up to the KDE people to make sure it works on different distributions. It is up to the distribution maintainers.
And it is much better for the users who don't have to worry about finding drivers (much) and getting random hardware to work. I'm not really sure how you can twist the fact that owning a PC is quite often a pain in the ass into something that is "impressive."
What is impressive about KDE is the magnitude of the project and that it is all done by volunteers. That's all, really.
-matthew
Have you tried http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/shapeshifter ?
We were talking about 10.0 which was the first release of OS X.
Regardless, we're still trying to compare a whole OS to a desktop environment. KDE 4.0 ought to be more stable than a a brand new OS.
Which would make KDE 4.0 look worse in comparison.
-matthew
And KDE is not entirely an operating system.
So I guess the question is, why you using OS X at all? I am a former desktop Linux user of 12 years and I have fully embraced Cocoa apps. The Finder works fine for me. iTerm works fine. I love TextMate for editing. There's a number of Cocoa torrent clients (what does it really have to do besides sit there in the background and download anyway?) But then I suppose was never much for KDE or GNOME even when I was using Linux on the desktop. It was all XFCE or WindowMaker for me. I was used to running just random apps each using a differnt UI toolkit... few of which looked or behaved the same. The ONLY thing I miss from Linux is the desktop pager. I've tried a few implementations on OSX but none of them really work Just Right(tm).
Only if you consider a QT app to be native, which I don't. QT is an abstraction of the Carbon API. And KDE is further abstraction of QT. I doubt that any KDE app would ever integrate well enough with the rest of my OS X desktop to make me want to use it. And if the K app was really that awesome, I'd always secretly be hoping for someone to port/rewrite/reimplement it directly to Cocoa.
Anyway, the app I mentioned was GTK. Though I should mention that I haven't read newsgroups in a while and haven't bothered reinstall PAN since I upgraded to Leopard. I guess my point is that for most common functionality, I find that native Cocoa apps are not only better individually than Linux counterparts, but also integrate better with each other. Like Java (Swing/SWT) apps, K apps would have an automatic handicap running on OS X in my opinion.
-matthew
So? It still doesn't make sense to compare KDE 4.0 to the very first release of an entirely new operating system.
Using "native" somewhat loosely, of course. I know Qt apps can do a decent job of at least appearing native, but I have my doubts about anything that is further abstracted with KDE libraries. Doesn't KDE provide a lot of redundant facilities such as a VFS that would make integration with the Finder, the Dock, and other Cocoa apps somewhat... awkward? Will the K apps come packaged nicely in .app folders or would I have to manage packages and installers? I can't say I'm terribly excited by the prospect of K apps on OS X. Seriously, what's the point?
Ha! I've heard Windows called a lot of things, but "comfy" is not one of them. I'll assume what you mean is "ensnaring."
-matthew
Yeah, except that KDE is LONG past its first .0 release. And it is only the desktop.. not a whole OS.