Read the next few paragraphs in my original posting.
> Yes the minor issues for one are the biggest buggers for others
When did I say those were minor issues? My point was that it seemd all people cared about were these few issues, when there's plenty more things to consider as well.
> Exactly IN DEVELOPMENT that's what it is. I wonder if it's stable for anytime usage one day. Till yet I have more issues with GStreamer than with anything else.
You have just repeated what I said. Yes it is in development - it's a fact I thought to mention since no one has.
> The strenghts of Windows Registry IS Windows Regsitry and no poorly written wannabe immitation. Gconf caused more damage than anything good. I am able to count a lot of disadvantages about GConf but then it may sound like a rant in your eyes.
What? My posting had not a single piece of flaming. Yet you decline to offer these "disadvantages" claiming I will take it as a rant? Try me.
> Freedesktop.org is just a discussion forum for either KDE and GNOME to suggest good solutions howto do things nothign else. > When I then go over to contact the person responsible for the app he replies 'fuck off i dont care for gnome or kde'.
That's right! You just repeated my words again. And people ignoring the HIG is no different from companies ignoring web standards or compiler standards and introducing extensions/incompatibilities. It happens. Don't use 'em if it causes problems.
> Yeah what an ideal world eh ? On my GNOME 2.2 CVS installation that I compiled last night only 1/10 of the keys are commented the others are not. And this from a standard GNOME only installation no addational applications.
Bugs! Please report to bugzilla, not slashdot. Thanks.
> Dude, seriously you are totally biassed.
What does that mean? That I prefer one over the other? Of course! I just looked at more things when making a decision, and I wished for more people here to do the same.
Everyone is ignoring so much stuff!!
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The article in question is obviously nothing anyone should take seriously. It does not even pretend to be an honest comparison between two windowing environments; it's basically one person's rant about why he prefers one over the other. Good for him, but mentioning only KDE's good points and only Gnome's bad points isn't a useful comparison to anyone else.
I'm surpised at how poorly informed the people who discuss Gnome vs KDE are. No one has mentioned any of the new accomplishments both environments has achieved. It's still all "file selector" this and "configuration options" that. Dudes, I stopped fretting over thing like that years ago. There's plenty of other things that need focus for a good desktop environment, and are being worked on as we speak, but no one has mentioned them in any of the comments I've read.
Anyone here even know about the massive time spent on building a rich and powerful "accessibility toolkit" ATK? Or the very well thought out multimedia framework GStreamer that's currently in development. I've only seen a few mentions of the establishment and accomplishments of freedesktop.org - whose goal is to set standards (such as the HIG) which both Gnome and KDE can follow to achieve consistency and inoperatability. How about the universal adoption of Unicode (using UTF8) throughout so that proper internationalization is finally possible?
These are important things, and much more forward looking than all the nitpicking that's so prevalent in these discussions. These articles and the bickering that ensues are no better than "celebrity tells all" and "other celebrity makes rebuttal" shows on TV. Totally pointless - fun to watch sometimes - but pointless.
One thing I need to add: Most complaints about GConf that I've read are miss-informed. Yes, the closest approximation is the Windows registry. But it was created with the strengths of that registry in mind, and steps taken to get rid of the problems that the registry had. For example, ALL keys are documented. Which is easier? Hand editing a text file, or going down a list of fully documented options in a gui editor - toggling boolean keys, editing strings, etc.
I'm obviously a Gnome user. I know KDE has it's own list of accomplishments, but I don't know them well enough to list. My point is, why the hell are you choosing a desktop environment based on which has a better file selector? There is plenty more to look at.
I remember big events in my first home. Like when the stove caught fire during a big party, or when I stole a cigarette from my dad, or when I peeked through the door when my mother was showering and surprised her. I think was between 2 and 3 for all of those.
But you know what? I suspect that instead of that being the earliest thing I can remember, it's rather the earliest thing I remember remebering.
Blizzard made many patches since then to fix the "4-zergling rush" and many other cheeze rushes that almost guaranteed a win. You stopped playing very very early on. Starcraft Broodwars is still very actively played today (especially in my dorm) - with everyone playing all the races. The beauty of Starcraft is not that it's balanced. It's that it's balanced even though the 3 races are completely different and use completely different strats.
I have a question. Are there _any_ distributions that set up and use ALSA as the default and main sound system? I mean, from what I've gathered, it's sure better than OSS in many departments, and even has OSS compatibility. With distributions switching to using GRUB for bootloading and other changes, why haven't we seen a trend towards using ALSA? Just a thought.
The year 2001 had to be the worst year of my entire life. What with dropping out of school for a while, falling greatly in debt, losing a job, and missing several important opportunities, I'm surprised I'm still alive. And to top the whole damn thing off, just near the end of the year, when things are starting to look up again, my girlfriend of 3 years and I break up so badly I went insane for a couple of days. *Sigh* What doesn't kill me can only make me stronger.....
Something is seriously wrong with the Ximian FTP Servers. It causes NcFTP to SEGFAULT!! No other FTP client can connect either. Grumble stupid slashdot effect grumble.
You are right, you DON'T understand the problem. You cannot help countries in need just by "giving them money". What they need is food and medicine during emergencies, but more importantly, they need skilled people who can help build infrastructure to help the economy grow - things from simple farming equipment all the way to high-tech tools. The money people donate helps pay to get this done. But to get anything done, YOU NEED PEOPLE. Skilled people for that matter. That is why I believe that volunteering to work for a non-profit org is way way better than just donating money.
I come from a 3rd-world country - Bangladesh to be exact. I was lucky enough to have parents that poured their heart and soul to give me a good education, which allowed me to be able to come to the US for college. But I digress. Bangladesh has thousands and thousands of villages, all inhabited by relatively poor people. What they needed was not money, but education and training. Foreign Aid organizations and the local government did just that. They installed a "Money for education" program which encouraged families to send their children to school (especially girls) instead of keeping them at home to work (at home or in the fields). They send skilled people to villages all over the place to train people how to better cultivate the land with newer but not-that-expensive technology. They give simple loans to people to get started. And all in all, the government actually almost breaks even. Because although there was an initial investent that had to be made, it was rewarded greatly by a vast number of people suddenly earning a decent revenue through fishing, farming, etc.
That mission didn't cost very much money, what it needed was lots of people.
I'm setting up a web-server and file-server for my dorm - which shall have upto 100 computers accessing it. The files are mostly small ones - almost all less than 10 MB. I want a journalling filesystem that journals file data as well as metadata. What should I use?
I don't see how "editing the World Trade Center out" of a movie is being "sensitive to the recent events". If it's because they've only done part of the filming, and that filming had the WTC in them, and now the rest of the filming won't, then I obviously understand. But if it's just because of the recent terrorist acts, then so what. Keep the WTC in them. Movies and photographs are the only things now that will keep the image of the old WTC alive.
What are you talking about? That's already what Mozilla does!!! The browser, the mail/news reader, the ssl system, etc. are all seperate components, of which only the browser is compulsory to install. It has been like this for ages!!! I must admit that the composer is included with the browser, when it should be a seperate component, but apart from that Mozilla is a "component-based application". ------------------
I think a simple example will best explain and summarize what Miguel was trying to convey in the article. When he said "aiming low", he is not advocating throwing away the "blue sky goal", but instead he's suggesting to approach it gradually, rather than in one BIG jump.
Here is the example. Say we think we need 6 months to do all the architectural changes and stuff to get to Gnome 2.0. Based on the "delays" examples he's given, we'll probably end up taking 12 months to actually finish it. Meanwhile, in those 12 months, the stable Gnome 1.2 (or 1.4) will languish and just have bug fixes, with no preview of what's to come. Rather, if we "aim low" at first, then in 6 months we are sure to have *some* extra features/improvements. Gnome 2.0 might (and probably will) take 12 months, but at least we have *something* in 6 months to work with and use.
Remember that Gnome is not an Application, not even just a Desktop Environment. IMHO the most important aspect of Gnome is that it is a Development Environment across Unices. If things break all of a sudden, a whole strew of applications will break with it. If Gnome 2.0 takes 12 months to be declared stable, a whole strew of applications will be unstable for 12 months, or use the old Gnome instead. However, if we have something not as good in 6 months, and then the blue sky goal after another 6 months, the applications can do the same.
This approach follows quite nicely with the "release early, release often" mentality. Instead of doing a massive upgrade, Miguel is proposing taking smaller steps and releasing something stable each time. The key here is to aim at something reasonable each time.
Well, if you are compiling from source because the latest RPM isn't available, why not create your own RPM from the source, then install the RPM. Most packages that are found in RPM format have the specfile in the source, and so making an RPM from the latest source is as easy as rpm -tb package.tar.gz. Once that is done, install the RPM. Also, you can upload the RPM to the projects site, so that other people can use it! ------------------
Ever heard of shared memory? Each of those applets may be using 1 MB, but 80% - 90% of that 1 MB is shared. I really think we need a new version of "top" that makes this properly obvious to people who are a little slow to get it. ------------------
A lot of people seem adverse to the fact that Gnome is trying to do so much - desktopwise (window manager, panel, sessions, etc), toolwise (mail clients and backend, schedulers, etc.), applicationwise (gnome office, etc.) and COM libraries and interfaces (bonobo). It's against UNIX nature to try to be one-solves-all instead of doing small things well.
However, if you looks at the history of Gnome, you'll see that way back when Gnome was first created, Gnome was just about Bonobo. Hence the name "GNU Network Object Model Environment".And Gnome was apparently going to be "part of KDE". However, because KDE was using a propietory toolkit (QT) for it's core work, Gnome expanded to include the Desktop Interface. Everything else in Gnome comes from these original two - a COM-like architecture and a Desktop Interface.
The way I see it, GNOME project is really just the GNU project all over again, but one step up. The GNU project's original goal was to make a "Free Operating System" (defining operating system as everything you need to get work done). So far they've achieved the first stage of that goal. They've created the backbone of a free system - an OS kernel (GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd), compilers, basic libraries, display (XFree), various development utilities and tools, etc. GNOME is taking care of stage two: bring that free system to the generic modern user with easy graphical interfaces and large end-user applications. ------------------
It seems that Bowie is trying to suggest that it's all Naru Sundar's (the new maintainer) fault that Propaganda is "languishing", and so must be killed. The way I see it, he didn't have time to make more backgrounds, and so he got someone else to maintain the site and continue making backgrounds. Most probably that guy as well didn't have enough time in his hands to keep making backgrounds. And now Bowie is not only stopping his so-called "project", but he's removing the two volumes Naru had spent time to create, plus blaming him for the site's "demise". And judging from the article and his comments on other articles regarding Propaganda, methinks Bowie is a tad too arrogant about this "contribution" to the world. I liked the backgrounds, both his and Naru's, but his attitude has space for improvement. I mean, calling the last two volumes (Naru's) "less than steller" was downright rude.
Bowie, if you are reading this, calm down and stop being so protective of your "project". How about keeping the site up (wherever it may be) and allow other people to contribute, sort of like themes.org. ------------------
Actually, it doesn't work exactly like that. Contracts that employee's sign when joining a company can specify that code the employee writes for the company, or code written using the technology provided by the company belongs to the company. The company, however, cannot claim ownership of code written by that employee in his own time in his own house. And, I doubt any Microsoft employee would be working in Linux code at work (where all machines most probably run just Windows). ------------------
For one thing, people would by a VCD because they have a conscience and would like to own a legal copy. Secondly, VCD is a widely used format in many parts of the world, especially Asia. It's almost as mainstream as VHS, whereas DVD is still years away from catching on. ------------------
> 1. No pointers. It can't possibly be a programming language.
Why not? Even though it doesn't have pointers per say, it handles all of its objects pretty much like C handles pointers, albeit more cleanly.
> 2. People say it has no #includes, yet there continues to be this funny, mystical command called 'import'...
Useless gripe, IMHO. "import", unlike #include (which just inserts code from a seperate file) loads up a library of functions. Again, cleaner.
> 3. Strings are a class!!! Whose dumb idea was it to take a string, call it a class, and make stringVariableName.equals(someOtherString); be a strcmp(a,b);?
I don't know about you, but a.equals(b) seems more intuitive to me then strcmp(a, b). Again, cleaner.
Don't get me wrong, I luv C and C++ as much as Java, but one thing I must agree to is the fact that Java is a much cleaner implementation of most of the functionality found in C and C++. ------------------
I've got a Pentium 100 with only 24 megs of RAM. Yes it's REALLY old but I'm pretty poor and am saving up until I get enough money for a REALLY good system. But until then this suits me just fine. Now for my current system, Gnome and KDE are just too memory hungry, and Enlightenment brings everything to a crawl.
So I had to choose between windowmaker, blackbox and icewm. I chose icewm because it had a smaller memory footprint than the others, had adequate theme support, and was gnome-aware (so I could easily set up gtk themes to match my icewm themes, for example).
I tried XFCE this evening, and it's great. I recognize the layout from all the old Unix machines in my lab, but I like the layout, it's simple, but easy to extend as much as I wish. Plus, it is gnome aware. Even though it has a slightly higher memory footprint than icewm, it runs noticeably faster.
The thing I like best of all though, is that I no longer need to configure two sets of themes - GTK and the Window Manager. XFCE does both together. Nice! ------------------
In my opinion, the only thing which the college professors can claim to have intellectual property rights on are hard copies of their lectures that they themselves wrote. Many professors create transparencies, slides, and other hard copy notes for theirs students. These, I believe, belong to them and not the students.
Notes which the student took himself while attending a lecture is the student's own work and hence the student can claim intellectual property rights on those notes. For example, if I attended some conference, and the speaker presented a few ideas on a certain topic, and I later go back home and right an article on my interpretation of his ideas, that article belongs to me, not the speaker.
The professors can require, at most, acknowledgement in the students' notes that those notes were taken at a lecture by that professor. That would be nice, actually.
Slashdot Mirror
> And the Good points in GNOME are ?
Read the next few paragraphs in my original posting.
> Yes the minor issues for one are the biggest buggers for others
When did I say those were minor issues? My point was that it seemd all people cared about were these few issues, when there's plenty more things to consider as well.
> Exactly IN DEVELOPMENT that's what it is. I wonder if it's stable for anytime usage one day. Till yet I have more issues with GStreamer than with anything else.
You have just repeated what I said. Yes it is in development - it's a fact I thought to mention since no one has.
> The strenghts of Windows Registry IS Windows Regsitry and no poorly written wannabe immitation. Gconf caused more damage than anything good. I am able to count a lot of disadvantages about GConf but then it may sound like a rant in your eyes.
What? My posting had not a single piece of flaming. Yet you decline to offer these "disadvantages" claiming I will take it as a rant? Try me.
> Freedesktop.org is just a discussion forum for either KDE and GNOME to suggest good solutions howto do things nothign else.
> When I then go over to contact the person responsible for the app he replies 'fuck off i dont care for gnome or kde'.
That's right! You just repeated my words again. And people ignoring the HIG is no different from companies ignoring web standards or compiler standards and introducing extensions/incompatibilities. It happens. Don't use 'em if it causes problems.
> Yeah what an ideal world eh ? On my GNOME 2.2 CVS installation that I compiled last night only 1/10 of the keys are commented the others are not. And this from a standard GNOME only installation no addational applications.
Bugs! Please report to bugzilla, not slashdot. Thanks.
> Dude, seriously you are totally biassed.
What does that mean? That I prefer one over the other? Of course! I just looked at more things when making a decision, and I wished for more people here to do the same.
The article in question is obviously nothing anyone should take seriously. It does not even pretend to be an honest comparison between two windowing environments; it's basically one person's rant about why he prefers one over the other. Good for him, but mentioning only KDE's good points and only Gnome's bad points isn't a useful comparison to anyone else.
I'm surpised at how poorly informed the people who discuss Gnome vs KDE are. No one has mentioned any of the new accomplishments both environments has achieved. It's still all "file selector" this and "configuration options" that. Dudes, I stopped fretting over thing like that years ago. There's plenty of other things that need focus for a good desktop environment, and are being worked on as we speak, but no one has mentioned them in any of the comments I've read.
Anyone here even know about the massive time spent on building a rich and powerful "accessibility toolkit" ATK? Or the very well thought out multimedia framework GStreamer that's currently in development. I've only seen a few mentions of the establishment and accomplishments of freedesktop.org - whose goal is to set standards (such as the HIG) which both Gnome and KDE can follow to achieve consistency and inoperatability. How about the universal adoption of Unicode (using UTF8) throughout so that proper internationalization is finally possible?
These are important things, and much more forward looking than all the nitpicking that's so prevalent in these discussions. These articles and the bickering that ensues are no better than "celebrity tells all" and "other celebrity makes rebuttal" shows on TV. Totally pointless - fun to watch sometimes - but pointless.
One thing I need to add: Most complaints about GConf that I've read are miss-informed. Yes, the closest approximation is the Windows registry. But it was created with the strengths of that registry in mind, and steps taken to get rid of the problems that the registry had. For example, ALL keys are documented. Which is easier? Hand editing a text file, or going down a list of fully documented options in a gui editor - toggling boolean keys, editing strings, etc.
I'm obviously a Gnome user. I know KDE has it's own list of accomplishments, but I don't know them well enough to list. My point is, why the hell are you choosing a desktop environment based on which has a better file selector? There is plenty more to look at.
Certain sun machines (their names escape me at the moment) with multiple processors can hot-swap their CPU's.
I remember big events in my first home. Like when the stove caught fire during a big party, or when I stole a cigarette from my dad, or when I peeked through the door when my mother was showering and surprised her. I think was between 2 and 3 for all of those.
But you know what? I suspect that instead of that being the earliest thing I can remember, it's rather the earliest thing I remember remebering.
Another dupe in mere hours? They are in the same Slashdot page for crying out loud! :-)
Beat this!
Blizzard made many patches since then to fix the "4-zergling rush" and many other cheeze rushes that almost guaranteed a win. You stopped playing very very early on. Starcraft Broodwars is still very actively played today (especially in my dorm) - with everyone playing all the races. The beauty of Starcraft is not that it's balanced. It's that it's balanced even though the 3 races are completely different and use completely different strats.
I have a question. Are there _any_ distributions that set up and use ALSA as the default and main sound system? I mean, from what I've gathered, it's sure better than OSS in many departments, and even has OSS compatibility. With distributions switching to using GRUB for bootloading and other changes, why haven't we seen a trend towards using ALSA? Just a thought.
The year 2001 had to be the worst year of my entire life. What with dropping out of school for a while, falling greatly in debt, losing a job, and missing several important opportunities, I'm surprised I'm still alive. And to top the whole damn thing off, just near the end of the year, when things are starting to look up again, my girlfriend of 3 years and I break up so badly I went insane for a couple of days. *Sigh* What doesn't kill me can only make me stronger .....
Something is seriously wrong with the Ximian FTP Servers. It causes NcFTP to SEGFAULT!! No other FTP client can connect either. Grumble stupid slashdot effect grumble.
You are right, you DON'T understand the problem. You cannot help countries in need just by "giving them money". What they need is food and medicine during emergencies, but more importantly, they need skilled people who can help build infrastructure to help the economy grow - things from simple farming equipment all the way to high-tech tools. The money people donate helps pay to get this done. But to get anything done, YOU NEED PEOPLE. Skilled people for that matter. That is why I believe that volunteering to work for a non-profit org is way way better than just donating money.
I come from a 3rd-world country - Bangladesh to be exact. I was lucky enough to have parents that poured their heart and soul to give me a good education, which allowed me to be able to come to the US for college. But I digress. Bangladesh has thousands and thousands of villages, all inhabited by relatively poor people. What they needed was not money, but education and training. Foreign Aid organizations and the local government did just that. They installed a "Money for education" program which encouraged families to send their children to school (especially girls) instead of keeping them at home to work (at home or in the fields). They send skilled people to villages all over the place to train people how to better cultivate the land with newer but not-that-expensive technology. They give simple loans to people to get started. And all in all, the government actually almost breaks even. Because although there was an initial investent that had to be made, it was rewarded greatly by a vast number of people suddenly earning a decent revenue through fishing, farming, etc.
That mission didn't cost very much money, what it needed was lots of people.
I'm setting up a web-server and file-server for my dorm - which shall have upto 100 computers accessing it. The files are mostly small ones - almost all less than 10 MB. I want a journalling filesystem that journals file data as well as metadata. What should I use?
People. He's just using this humorous approach to show us how ridiculous the DMCA can be.
I don't see how "editing the World Trade Center out" of a movie is being "sensitive to the recent events". If it's because they've only done part of the filming, and that filming had the WTC in them, and now the rest of the filming won't, then I obviously understand. But if it's just because of the recent terrorist acts, then so what. Keep the WTC in them. Movies and photographs are the only things now that will keep the image of the old WTC alive.
What are you talking about? That's already what Mozilla does!!! The browser, the mail/news reader, the ssl system, etc. are all seperate components, of which only the browser is compulsory to install. It has been like this for ages!!! I must admit that the composer is included with the browser, when it should be a seperate component, but apart from that Mozilla is a "component-based application".
------------------
I think a simple example will best explain and summarize what Miguel was trying to convey in the article. When he said "aiming low", he is not advocating throwing away the "blue sky goal", but instead he's suggesting to approach it gradually, rather than in one BIG jump.
Here is the example. Say we think we need 6 months to do all the architectural changes and stuff to get to Gnome 2.0. Based on the "delays" examples he's given, we'll probably end up taking 12 months to actually finish it. Meanwhile, in those 12 months, the stable Gnome 1.2 (or 1.4) will languish and just have bug fixes, with no preview of what's to come. Rather, if we "aim low" at first, then in 6 months we are sure to have *some* extra features/improvements. Gnome 2.0 might (and probably will) take 12 months, but at least we have *something* in 6 months to work with and use.
Remember that Gnome is not an Application, not even just a Desktop Environment. IMHO the most important aspect of Gnome is that it is a Development Environment across Unices. If things break all of a sudden, a whole strew of applications will break with it. If Gnome 2.0 takes 12 months to be declared stable, a whole strew of applications will be unstable for 12 months, or use the old Gnome instead. However, if we have something not as good in 6 months, and then the blue sky goal after another 6 months, the applications can do the same.
This approach follows quite nicely with the "release early, release often" mentality. Instead of doing a massive upgrade, Miguel is proposing taking smaller steps and releasing something stable each time. The key here is to aim at something reasonable each time.
------------------
Well, if you are compiling from source because the latest RPM isn't available, why not create your own RPM from the source, then install the RPM. Most packages that are found in RPM format have the specfile in the source, and so making an RPM from the latest source is as easy as rpm -tb package.tar.gz. Once that is done, install the RPM. Also, you can upload the RPM to the projects site, so that other people can use it!
------------------
Ever heard of shared memory? Each of those applets may be using 1 MB, but 80% - 90% of that 1 MB is shared. I really think we need a new version of "top" that makes this properly obvious to people who are a little slow to get it.
------------------
A lot of people seem adverse to the fact that Gnome is trying to do so much - desktopwise (window manager, panel, sessions, etc), toolwise (mail clients and backend, schedulers, etc.), applicationwise (gnome office, etc.) and COM libraries and interfaces (bonobo). It's against UNIX nature to try to be one-solves-all instead of doing small things well.
However, if you looks at the history of Gnome, you'll see that way back when Gnome was first created, Gnome was just about Bonobo. Hence the name "GNU Network Object Model Environment".And Gnome was apparently going to be "part of KDE". However, because KDE was using a propietory toolkit (QT) for it's core work, Gnome expanded to include the Desktop Interface. Everything else in Gnome comes from these original two - a COM-like architecture and a Desktop Interface.
The way I see it, GNOME project is really just the GNU project all over again, but one step up. The GNU project's original goal was to make a "Free Operating System" (defining operating system as everything you need to get work done). So far they've achieved the first stage of that goal. They've created the backbone of a free system - an OS kernel (GNU/Linux or GNU/Hurd), compilers, basic libraries, display (XFree), various development utilities and tools, etc. GNOME is taking care of stage two: bring that free system to the generic modern user with easy graphical interfaces and large end-user applications.
------------------
It seems that Bowie is trying to suggest that it's all Naru Sundar's (the new maintainer) fault that Propaganda is "languishing", and so must be killed. The way I see it, he didn't have time to make more backgrounds, and so he got someone else to maintain the site and continue making backgrounds. Most probably that guy as well didn't have enough time in his hands to keep making backgrounds. And now Bowie is not only stopping his so-called "project", but he's removing the two volumes Naru had spent time to create, plus blaming him for the site's "demise". And judging from the article and his comments on other articles regarding Propaganda, methinks Bowie is a tad too arrogant about this "contribution" to the world. I liked the backgrounds, both his and Naru's, but his attitude has space for improvement. I mean, calling the last two volumes (Naru's) "less than steller" was downright rude.
Bowie, if you are reading this, calm down and stop being so protective of your "project". How about keeping the site up (wherever it may be) and allow other people to contribute, sort of like themes.org.
------------------
Actually, it doesn't work exactly like that. Contracts that employee's sign when joining a company can specify that code the employee writes for the company, or code written using the technology provided by the company belongs to the company. The company, however, cannot claim ownership of code written by that employee in his own time in his own house. And, I doubt any Microsoft employee would be working in Linux code at work (where all machines most probably run just Windows).
------------------
For one thing, people would by a VCD because they have a conscience and would like to own a legal copy. Secondly, VCD is a widely used format in many parts of the world, especially Asia. It's almost as mainstream as VHS, whereas DVD is still years away from catching on.
------------------
> 1. No pointers. It can't possibly be a programming language.
Why not? Even though it doesn't have pointers per say, it handles all of its objects pretty much like C handles pointers, albeit more cleanly.
> 2. People say it has no #includes, yet there continues to be this funny, mystical command called 'import'...
Useless gripe, IMHO. "import", unlike #include (which just inserts code from a seperate file) loads up a library of functions. Again, cleaner.
> 3. Strings are a class!!! Whose dumb idea was it to take a string, call it a class, and make stringVariableName.equals(someOtherString); be a strcmp(a,b);?
I don't know about you, but a.equals(b) seems more intuitive to me then strcmp(a, b). Again, cleaner.
Don't get me wrong, I luv C and C++ as much as Java, but one thing I must agree to is the fact that Java is a much cleaner implementation of most of the functionality found in C and C++.
------------------
I've got a Pentium 100 with only 24 megs of RAM. Yes it's REALLY old but I'm pretty poor and am saving up until I get enough money for a REALLY good system. But until then this suits me just fine. Now for my current system, Gnome and KDE are just too memory hungry, and Enlightenment brings everything to a crawl.
So I had to choose between windowmaker, blackbox and icewm. I chose icewm because it had a smaller memory footprint than the others, had adequate theme support, and was gnome-aware (so I could easily set up gtk themes to match my icewm themes, for example).
I tried XFCE this evening, and it's great. I recognize the layout from all the old Unix machines in my lab, but I like the layout, it's simple, but easy to extend as much as I wish. Plus, it is gnome aware. Even though it has a slightly higher memory footprint than icewm, it runs noticeably faster.
The thing I like best of all though, is that I no longer need to configure two sets of themes - GTK and the Window Manager. XFCE does both together. Nice!
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In my opinion, the only thing which the college professors can claim to have intellectual property rights on are hard copies of their lectures that they themselves wrote. Many professors create transparencies, slides, and other hard copy notes for theirs students. These, I believe, belong to them and not the students.
Notes which the student took himself while attending a lecture is the student's own work and hence the student can claim intellectual property rights on those notes. For example, if I attended some conference, and the speaker presented a few ideas on a certain topic, and I later go back home and right an article on my interpretation of his ideas, that article belongs to me, not the speaker.
The professors can require, at most, acknowledgement in the students' notes that those notes were taken at a lecture by that professor. That would be nice, actually.
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