Swing is portable (native-looking Swing) to any platform the JVM and the standard class libraries has been ported to. SWT, on the other hand is only available on the platforms that SWT has been ported to. With Swing I can just distribute an app and it only requires the JRE. Not so with SWT. SWT won't be added to the Java Class library because SWT just isn't that great of a framework given the alternative. Sorry but from a developers point of view, verbose as it is, Swing is a better and more flexible framework than SWT.
When Java 6 is released, Swing will use native drawing on all supported platforms. This means under Linux, your swing apps will blend right into your gnome desktop (at least as much as SWT anyway) and on Windows I doubt any user could now distinguish a Swing app from a native app. Sun has put a lot of energy into making Swing fast and good-looking, now that the supporting Java class framework is mature.
In fact, with Java 6 it is hard to find any compelling reason at all to build SWT apps instead of just using Swing. SWT apps are not portable without bundling specific dlls for each platform. Further SWT isn't even that great of a framework, but it has worked well for what it was made for, eclipse.
So please stop spouting this continued FUD about how bad swing is. Yes it was horrible in the past and looked like the ugly step-child. But with Java 6 Swing is poised to be a good candidate for serious desktop java use. Even a couple of years ago, Apple's customizations to Swing illustrate that Swing was capable of being a first-class GUI citizen. Apple bundles a number of Java apps that are wrapped in a nice app bundle and no one would ever know there were Java rather than some native binary.
Definitely KDE's io-slaves are very good. Gnome does have the gnome-vfs subsystem, which in theory provides a similar function, but just seems to be lacking any real, useful functionality. I have yet to see gnome-vfs used the way most KDE users depend on io-slaves. There's not even a working fish:/// protocol. There is sftp:/// but I would find fish more useful as it works with servers that may not have sftp working; all it needs is shell access. However, both io-slaves and gnome-vfs have a fatal flaw in that they only are available to apps who know about them (IE linked to the KDE or Gnome libraries). There are a myriad of usability issues to overcome to make this kind of io layer work at the lower levels where all apps could benefit, however. So it is a tough issue. I have used a hack that used fuse to mount a kde io-slave url to a folder that anyone could access. It worked most of the time, but required an X11 connection to display the password dialog boxes.
Since spacial browsing is optional, I don't think that this alone is a valid reason to disparage Nautilus. The tired old argument against Gnome for having reasonable, simple defaults doesn't really fly either. It's all a matter of personal preference. Your need to micromanage the UI doesn't mean that all users want to micromange the UI anymore than my preference of sane defaults that I never have to tweak means everyone should also have the same preference. I don't find either Konqueror or Nautilus to be that useful to me period. My favorite file managers are the bash shell and the venerable Midnight Commander.
Re:On OS X, it's all about SubEthaEdit
on
Vim 7 Released
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Sure but SubEthaEdit has a very annoying and on-going bug that the developers cannot seem to reproduce or fix. Invariably, SubEthaEdit litters my code with random ":" and sometimes ":w". It's very annoying. Occasionally I see other random sequences appear like "gg", "yy", "dd", and "x".
uh huh. Slow CPU eh. Let's see. It's an Athlon 2800+ XP running at 2 GHz. While that may not be as fast as a CoreSingle at the same speed, it's more than enough to decode video. I mean come on. xine has absolutely no problems with syncing or frame dropping for that matter. No this is an mplayer problem (a chronic problem I might add). Still mplayer is a marvelous piece of work, being the first to use windows dlls to decode proprietary codecs. Until the situation improves, though, xine just works fine for me. I'll check out mplayer from time to time and see how it is progressing.
Maybe things have changed recently, but I always found mplayer to quickly lose video/audio syncing and often segfaults, although I disovered that the segfaulting is because of the video output device somehow. Using gmplayer works fine. But xine just works better for me. I run it from the command line (Gui hidden) and it plays everything I throw at it.
Google never took a Miro painting and copied it; they made a logo that was in a style of Miro. This is not a copyright violation. This is fair use. And if these companies did what you have mentioned in a similar way (not reproductions but just simply likenesses) then that is not wrong. In fact, other than trademark infringement their is nothing you can do.
Now your example doesn't apply to this google situation anyway because you are talking about blatant use of your copyrighted works in a way is just plain copying. So yes your post should be rated off-topic because it is. And how you manage to drag the GPL into this is a red herring too. Someone is perfectly welcome to make program that looks much like and acts much like a GPL'd program and use it for any purpose without violating the GPL or copyright on the code.
From what the article said, it does prefer wifi over cell towers.
Sure, but if the phone can switch from wifi to cellular and back again without dropping your call, what this really means is that you're still communicating with your provider (using VoIP) and so you're still getting charged for minutes. Of course it is probably possible to use your own provider like vonage or something similar with these types of phones, but you would not be able to seemlessly switch from one to the other (vonage on wifi to verizon cellular) without dropping the call.
Seems to me that the latest incarnation which requires firefox 1.5 and takes over the entire window (menu and everything) is just a normal web-hosted XUL application. If this is the case then it is not technically ajax. Can someone shed some light on this? I mean will it work on IE 6? What about Safari?
I think that useful XUL applications are a good thing, if that's what it is.
From the product web site http://www.eiffel.com/products/studio/, it looks like Eiffel targets.NET. I know in the past Eiffel could emit C code which was them compiled. I'm not sure if the.NET "integration" is only in Windows or if it uses Mono on linux for that. I'm not able to determine this from a cursury glance at their web site.
In any event, I welcome this move. I'm definitely adding Eiffel to my list of languages to learn. It is a neat language that has a lot of advantages. In fact at one time HP was using it for developing printer firmware since it was less error-prone and increased their productivity dramatically over using just C. Certainly as our apps increase in complexity we need tools that allow things like design-by-contract in order to save us from the inevidable bugs.
Alpha-blending is *not* the same as translucency (same rendering technologies perform it, though). Once again my point is being missed. I'm comparing Vista's apparently completely translucent window decorations with what OS X has done. In practice it turns out that too much special effects harm the user experience as OS X has learned. That's why making windows translucent is now something that is not often done on OS X nor done to the same extent. It turns out that opaque windows really are the most usable, with the subtle effects like alpha-blended edges, casting a shadow, and fading in windows (or the genie effect). Xgl and Vista contain impressive technologies (from what I hear they easily rival what quartz is capable of). I just hope that the powers that be choose to employ these technologies in ways that actually increase usability.
Umm, yeah, but my point was that OS X does not do very much translucency in the UI itself (not talking about it's capabilities). Icons are alphablended, true, But the windows are generally opaque and I think this is by design. Translucency across windows doesn't always make things more usable. So for all the technology that Quartz is capable of, Apple decided that it's not always useful to employ. I hope that Linux desktop designers take note of such things and not do special effects just for the sake of special effects. More useful, subtle effects include shadows, clean, alpha-blended edges of decorations, windows fading in and out of existance (rapidly of course), etc.
OS X used to make the window titles translucent when they were not in focus. This effect was, thank goodness, dropped in Panther as it just didn't work out all that well.
Funny how the window decorations in these screenshots look a lot like the new default Fedora Core 5 metacity theme, at least in terms of shape and the window operation buttons. Shame on Redhat for copying Windows like that. Oh wait.
Seems to me Windows is looking more and more like the *nix desktops all the time. I guess this means that Linux really is influencing even Microsoft.
Having played with Xgl a bit, I find it cool, but generally speaking translucent windows are not that useful and often make the contents of the windows harder to read. Looks like MS's take on this is to add blurring to the translucency which actually makes the window contents very readable while still maintaining some transparency. Whether this is going to be a good thing when you have a bunch of windows stacked on top of each other I don't know. But definitely the blurring effect plus the translucency is much better than just the translucency that I can get with Xgl. Of course nothing stops one from doing the bluring in Xgl too. Xgl has all of these capabilities right here now. It will be interesting to see how translucency is finally used. For all its eye-candy, OS X does almost no translucency, except on the dock.
I asked this yesterday in another thread, but I never got an answer... given all of the features they've announced wouldn't be in Vista, WHAT is it, if NOT a release for the sake of income? Except for a new whiz-bang interface, I haven't really heard what compelling features Vista is supposed to have. From what I can tell, they're removing some of the suck, and a few incremental improvements, what motivates me as a consumer to want it?
I've heard that MS is putting a lot of effort into the idea of running all applications as normal, restricted users. Up til now, many legacy (and not-so-legacy) applications had to be run with power user or adminstratrator on XP because they expected to be able to write to Program Files or even to the windows system directory. I understand that Vista will have a very sophisticated virtual file system layer (talk about a kludge) that will virtualize some of these areas of the disk for these bad applications so that they can still function. The app will think it is writing to the windows sytem directory or the Program Files area when if fact it is not. On one hand this seems to me to be a pretty brilliant solution to the crappy legacy app problem, but on the other hand seems to be a horrible hack.
I'm pretty sure the gif patent did expire finally. Unfortunately the mp3 patent probably won't until the format is long obsolete. In the meantime, all my music is in ogg, and I transcode to the patent-encumbered formates for external devices. With high-quality oggs, the transcoding is hardly noticable on most portable devices.
Actually upgrading is completely automatic. A yum update from today should do it. My installations of CentOS have automatically upgraded themselves from 4.0 all the way to this release.
Just to verify, I ran yum update on one machine that doesn't auto update and it's upgrading to 4.3 all by itself. (no need to install centos-release)
I use RHEL4 and CentOS interchangably. They are 100% compatible (binary package-wise). I have switched machines back and forth on the fly. I must say, though, CentOS needs to get a graphics designer to tweak things. Their gdm and gnome login screens are hideous. Even their grub background is awful.
Indeed this is a weakness that needs to be addressed. Fedora probably ought to have a curses-based firstboot screen to finish the configuration. Probably this should be reported as a bug to the Fedora bug tracker.
Instead, as with Mac OS X, after the first boot you are *required* to make a non-root user before you can log in and actually use the computer. Apparently his motherboard problems prevented him from reaching this first boot stage.
And forget about the mp3/dvd stuff. Get over it. Fedora will *never* support this stuff without adding a 3rd party repository because of legal reasons. Ubuntu doesn't either, out of the box. Now arguably Ubuntu wins here because it's package utility will give the option to automatically add in the 3rd-party illegal (in the US) repositories straight away. Fedora might want to consider that.
Anyway, I find all the comments about how fedora sucks to be amusing. I find that Fedora fits my needs quite well, thank you. I don't use every version; I only upgrade once a year. I'm typing this on FC3 right now, which is working great. FC5 will go on soon. I'm kind of on an odd-number schedule. In my experience the odd-numbered releases of Fedora Core are the best anyway. I tried Ubuntu recently, and was impressed, but it won't replace FC anytime soon on my box. One good reason for that is that I maintain 10 or 12 RHEL4 boxes, and I need an environment that is similar for development purposes.
Well the point ought to be that apps should be somewhat aware of the environment they are running in and switch some of their defaults accordingly. For example, a GTK app running on windows can switch the button order very easily to match the windows defaults. On KDE they could also switch. A KDE app running on Gnome should also change its defaults.
There is no one right way. just because Windows uses a button order doesn't mean that Gnome should too.
Re:Gnome guys still unresponsive I see.
on
Gnome 2.14 Review
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· Score: 2, Informative
It was removed because it basically sucked. I'm glad to see it back though. Thanks to the freedesktop menu standards, though, I've have *yet* to need to edit my menu. Every app I installed put its icon in the proper place on the menu. No need to screw with the layout. With windows I'm constantly editing the start menu because it is layed out in such a horrible way. All gnome distros I've dealt with recently had sane and logical menu entries. All KDE and Gnome apps showed up in the proper place upon installation. Beats the heck out of installing your own crappy menu items only to have a bunch of stale links when you remove the program like in the old KDE days.
So basically as far as overall usability goes, menu editing is not quite dead last but definitely not a priority.
In short, these "gnome guys" as you call them actually are doing a great job. I'd rather have a feature implemented right than implemented poorly like Windows does. (Can't speak for KDE, but I haven't had to edit KDE menus in about 5 years either.)
Fortunately the button order is the thing that Gnome got right. I absolutely cannot stand the Windows and KDE button orders. It is not logical to my mind. This compounds the problem that Windows buttons (maybe kde too) often mix word types, leading to horrific "yes," "no," "cancel" situations. On windows (and sometimes KDE) I have to always make sure to read the entire prompt before I decide on an action. In Gnome it is much better. Usually the verb in the button is enough. This practice makes a different button order than you are used to much more workable.
I don't buy the most important button first philosophy. This is the kind of misguided thinking that leads to windows wizards where the "next" button frequently changes position, making the wizard slower and more tedious than it needs to be.
I don't understand why you expect a KDE app, firefox, and a gnome app to all be consistant button-order-wise when KDE and gnome have fundementally different button order philosophies. Gnome is consistant with itself. Now if only there was a reliable way to change the KDE button order... There is actually, but it's not consistant.
I've been using VMware for years now on my personal laptop. It's barely usable in speed terms.
Either you haven't used it recently or you just don't have enough ram. With my 1 GB of ram and 192 MB allocated to a windows XP instance, I find vmware to be very fast. Probably 70%-80% of native speed, depending on what it is doing (graphics and disk i/o do suffer). In short vmware is very usable and if ported to OS X for the intel machines it would probably be far more useful to most people than dual-booting.
Yes, Yes, Yes, provided the clients you are interacting with support the industry standard SIP and H.323 protocols. Certainly it can talk to netmeeting. I believe it can also talk to any SIP VoIP service out there (computer->computer and computer->land line).
What convential rockets? If we had conventional rockets capable of lifting cargo to the space station, don't you think we'd be using them? Instead we have to essentially buy progress and soyuz launches (at least any outside of the flights specified in our existing agreements, which I believe we have already reached the end of).
That's why it is so urgent to get the newer unmanned cargo lifter system (and the crew exploration vehicle or whatever they call it) operational as soon as possible. I think the design for a heavy lift cargo vehicle using the SSME's and the existing tank/booster combination is ideal for space station hauling. Who cares if foam sheds on that, since it's being thrown away anyway. Of course there is the problem of throwing away SSMEs every launch, but maybe something could be done about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Swing is portable (native-looking Swing) to any platform the JVM and the standard class libraries has been ported to. SWT, on the other hand is only available on the platforms that SWT has been ported to. With Swing I can just distribute an app and it only requires the JRE. Not so with SWT. SWT won't be added to the Java Class library because SWT just isn't that great of a framework given the alternative. Sorry but from a developers point of view, verbose as it is, Swing is a better and more flexible framework than SWT.
When Java 6 is released, Swing will use native drawing on all supported platforms. This means under Linux, your swing apps will blend right into your gnome desktop (at least as much as SWT anyway) and on Windows I doubt any user could now distinguish a Swing app from a native app. Sun has put a lot of energy into making Swing fast and good-looking, now that the supporting Java class framework is mature.
In fact, with Java 6 it is hard to find any compelling reason at all to build SWT apps instead of just using Swing. SWT apps are not portable without bundling specific dlls for each platform. Further SWT isn't even that great of a framework, but it has worked well for what it was made for, eclipse.
So please stop spouting this continued FUD about how bad swing is. Yes it was horrible in the past and looked like the ugly step-child. But with Java 6 Swing is poised to be a good candidate for serious desktop java use. Even a couple of years ago, Apple's customizations to Swing illustrate that Swing was capable of being a first-class GUI citizen. Apple bundles a number of Java apps that are wrapped in a nice app bundle and no one would ever know there were Java rather than some native binary.
Definitely KDE's io-slaves are very good. Gnome does have the gnome-vfs subsystem, which in theory provides a similar function, but just seems to be lacking any real, useful functionality. I have yet to see gnome-vfs used the way most KDE users depend on io-slaves. There's not even a working fish:/// protocol. There is sftp:/// but I would find fish more useful as it works with servers that may not have sftp working; all it needs is shell access. However, both io-slaves and gnome-vfs have a fatal flaw in that they only are available to apps who know about them (IE linked to the KDE or Gnome libraries). There are a myriad of usability issues to overcome to make this kind of io layer work at the lower levels where all apps could benefit, however. So it is a tough issue. I have used a hack that used fuse to mount a kde io-slave url to a folder that anyone could access. It worked most of the time, but required an X11 connection to display the password dialog boxes.
Since spacial browsing is optional, I don't think that this alone is a valid reason to disparage Nautilus. The tired old argument against Gnome for having reasonable, simple defaults doesn't really fly either. It's all a matter of personal preference. Your need to micromanage the UI doesn't mean that all users want to micromange the UI anymore than my preference of sane defaults that I never have to tweak means everyone should also have the same preference. I don't find either Konqueror or Nautilus to be that useful to me period. My favorite file managers are the bash shell and the venerable Midnight Commander.
Sure but SubEthaEdit has a very annoying and on-going bug that the developers cannot seem to reproduce or fix. Invariably, SubEthaEdit litters my code with random ":" and sometimes ":w". It's very annoying. Occasionally I see other random sequences appear like "gg", "yy", "dd", and "x".
uh huh. Slow CPU eh. Let's see. It's an Athlon 2800+ XP running at 2 GHz. While that may not be as fast as a CoreSingle at the same speed, it's more than enough to decode video. I mean come on. xine has absolutely no problems with syncing or frame dropping for that matter. No this is an mplayer problem (a chronic problem I might add). Still mplayer is a marvelous piece of work, being the first to use windows dlls to decode proprietary codecs. Until the situation improves, though, xine just works fine for me. I'll check out mplayer from time to time and see how it is progressing.
Maybe things have changed recently, but I always found mplayer to quickly lose video/audio syncing and often segfaults, although I disovered that the segfaulting is because of the video output device somehow. Using gmplayer works fine. But xine just works better for me. I run it from the command line (Gui hidden) and it plays everything I throw at it.
Google never took a Miro painting and copied it; they made a logo that was in a style of Miro. This is not a copyright violation. This is fair use. And if these companies did what you have mentioned in a similar way (not reproductions but just simply likenesses) then that is not wrong. In fact, other than trademark infringement their is nothing you can do.
Now your example doesn't apply to this google situation anyway because you are talking about blatant use of your copyrighted works in a way is just plain copying. So yes your post should be rated off-topic because it is. And how you manage to drag the GPL into this is a red herring too. Someone is perfectly welcome to make program that looks much like and acts much like a GPL'd program and use it for any purpose without violating the GPL or copyright on the code.
Sure, but if the phone can switch from wifi to cellular and back again without dropping your call, what this really means is that you're still communicating with your provider (using VoIP) and so you're still getting charged for minutes. Of course it is probably possible to use your own provider like vonage or something similar with these types of phones, but you would not be able to seemlessly switch from one to the other (vonage on wifi to verizon cellular) without dropping the call.
Seems to me that the latest incarnation which requires firefox 1.5 and takes over the entire window (menu and everything) is just a normal web-hosted XUL application. If this is the case then it is not technically ajax. Can someone shed some light on this? I mean will it work on IE 6? What about Safari?
I think that useful XUL applications are a good thing, if that's what it is.
From the product web site http://www.eiffel.com/products/studio/, it looks like Eiffel targets .NET. I know in the past Eiffel could emit C code which was them compiled. I'm not sure if the .NET "integration" is only in Windows or if it uses Mono on linux for that. I'm not able to determine this from a cursury glance at their web site.
In any event, I welcome this move. I'm definitely adding Eiffel to my list of languages to learn. It is a neat language that has a lot of advantages. In fact at one time HP was using it for developing printer firmware since it was less error-prone and increased their productivity dramatically over using just C. Certainly as our apps increase in complexity we need tools that allow things like design-by-contract in order to save us from the inevidable bugs.
Alpha-blending is *not* the same as translucency (same rendering technologies perform it, though). Once again my point is being missed. I'm comparing Vista's apparently completely translucent window decorations with what OS X has done. In practice it turns out that too much special effects harm the user experience as OS X has learned. That's why making windows translucent is now something that is not often done on OS X nor done to the same extent. It turns out that opaque windows really are the most usable, with the subtle effects like alpha-blended edges, casting a shadow, and fading in windows (or the genie effect). Xgl and Vista contain impressive technologies (from what I hear they easily rival what quartz is capable of). I just hope that the powers that be choose to employ these technologies in ways that actually increase usability.
Umm, yeah, but my point was that OS X does not do very much translucency in the UI itself (not talking about it's capabilities). Icons are alphablended, true, But the windows are generally opaque and I think this is by design. Translucency across windows doesn't always make things more usable. So for all the technology that Quartz is capable of, Apple decided that it's not always useful to employ. I hope that Linux desktop designers take note of such things and not do special effects just for the sake of special effects. More useful, subtle effects include shadows, clean, alpha-blended edges of decorations, windows fading in and out of existance (rapidly of course), etc.
OS X used to make the window titles translucent when they were not in focus. This effect was, thank goodness, dropped in Panther as it just didn't work out all that well.
Funny how the window decorations in these screenshots look a lot like the new default Fedora Core 5 metacity theme, at least in terms of shape and the window operation buttons. Shame on Redhat for copying Windows like that. Oh wait.
Seems to me Windows is looking more and more like the *nix desktops all the time. I guess this means that Linux really is influencing even Microsoft.
Having played with Xgl a bit, I find it cool, but generally speaking translucent windows are not that useful and often make the contents of the windows harder to read. Looks like MS's take on this is to add blurring to the translucency which actually makes the window contents very readable while still maintaining some transparency. Whether this is going to be a good thing when you have a bunch of windows stacked on top of each other I don't know. But definitely the blurring effect plus the translucency is much better than just the translucency that I can get with Xgl. Of course nothing stops one from doing the bluring in Xgl too. Xgl has all of these capabilities right here now. It will be interesting to see how translucency is finally used. For all its eye-candy, OS X does almost no translucency, except on the dock.
I've heard that MS is putting a lot of effort into the idea of running all applications as normal, restricted users. Up til now, many legacy (and not-so-legacy) applications had to be run with power user or adminstratrator on XP because they expected to be able to write to Program Files or even to the windows system directory. I understand that Vista will have a very sophisticated virtual file system layer (talk about a kludge) that will virtualize some of these areas of the disk for these bad applications so that they can still function. The app will think it is writing to the windows sytem directory or the Program Files area when if fact it is not. On one hand this seems to me to be a pretty brilliant solution to the crappy legacy app problem, but on the other hand seems to be a horrible hack.
I'm pretty sure the gif patent did expire finally. Unfortunately the mp3 patent probably won't until the format is long obsolete. In the meantime, all my music is in ogg, and I transcode to the patent-encumbered formates for external devices. With high-quality oggs, the transcoding is hardly noticable on most portable devices.
Actually upgrading is completely automatic. A yum update from today should do it. My installations of CentOS have automatically upgraded themselves from 4.0 all the way to this release.
Just to verify, I ran yum update on one machine that doesn't auto update and it's upgrading to 4.3 all by itself. (no need to install centos-release)
I use RHEL4 and CentOS interchangably. They are 100% compatible (binary package-wise). I have switched machines back and forth on the fly. I must say, though, CentOS needs to get a graphics designer to tweak things. Their gdm and gnome login screens are hideous. Even their grub background is awful.
Indeed this is a weakness that needs to be addressed. Fedora probably ought to have a curses-based firstboot screen to finish the configuration. Probably this should be reported as a bug to the Fedora bug tracker.
Instead, as with Mac OS X, after the first boot you are *required* to make a non-root user before you can log in and actually use the computer. Apparently his motherboard problems prevented him from reaching this first boot stage.
And forget about the mp3/dvd stuff. Get over it. Fedora will *never* support this stuff without adding a 3rd party repository because of legal reasons. Ubuntu doesn't either, out of the box. Now arguably Ubuntu wins here because it's package utility will give the option to automatically add in the 3rd-party illegal (in the US) repositories straight away. Fedora might want to consider that.
Anyway, I find all the comments about how fedora sucks to be amusing. I find that Fedora fits my needs quite well, thank you. I don't use every version; I only upgrade once a year. I'm typing this on FC3 right now, which is working great. FC5 will go on soon. I'm kind of on an odd-number schedule. In my experience the odd-numbered releases of Fedora Core are the best anyway. I tried Ubuntu recently, and was impressed, but it won't replace FC anytime soon on my box. One good reason for that is that I maintain 10 or 12 RHEL4 boxes, and I need an environment that is similar for development purposes.
Well the point ought to be that apps should be somewhat aware of the environment they are running in and switch some of their defaults accordingly. For example, a GTK app running on windows can switch the button order very easily to match the windows defaults. On KDE they could also switch. A KDE app running on Gnome should also change its defaults.
There is no one right way. just because Windows uses a button order doesn't mean that Gnome should too.
It was removed because it basically sucked. I'm glad to see it back though. Thanks to the freedesktop menu standards, though, I've have *yet* to need to edit my menu. Every app I installed put its icon in the proper place on the menu. No need to screw with the layout. With windows I'm constantly editing the start menu because it is layed out in such a horrible way. All gnome distros I've dealt with recently had sane and logical menu entries. All KDE and Gnome apps showed up in the proper place upon installation. Beats the heck out of installing your own crappy menu items only to have a bunch of stale links when you remove the program like in the old KDE days.
So basically as far as overall usability goes, menu editing is not quite dead last but definitely not a priority.
In short, these "gnome guys" as you call them actually are doing a great job. I'd rather have a feature implemented right than implemented poorly like Windows does. (Can't speak for KDE, but I haven't had to edit KDE menus in about 5 years either.)
Fortunately the button order is the thing that Gnome got right. I absolutely cannot stand the Windows and KDE button orders. It is not logical to my mind. This compounds the problem that Windows buttons (maybe kde too) often mix word types, leading to horrific "yes," "no," "cancel" situations. On windows (and sometimes KDE) I have to always make sure to read the entire prompt before I decide on an action. In Gnome it is much better. Usually the verb in the button is enough. This practice makes a different button order than you are used to much more workable.
I don't buy the most important button first philosophy. This is the kind of misguided thinking that leads to windows wizards where the "next" button frequently changes position, making the wizard slower and more tedious than it needs to be.
I don't understand why you expect a KDE app, firefox, and a gnome app to all be consistant button-order-wise when KDE and gnome have fundementally different button order philosophies. Gnome is consistant with itself. Now if only there was a reliable way to change the KDE button order... There is actually, but it's not consistant.
Either you haven't used it recently or you just don't have enough ram. With my 1 GB of ram and 192 MB allocated to a windows XP instance, I find vmware to be very fast. Probably 70%-80% of native speed, depending on what it is doing (graphics and disk i/o do suffer). In short vmware is very usable and if ported to OS X for the intel machines it would probably be far more useful to most people than dual-booting.
Yes, Yes, Yes, provided the clients you are interacting with support the industry standard SIP and H.323 protocols. Certainly it can talk to netmeeting. I believe it can also talk to any SIP VoIP service out there (computer->computer and computer->land line).
Skype anyone?
What convential rockets? If we had conventional rockets capable of lifting cargo to the space station, don't you think we'd be using them? Instead we have to essentially buy progress and soyuz launches (at least any outside of the flights specified in our existing agreements, which I believe we have already reached the end of).
That's why it is so urgent to get the newer unmanned cargo lifter system (and the crew exploration vehicle or whatever they call it) operational as soon as possible. I think the design for a heavy lift cargo vehicle using the SSME's and the existing tank/booster combination is ideal for space station hauling. Who cares if foam sheds on that, since it's being thrown away anyway. Of course there is the problem of throwing away SSMEs every launch, but maybe something could be done about that.